Colin Trevorrow on farewelling Jurassic World and the tough lessons he learned from Star Wars

Colin Trevorrow’s time in the Star Wars universe didn’t end well, but he reveals the valuable lessons he learned for the final Jurassic World movie.

Colin Trevorrow already had some experience in making the final chapter in a much-loved film series when he signed up for Jurassic World Dominion.

After making the cult, indie, sci-fi-rom-com Safety Not Guaranteed in 2012, the American director hit the big time with 2015’s Jurassic World, the fourth film in the trailblazing dinosaur franchise started by Steven Spielberg way back in 1993.

Its success in bringing back the T-Rex and his dino pals after 14 years and kicking off a new trilogy starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard led to Trevorrow being invited to direct Star Wars Episode IX, the final film in the third trilogy of the revered sci-fi series.

Sadly, the experience didn’t end well. The script he wrote with long-time collaborator Derek Connolly, titled Duel of the Fates, was rejected by the Star Wars bosses (it has since emerged online to greater acclaim than JJ Abrams eventual film The Rise Of Skywalker) and he left that galaxy far, far away due to the dreaded “creative differences”.

But he says he learned some valuable lessons from the bruising experience that proved invaluable in wrapping up the Jurassic World story, particularly about taking input from the actors who had played beloved characters for many years.

Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) in Jurassic World Dominion, co-written and directed by Colin Trevorrow.

After handing over the director’s baton to J.A Bayona for the last film, 2018’s Fallen Kingdom (he stayed on as a writer and executive producer), he was ready to put them into practice on the eagerly anticipated Jurassic World Dominion, which reunites the original trilogy’s core cast of Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum alongside the new trilogy’s leads Pratt and Howard.

“I feel like I got a master’s degree in telling the third episode in a trilogy based on a story everybody loves from our childhood,” Trevorrow says. “And it’s a very specific gig. Whether I learned it in that time or not, it definitely reinforced my feelings about how I wanted to specifically treat our characters and I very much wanted to listen to the actors who played our characters.

“This is going to sound like it’s a comment on Star Wars – and it really isn’t – but my values about how people like Laura Dern and Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum, who have played these characters for going on 30 years now, they’re authorities of their character, and I wanted to listen to them and make sure that they knew why we were doing everything we were doing and they felt supported and they felt listened to and heard.

“Ultimately, I think we’ve ended up with a film that has a real balance between their story, Bryce and Chris’s story, and also new characters that we’re introducing.”

Jurassic World Dominion director Colin Trevorrow.

As a film fan himself from a very early age, he also wanted to give the diehard fans of the movies their due too. He still remembers being blown away by Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park when he saw it as a 16-year-old and whether it’s those films or the Star Wars movies her also grew up loving, he believes that “there is a shared ownership that we all have to certain films from our childhood” and filmmakers underestimate that deep passion at their own peril.

“I think that’s where we can get into conflict because a lot of these stories are more powerful than even those who created them understand that they are,” he says. “They become belief systems in a lot of ways. For my generation we take these myths very seriously and many of us don’t apologise for it. These movies taught us how to be and so when you’re dealing with something that people are going to be extremely passionate and vocal about.”

Trevorrow particularly wanted to give Dern’s character, palaeobotanist Ellie Sattler, a chance to shine in Dominion. Goldblum and Neill had their moments in the sun in Jurassic Park 2 and 3 respectively and Trevorrow went as far as writing the final story around her character. Dominion begins where Fallen Kingdom left off, with dinosaurs living in the wild and humanity adjusting to living along them, and also incorporates a shady biotech company that is threatening global food production for its own greedy ends.

“We took a team of geneticists together and some futurists and we asked them ‘is there a genetically designed global disaster that is plausible that you would need a palaeobotanist to get to solve?’ and they come up with a scenario and that’s what’s in the movie,” says Trevorrow.

Chris Pratt in a scene from Jurassic World Dominion.

And for all the ever-bigger and badder dinosaur stomping and chomping that audiences love in Jurassic World movies, Trevorrow also wanted to make a serious point in Dominion about the way humankind treats the planet as well as the dangers of scientific and technological advancement unfettered by ethics or morality. From climate change to pollution and genetics, humanity, he says, is now dealing with “the results of another generation’s choices”.

“It’s a little bit more about why dinosaurs matter and why we should respect the planet we’re on,” he says.

“Something we’re struggling with right now is getting everyone to just agree that there are problems before we even agree on what the solution is. Our message is we must be humble in the face of nature and we must recognise its power because its power can kill a lot of us very quickly. The dinosaurs went extinct and so can we.”

Jurassic World Dominion also blazed a trail by being among the first, and the highest profile, films to resume production after the coronavirus pandemic had shut down movies and TV around the world. Millions were spent creating a Covid-safe environment in Pinewood Studios in England and the production also rented out an entire hotel, where cast and crew could live without masks and social distancing once they had completed their quarantine period.

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The unusual and innovative arrangement not only provided the world social media gold from Neill and Goldblum playing the ukulele and piano, but also inspired Judd Apatow’s recent Netflix comedy, The Bubble. The comedy director did the courtesy of showing the distinctly non-family-friendly film before release to Trevorrow, who never thought in a million years he’d create something worthy of satirising. His only beef? Apatow’s dinosaurs looked more like dragons.

“I take my dinosaurs very seriously,” says Trevorrow with a laugh. “I think we have to make sure kids know the difference – but hopefully kids didn’t watch that movie.”

Jurassic World Dominion opens in cinemas on June 10.

Originally published as Colin Trevorrow on farewelling Jurassic World and the tough lessons he learned from Star Wars