An Australian Town Decided To Remake Jurassic Park

This morning’s location: a field outside Castlemaine, Victoria. The air is thick with flies, attracted to the cow dung but ignoring the nearby dinosaur poo, sturdily constructed from papier-mache.

“Oh god,” Sam Neill groans – though these words aren’t actually uttered by Neill but local builder Ian Flavell, who has taken on Neill’s role as palaeontologist Alan Grant – and drops to his knees in front of an ailing triceratops.

This is Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux, a shot-for-shot remake (if you squint) of Jurassic Park, the 1993 blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg. This film’s director is John Roebuck, the man with the vision and the $3,000 budget. Right now, he’s hunched over a monitor: some sheep walked into the last shot and screwed up the continuity.

There have been longer-term continuity problems: Charles Sanderson-Eales, who plays Tim, one of the child characters, was 14 when he started in the role. He’s now 17: his voice has broken and he’s too big to be carried in one scene, as Tim was in the original film.

“His height goes up and down throughout,” says Roebuck. “It’ll hopefully add to the charm.”

This “back yard mockbuster” has been a labour of fandom three years in the making, born out of a staffroom conversation between Roebuck, a teacher, and some bored colleagues about what they could do to lift themselves out of the doldrums. Someone suggested crocheting. Roebuck had other ideas.

Spielberg’s mega-hit was chosen on a whim. For 10 years, Roebuck was a film critic and ran the ReelGood film festival, so his tastes usually steer to “semi-pretentious”. But taking on such an ambitious project became a personal quest. On the local Facebook page for the town, Roebuck’s posts tend to start with “Long shot …” and end with a request for the film: could someone provide temporary fencing, a raft, a cave, a generator, a dirt road …?

To Roebuck’s surprise, support for his project quickly grew, which meant he only wound up spending $3,000 of his own money – mainly on venue hire and catering. Jurassic Park Motor Pool Australia – a club for owners and enthusiasts of replica Jurassic Park vehicles – supplied some wheels and props. Local cameraman Kristian Bruce brought his professional gear, retiring the DSLR Roebuck had been using. A man in Texas saw the trailer and offered his VFX services. Castlemaine itself – a town that embraces sublimely ridiculous ideas, such as Castlemaine Idyll (a raucous take on Australian Idol) and the community dance-off Hot Moves No Pressure – leapt on tickets to the “world premiere”. There are four screenings of Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux at the Theatre Royal between 11 and 13 April.

“Part of me wants to reshoot the crappy looking stuff,” Roebuck says of the earlier material, “but people keep saying, ‘Nah, you’ve got to play it as it lays’. The bad stuff will hopefully be funny, and with the good stuff people will be like, ‘How did you do that?’”

The film has become an allosaurus around Roebuck’s neck. For three years he’s been wrangling about 150 people, and is responsible for directing and editing the film. The project also coincided with the birth of his child and a children’s book deal with his wife, Ella Mulvey, who also acts in the film.

“It’s become bigger than Ben-Hur,” Roebuck says. “By the time I realised it was all too much, we’d done way too much to stop and I’d told way too many people about it. When this is done, I’ll settle into the relatively easy job of raising a child for 18 years.”

Back in that field outside Castlemaine, local actor Gus Read-Hill is waiting his turn. Read-Hill – playing ranger Dr Harding – has decided to go full-tilt at an American accent, which not every cast member is willing to attempt.

“John said to just decide and stick to it,” Read-Hill says, citing Kevin Costner’s performance in Robin Hood: Prince as Thieves as an example of not sticking to it. “You’ve just got to commit.”

There’s stifled laughter from the crew as Jen O’Donnell (playing Dr Ellie Sattler, originally depicted by Laura Dern) breathes heavily over the fallen triceratops, which looks way more realistic than its bubble wrap and beanbag construction should allow. Cinematographer Michael Mouritz positions himself to use depth of field to make the triceratops much bigger than the humans mourning it.

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Necessity is the mother of invention with this production: O’Donnell, for instance, also makes props. “I put a clothes steamer through the mouth of the raptor head for that iconic scene when it steams up the round window,” she says. “I’m just trusting in the editing.”

Outside of dinosaur bothering, O’Donnell teaches at Wesley College Clunes Campus. Roebuck also teaches there, including an elective where students are tasked with recreating a scene from blockbuster films. O’Donnell’s husband and children all have roles in the Jurassic Park remake. “Our son was too cool to be in our daggy project at first,” she says. “Then it started getting bigger and he wanted to be involved.”

Her most memorable experience was filming in the toilet corridor of Castlemaine’s artisan shopping hub, The Mill, where they recreated the scene where Samuel L Jackson’s character Ray Arnold has his arm ripped off by a raptor.

“I’m trying to flick a switchboard and a dinosaur attacks me,” O’Donnell says. “I had to scream over and over – my screams overpowered the band that was playing next door at The Taproom, so the owner had to come out and tell me to stop.” (Local radio station Main FM got O’Donnell to recreate that scream on air, then started playing it randomly between segments: “Castlemaine’s a place where magical things can happen,” she observes.)

Roebuck’s project has inspired his own family. “I think my dad’s love language has been discovered,” he says. “He built us a replica of the Jurassic Park gates, and hand-carved a raptor claw, which looks exactly the same as the one in the film. I think my parents were [perplexed] for a long time. My brother, who’s a doctor and a lawyer, has a career path that’s a lot easier for them to understand. But it’s actually been a surprise how much they’ve gotten behind this.”

Every bold idea has its haters, though, and Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux found those on Reddit, with some predicting failure to finish, and others wondering why the team wouldn’t create something entirely original. As one poster put it, quoting Jeff Goldblum’s cynical scientist Ian Malcolm: “They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

It’s water off Roebuck’s back. “A lot of me connects with what they’re saying,” he says. “I mean, when people ask me, ‘Why? Why on earth would you do that?’ I get where they’re coming from. But there’s something appealing about there being absolutely no teaching moment or take-home message from all this effort.”

Two babies, 25 filming locations, thousands of minutes of footage and about 10 “rock bottom despair-fuelled meltdowns” later (all Roebuck’s, he says), the film is now done. The cast and crew will be dressing up for the “world premiere” in Castlemaine like it’s a red-carpet event, because this is the end of the road. The remake can’t be screened more widely, even at film festivals, because of copyright infringement. The Castlemaine screenings are free to attend, so nobody’s profiting from it – but even they theoretically risk being shut down.

“A few people on the team have already been getting worried that we’ll get shut down,” says Roebuck. “In my head, I’m like, ‘Oh, that’d be kind of a funny way for all this to finish.’ Essentially, we’ll probably screen it at the Theatre Royal and then it’ll sit on a hard drive, like the ark at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and just gather dust.”