Colin Trevorrow On the Future Beyond Jurassic World
In a land before Jurassic World became a worldwide monster hit, director Colin Trevorrow spoke of a potential trilogy of films taking part in the Jurassic canon. Now, with Trevorrow heading off to a galaxy far, far away; what will become of those plans for Jurassic World 2?
Speaking to the Jurassic Cast Podcast, Trevorrow revealed that Jurassic World and the potential trilogy it kicks off was laid out in basic form during a road trip he took with co-writer Derek Connolly. And they’re drawing from the original Jurassic Park for their ideas: “Honestly, the trilogy is articulated in Jurassic Park, it’s all in there,” he says. “Jurassic World is all based on Ian Malcolm’s quote, ‘You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you wanna sell it.’ That to me is Jurassic World, that’s why I had all the product placement, that’s what it was."
So where will the second film draw its influence from? “The second one, Jurassic World 2, and as we were driving we tried to find, what is the foundation?” he said. ‘Dinosaurs and man, separated by 65 million years of evolution have been thrown back into the mix together. How can we know what to expect?’ That’s why it’s exciting that the movie did well, that leaves us a lot of room to run, and it was part of this design, it had a beginning, middle, and end when we wrote the first movie. Now that the movie did well, we get to play that out.”
Looking to shake up the formula, the second script promises to be a different kind of film. “The audience has given us permission to a certain extent to take this to the next level, and I don’t necessarily mean in scale, I feel very strongly that it’s not about more dinosaurs or bigger and better dinosaurs, it’s about using this as a starting point for a much larger story about our relationship with these animals and about animals in general and the dynamic created by bringing them back to life.”
As for where that leaves Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), Trevorrow is down to explore where else they can take them; promising that neither will be in the same place as they were come the end of Jurassic World. “Even though Claire is the one who evolves the most over the trilogy, it’s her story that mirrors this changing world, Owen has s**t to deal with. The two of them opened Pandora’s Box in Jurassic World and each of them are responsible for different elements of it in different ways, and I think the way that these characters are connected to the circumstances of what’s happening it’s different than the previous films. It’s not ‘Let’s manufacture a way to get them somewhere,’ they’re embedded into it now in a way that as story tellers makes it much easier for us to keep them involved and doesn’t feel as contrived.”
You can listen to the whole podcast below.