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Sometimes a movie becomes so intrinsically linked to a filmmaker that it can be hard to imagine anyone else making it. Who else but George Lucas could have made Star Wars? And who else could have directed Jurassic Park but Steven Spielberg? Well, we almost had a James Cameron-directed Jurassic Park, but even the Avatar creator admits he is glad he didn’t get the chance.

“I got sent Jurassic Park – the [Michael] Crichton novel,” James Cameron said during an interview in the current issue of Empire Magazine. “It arrived on a Friday afternoon and I was halfway through it on Saturday. I got to the scene in the book where the kids are in the Jeep and they get flipped upside-down and trapped and the Tyrannosaurus comes up and licks the windshield because it can smell them inside. I got to that scene and I went, ‘I’m doing this movie.’ So I called up the agent and I said, ‘I’m buying the book!’”

However, it was not to be. Turns out another iconic director already had the book, and they just wanted to get him to make up his mind already. “He said, ‘Too late, Steven Spielberg just got it.’ And then I realized two things: one in the moment and one much later. The one in the moment was I had been played as a stalking horse to hurry up and get Steven’s deal closed – he’d probably read the book two weeks earlier. Hollywood, right? Two, I realized when I saw the movie: he was the right guy to make it. Not me, because I would have made it too terrifying. It would have been R-rated. It would have been like Aliens with dinosaurs. Which would have been super-cool, but he made the version that would have spoken to me as an eight-year-old, when I thought dinosaurs were the coolest thing in the world. And that’s the movie that should have been made.”

It is worth remembering that this all happened in early 1990, when James Cameron was already a massive name in Hollywood. By then, he had directed The Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss, all of which were blockbusters on the scale of even Steven Spielberg. So, we could imagine him being tapped to direct Jurassic Park. Like him, though, we’re glad the right person got the job instead.

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