With Jurassic World pulling in a whopping $1.6 billion worldwide, it was little surprise that the sequel was announced shortly thereafter with director Colin Trevorrow returning. And our friends over at Jurassic Cast had the chance to sit down an interview the man himself, two years after they spoke to him last. And as well as talking about Star Wars: Episode IX [read what he had to say here], he spoke about some plot details for Jurassic World 2.
“We looked at it as a trilogy from the very beginning,” he told the podcast. “We designed the whole thing that way. And, honestly, the whole trilogy is articulated in Jurassic Park. 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 knew what you had, you’d packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox and now you want to sell it.’ That, to me, is Jurassic World. That’s why I had all the product placement, that’s what it was. So with Jurassic World 2 it’s: “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 not the exact quote, but you get the idea.”
“And that’s why its exciting the movie did well”, he continues. “I had a beginning, a middle and an end and it was designed this way. So now we get to play that out.”
“It’ll be a different kind of film,” he says of the sequel. “And the audience has given us kind of permission to take this to the next level. And I don’t mean in scale. I feel very strongly that this is not ‘more dinosaurs’ or ‘bigger dinosaurs’, it’s about using this as a starting point to discover our relationship with these animals and with animals in general, and the dynamic that was created by bringing them back to life.”
“We made [Jurassic World] with the fans very much in mind,” he continues. “And I’m not going to forget that, but we’ve seen a lot of ‘dinosaurs chasing people around on an island’ movies. And I think you guys and the general audience are going to be down to explore where else we can go. Owen is going to be in it, Claire is in it and neither are going to be in the same place we left them in the first movie. And even though Claire is the one who evolves the most over the trilogy, it’s her story that mirrors this changing world. Owen has shit to deal with. They’ve both opened Pandora’s Box in Jurassic World and both of them are responsible for different elements of it. And I think the way these characters are connected to these circumstances of what’s happening, it’s different than previous films. It’s not ‘let’s manufacture a way to get them somewhere’, they’re embedded into it now in a way that us storytellers are able to keep them involved without it feeling contrived.”
Trevorrow also notes that Jurassic World 2 is not the official title, but it’s the easiest thing for him to call it right now.
Listen to the whole episode below, and thanks to the chaps from Jurassic Cast for sending us the episode:
Originally published September 21, 2015. Updated April 13, 2018.
