If we know anything about the new Hollywood we know that a small group of huge franchises now dominate the economy. Few of those empires are bigger than the Jurassic Park empire. There was a gap of 14 years between the release of Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World in 2015. The title was well-chosen. That film managed the then-staggering task of taking more than $1 billion outside North America alone. Within a few weeks, it had become the third-highest-grossing film of all time. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, released in 2018, did almost as well.
All of this makes Colin Trevorrow, presiding force of the “World” trilogy, among the most powerful men in what’s left of the movie business. He directed the first film. He wrote and executive-produced the second. He is now back to boss early summer with Jurassic World Dominion (no colon, apparently). Like so many directors of such hyper-franchises, there is not a hint of megalomania about him. A polite, business-like San Franciscan in his mid-40s, Trevorrow speaks to me from his house in the country outside London.
“I moved in 2016. So it’s been a while. I have my permanent residency. So I am not looking to return,” he says. “My wife is from France. So we visit her family a lot.”
His wife is French? Well, she must really hate it there then. Ha, ha!
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“I have been tracking the beef between the two countries for some time. I get to stay neutral,” he says.
Covid shooting
The time will come when we don’t discuss the effect of the Covid shutdown on marquee films, but we are not there yet. Dominion was one of the first and biggest productions to engineer an early-pandemic swerve. Filming began in February of 2020. They shut down a few weeks later and did not resume until July. That must have been like rescheduling D-Day.
“Um, gosh. I imagined it should have been stressful, but I had this faith that we were going to find a way to do it,” he says. “I had made the last Jurassic film here. I worked on Star Wars here. I knew we had the craftspeople to do it. We had the patience. We had the ability to soldier on.”
As the films made in the pandemic years roll out, audiences are beginning to wonder if they can spot evidence of compromises. Are blockbusters using computer-generated imagery for even the most mundane street scenes? Is that all in our imagination? Does this Jurassic World Dominion differ from the film he would have made if lockdown had not struck?
“Yes, and I will say that I think it’s better,” he says. “I really do. I think it’s richer, it’s deeper, it’s more considered in every moment. On the macro, we knew we had a script and we were going to shoot it. But there are so many little moments, so many ideas that came up because we were all living together. We were rehearsing together on weekends.”
It felt a bit like old times working on his low-budget debut, Safety Not Guaranteed.
“We had the opportunity to work the way that we did on the first independent films we ever did – when we were living in a hotel together,” Trevorrow says. “The hotel I lived in for Safety Not Guaranteed wasn’t the same as this. It was all carrot sticks and turkey slices. But the instincts were there. It was like we were putting a play on in a barn. Which I think was really invigorating.”
Older cast
They have not ended up with a play in a barn. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are back to engage with – and occasionally fight against – the dinosaurs that have now spread about the planet. Unhappily, an evil corporation has a scheme to exploit them for mercenary ends (again). Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern and Sam Neill, who appeared in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original, are back for the noisy ride.
“They were all up for it,” he says of the older cast. “And they all wanted it to be as meaningful as I did. And they all wanted to make sure that those characters were honoured and weren’t just in the story for nostalgic purposes. Look, I’m not Steven Spielberg and I never will be. They were all aware of that. And yet, they were really open to understanding what I wanted to feel. What I wanted to feel was that these characters were honoured by being sent on a real adventure.”
Like fellow directors such as Rian Johnson and Patty Jenkins, Trevorrow came to the blockbuster milieu through independent cinema. A graduate of Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, he first moved into features with a well-received documentary entitled Reality Show. Safety Not Guaranteed, an imaginative, low-budget science-fiction comedy starring Aubrey Plaza, was a hit at Sundance in 2012 and attracted the eyes of studios eager to inveigle talented rough-hewn tyros into big-budget filmmaking. Three years after that film emerged, he was walking down the red carpet for Jurassic World. How do you so quickly learn the skills you need for filmmaking on that larger scale?
“Well honestly, I learned the same way I learned doing Safety Not Guaranteed,” he says. “How would I have learned to do any of that? That’s a challenging process in itself. I had been a writer up to that point. I was just constantly listening and processing that into an answer. I became very adept at directing while learning. When I had to apply that to a larger film I wasn’t afraid to ask questions about something I didn’t understand.”
Extreme fandom
Trevorrow’s involvement with the Star Wars franchise remains controversial. Following the success of Jurassic World, it was announced he would direct Star Wars: Episode IX but, two years later (during which time he had made the much-derided The Book of Henry), he was let go due to “creative differences”. JJ Abrams took over the film that became The Rise of Skywalker. You know how these things go with the “fandom”. Trevorrow and Derek Connolly’s script for Star Wars: Duel of the Fates – as their version was titled – leaked in early 2020 and attracted furious, furrowed attention. Many are the online commentators who claim it would have generated a far superior film to The Rise of Skywalker.
What the heck was going on?
“Well, there’s no conspiracy,” he says. “This happens on a lot of films all the time. People don’t see a shared path through the woods when it comes to how to tell the story. I wasn’t the first film-maker to deal with that. I haven’t been the last – not just on that franchise. You are the custodian of one of these myths that some people consider to be a belief system. In many cases it just fulfils something in them that is reaching for meaning. That is why they inspire such powerful emotions. They are icons that we look to – to help us understand how to live our lives.”
But it must be hard to entirely avoid the fanaticism that gathers round such projects. He is one character in a vast virtual diorama of players constructed online by Star Wars enthusiasts. To many, he is the snubbed king over the water.
“Yeah, I’ve got pretty good at disengaging,” he says calmly. “Honestly, I don’t think it really is for me to engage. For the most part, I think fandom is a beautiful thing. I know that there are elements within it that can get pretty nasty. But the concept of fandom is people sharing something they love with each other. That’s the same reason why we have clubs and groups. We all want to be close to something that other people love and to love it all together. And I think there are a lot of really beautiful emotions swimming in that. But, as with anything else, there can be toxic elements as well. You just have to figure out how to navigate it.”
It seems that Trevorrow has diplomatic skills to burn. If there are any horrible secrets, he will not be blurting them out. He is, in short, a professional – just the sort to manage the industry that Spielberg established nearly 30 years ago. I’m betting the great man has yet to burst in and demand to know what they’re doing to his baby.
“No, no. And he has seen the film many times,” he says. “So I think we’re good.”
Jurassic World Dominion opens on June 10th
