To celebrate the home video release of “Jurassic World Rebirth,” Universal Home Entertainment invited /Film and a few other outlets to Thailand to see several of the locations where the film was shot, as well as interview director Gareth Edwards and some of the cast.
Thapanee Kiatphaibool, the governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, was on hand to explain why Thailand is a great place for Hollywood productions to shoot (in addition to “Rebirth,” the country has recently played host to HBO’s “The White Lotus” and FX’s “Alien: Earth”), and she spoke about how part of the draw is the variety of landscapes that can be found here within a relatively short distance. As if to underline that point, we spent the next few days exploring three distinctly different environments seen in the movie. Here are the highlights of our “land, air, and sea” adventure.
For the “land” section, we drove two hours from our hotel to the grasslands in Krabi, where the titanosaurus DNA is obtained in the movie. It’s also the place where Gareth Edwards learned an important lesson as a filmmaker during the production.
“I wanted tall grass. Sadly, it doesn’t really exist in Thailand,” he told me. “So we looked all around, all the different fields everywhere, and they couldn’t do it. So then we were like, ‘OK, you know what? We’re going to grow it.’ And I’ve learned as a director, as long as you don’t go, ‘Oh, OK, maybe we won’t have tall grass,’ they have to do it. Right? I even called up David Koepp, the writer, and said ‘David, type tall grass, because if the word exists in the script, then they have to do it.’ So he writes tall grass, and they couldn’t find it, couldn’t get it to work. We went to visit a month before we were filming where we had planted this grass and put water in, and it was about that big [puts his fingers a couple inches apart], and it was like, ‘Oh my god, what are we going to do? This is a nightmare.’ So they flew in the world’s leading horticulturalists and they put this whole sprinkler system in. We came back two weeks later and it was [four or five feet tall], and then we started to get worried it was going to get too high and we were going to have to trim it.”
After production ended, the team cleared the grass away from the area, but later, more was planted in the lead-up to our visit; by the time we got there, it was approaching the height of how it looked on screen. Encircled by looming mountains and lush vegetation, the location has the potential to serve as a permanent tourist attraction (assuming someone involved knows enough about keeping grass alive to sustain it).
Visiting Jurassic World Rebirth locations
For the “air” segment, we moved to Phra Nang Beach for some rock climbing and rappelling as we attempted to recapture the spirit of the scene in which Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey’s characters rappel down a cliffside to retrieve the DNA of the flying quetzalcoatlus. It’s a good thing I was strapped into a safety harness, because at one point I slipped off the mountainside and would have died or been grievously injured had I plummeted to the ground below. (I am not an experienced climber, and boy, did I prove it.)
Finally, for the “sea” portion of the trip, we visited Phang Nga Bay, where the mosasaurus attack was filmed. Watching the movie’s frenetic chase scene, you don’t have much time to take in the beauty of the location since the characters are engaged in a race for their survival. But in person, without the magic of editing or a fast-paced score, you get a much better sense of how imposing and impressive these monoliths are. The overgrown foliage and towering formations certainly make them feel ancient, which ostensibly fits well with the film’s subject matter (yes, technically the dinos in “Rebirth” are mutant hybrids created by Jurassic Park scientists and not recreations of existing creatures, but just go with me on this).
Of course, the latest “Jurassic World” flick wasn’t the only Hollywood production to film here. Phang Nga Bay can also be seen in the James Bond movies “The Man with the Golden Gun” and “Tomorrow Never Dies,” and it served as the Wookiee home planet of Kashyyyk in “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith.”
Listen to /Film’s interviews with Gareth Edwards, Jonathan Bailey, and more
During the trip, I had the opportunity to speak with director Gareth Edwards, Jonathan Bailey (Dr. Henry Loomis), Luna Blaise (Teresa Delgado), David Iacono (Xavier Dobbs), and Audrina Miranda (Isabella Delgado). You can hear all of those conversations on the latest episode of the /Film Weekly podcast, which also features interviews with “The Naked Gun” director Akiva Schaffer, “Together” writer/director Michael Shanks, and “Together” stars Dave Franco and Alison Brie.
If you want to dive even deeper, you can read our full review of the movie and take a listen to a much longer interview we did with Gareth around the film’s theatrical release:
“Jurassic World Rebirth” is available now to rent or own on Digital HD, and it hits 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD on September 9, 2025.
