Back in April this year, before anyone knew what a big success Jurassic World would become, co-writer/director Colin Trevorrow talked to us about the plans he had for a trilogy of films should the first click with audiences. He won’t be back behind the camera (original projects and a little something called Star Wars are taking his time), but he is writing the script, and is now talking up some of the inspiration for the future of the story.
On a recent interview with the Jurassic Cast Podcast (as spotted by the team at Coming Soon), 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."
And the next film? “The second one, Jurassic World 2, and as we were driving we tried to find, what is the foundation? ‘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.”
According to Trevorrow, the next script will allow him to shake up the formula. “It will get 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.”
So where will we find Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen Grady (Chris Pratt)? “Jurassic World was very much made with the fans in mind, and I’m not going to forget it, but now we’ve seen a lot of ‘dinosaurs chasing people around on an island’ movies. I think the general audience is going to be down to explore where else we can go. We know Owen is going to be in it and Claire will be in it and neither will be in the same place that we left them in this movie, 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. 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.”
For the full interview, find the podcast below. The second Jurassic World should be out on June 8, 2018, once an appropriate director has been found.