“I just love the very delicate way you described that,” says Dern. “The day we fried the kid!”
Neill doubles down, growling: “We fried that kid on the goddamn fence!”
“You’re so Alan Grant,” Dern says. “You wonder why he cast Sam Neill to play this role. It’s so you.”
“Anyway, he came up to me halfway through the day and he said, ‘Hey, Sam, you know the accent we were talking about?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been working on it for four weeks.…’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, just use your own voice.’ I said, ‘That’s great, Steven, thank you so much.’ And then four days later, he came up to me and said, “You know that voice you’re using now?’ I said, ‘Yeah, my voice?’ He said, ‘Somewhere in between.’ It’s an actor’s nightmare! So that’s why I get a lot of flak to this day: Sam Neill’s American accent in Jurassic Park was a load of T. rex poo.”
“You give the fans everything they want,” says Dern. “A little bit of you, a little bit American.”
“Yes,” Neill says. “It’s generous that way.”
The actors were strangers to each other when they arrived in August 1992 on the island of Kauai. “We hadn’t met,” Goldblum says. “Never at a party or in passing or anything.”
“And we met in a hotel that literally had three weeks to live,” Neill adds. “It was destroyed three weeks later.”
“How about that?” Goldblum says gravely.
That was during Hurricane Iniki, the Category 4 tropical cyclone that pulverized the island, stranding the cast and crew and making them huddle for their lives during the most punishing parts of the storm. “Partly because of the hurricane, I think we really made a family,” Dern says. “Steven, [producer] Kathy Kennedy, I mean, these are family members now, through all our lives together, including the amazing Jeff Goldblum and my gorgeous Sam.”