Colin Trevorrow – Jurassic World

When we first heard there was a new entry coming from one of the biggest film franchises ever (14 years after the last film seemed to nail the final coffin into the series), the first question many people asked was; ‘Colin who’?

Maybe you were one of the very few who saw Jurassic World‘s writer/director Colin Trevorrow’s sole feature credit, Safety Not Guaranteed, a quirky low budget love story/sci-fi/adventure hybrid about a seemingly nutjob inventor (Mark Duplass) who advertises for an assistant to accompany him back in time.

It’s said Spielberg wanted to meet Trevorrow on the strength of the final sequence of the film – it contains the sole special effects in what’s otherwise a cute romantic drama.

But that’s what a blessing from the Spielbeard can do. Suddenly the 38 year old joins the exclusive club shared by Gareth Edwards, another filmmaker who’s gone from the scrappy ranks of indie sci-fi (Monsters) to steering one of the biggest Hollywood brands around (Star Wars: Rogue One).

The writer director of what’s become the hit of 2015 so far (on track to break the record set by The Avengers for biggest debut) sat down with Moviehole to talk about dinosaurs, product placement, and Steven Spielberg having your back.

How was the response to the announcement you were making Jurassic World from your perspective?

‘Please don’t ruin my childhood’. I had a lot of that. I understood where that came from. We all have a very personal relationship with these movies that we watched when we were growing up. I’m not alone in that and it was a very personal reaction because I thought about how it was going to affect my family and my kids and how we were going to have to spend the next two and a half years doing something that was very challenging.

But it was also the kind of challenge I felt I couldn’t turn down. My first film, while significantly smaller – probably cheaper than this set we’re sitting in now – it was a movie that still combined various tones. It was a romantic science fiction mystery comedy, and this movie is in science fiction action adventure romantic comedy territory. That is something that challenges me a lot as a filmmaker, to try and balance all of these tones into something that feels consistent and measured.

Is it true Kristen Stewart was considered for the role of Claire that went to Bryce Dallas Howard?

No.

What about Josh Brolin?

Josh Brolin I did consider, yeah. I think he’s a great actor. I thought he would have been a great Owen and I still do. But Chris Pratt delivered a performance that I’m so proud of, and he also was just such a blast to work with the entire time.

So what happened with Josh?

Not that anything happened. He was one of the people being considered. People hear that and it turns into a giant story. In the end, no offer or decision was made until we made an offer to Chris Pratt and he accepted it.

Audiences today know all about dinosaurs thanks to Jurassic Park, they know every single detail about it. You needed to make something bigger and better in the movie just like they do in the park.

We knew that. That’s why we made the movie about that idea because it’s so true. The first movie created a whole generation of those, and now they’re all paleontologists.

There’s actually been a huge rush of dinosaur discoveries in the past five or so years because of that fact. If anything, I think people talk a lot about how Jurassic Park made them want to be filmmakers, but just as many people want to be scientists. I hope this movie does the same thing.

Was there a lot of communication with Spielberg?

Absolutely, it was a true collaboration. He treated me like a peer, which I didn’t deserve and he had no reason to do, but he never acted like he was my boss. He acted like we were engaged in building something together.

Did he get very involved with the script?

Yeah, Derek Connolly and I wrote the script, but in close collaboration with him. We had many, many story meetings, and he read all of our drafts. They were based on his ideas.

The three key ideas in the film – an open park, a raptor trainer and have a genetically modified dinosaur that escapes and eats everybody – those were ideas he’d given to previous writers as well. So we just took those and wrote our own.

Ever ask him why he didn’t want to direct?

I never asked him that. I feel like I know the answer, which is he has so many different stories to tell and it’s kind of the same reason why I’m not looking to do another one of these films. I admire him so much for his versatility and his ability to constantly surprise us. It never occurred to me that he would want to.

Is it scary not just because of the fear of messing it up but of having so much more input or interference because of the budget?

It’s not what happened though. I had more freedom on this movie than I did on my small one.

Really?

Creatively, for sure. I didn’t have a studio over my shoulder. I didn’t get studio notes on this movie. This was my final cut that we’re watching. I think part of it was Steven’s support. I answered to him, yet he gave me so much freedom that I was able to make something very personal.

Steven has final cut on these movies. It’s an Amblin Movie. Not that they suddenly would have been overbearing. I had a great relationship with them and everybody at Universal, they loved what we were doing, and I think that if it was going wrong they would have stepped in. They’re there to protect a pretty sizable investment, but the movie went well. We ended two days early and under-budget, and we didn’t have any re-shoots.

No test screenings?

We did not test the movie.

Are you worried there might also be some cynicism about all the brand names?

Sure, that was an interesting dance. I wanted all of those product placement elements to happen because it’s part of the story. At the beginning of the film that I said very clearly, “Look, we can do all of this product placement, but this thing that Jake Johnson says about ‘let’s name all the dinosaurs Pepsisaurus, Tostitodon. They have all the ballparks’. That little speech stays in the movie because if that goes out, then it will just look like I put all this product placement in.

So Samsung knew you were going to break one of their phones?

Oh, absolutely. Everybody did. Starbucks, Margaritaville, Mercedes, all of these different product placement partners. I made it very clear at the end of this movie the oldest creatures on earth are going to completely destroy everything. As long as you’re cool with that, then we can have a partnership here.

There was a moment actually when I hesitated a little bit with The Samsung Innovation Center. I called Steven and was like, ‘I don’t know, man. They kind of own the whole street. They own Jurassic World. Is this cool?’ He said, ‘You know what? This is what your movie’s about, and if you’re gonna go for it, you have to go for it. It has to be what it is.’

What’s your favorite dinosaur?

I like the Ankylosaurus very much. That’s why I put her in. That’s the one that has like a spiky turtle shell and the tail moves around. It’s hard on the outside and soft in the inside. It’s a character that I understand.

It’s pretty sad when one of them dies.

Good.

It’s quite a trick to make the audience care about these animals even though they’re not real.

Yeah. I want you to feel something in these movies. It’s very easy, especially with movies that are heavy in visual effects, that not only do you stop feeling, but you kind of grow numb and just let all the information get downloaded into your brain.

There are moments throughout the film that are designed to really make these creatures feel like living animals that you can connect to. Especially since so many of the themes in the film involve our relationship with animals on the planet right now, I wanted them to feel real.

How do you do that in a practical sense?

You sit there for hours. It’s a very long, involved process that involves many of the best digital animators in the world. And the world’s full of men and women wanting to do this job because they grew up on Jurassic Park, and they insisted that this be the one that they spend a year of their life doing.

Yeah, it’s a whole new sidebar but a very long, complex process involving many, many different techniques – CGI, animatronics, motion-capture and very detailed mechanics that were given a digital skin to allow for facial breathing.

Motion-capture is not a new technology, but it’s never been used in a dinosaur movie before. I haven’t seen it used for anything but humanoid creatures like apes and Gollum and King Kong and things like that. We used it for bipedal dinosaurs and even the T-Rex.

You also have to fight against the cynicism of the audience. We’ve seen dinosaurs a hundred times like the visitors to the park have.

Yeah. It’s how the whole movie is designed. I was hyper-aware of that cynicism because I see it every day. What I learned into was it’s a little bit like a magic trick. You accept that the audience is intelligent and they’re going into this in a certain way and they know, ‘There’s no way I’m going to feel like a little kid. There’s no way that’s going to happen. You can’t do that to me.’

Then before they know it, it’s happening. You know, a magician will first show you a hat and say, ‘Look, it’s empty. There’s not a rabbit in this hat. We all agree there’s not a rabbit in this hat. But, oh man, look at this rabbit.’ That was kind of the goal.

Did that add to any fear going into it?

Fear, no. Acknowledgement and recognition of that, yes. That’s why one of the first lines of the movie is, ‘No one’s impressed by a dinosaur anymore.’ We start there. That really is the goal, over the course of the film to slowly bring people into a story they’re getting more and more involved in and allow them to forget that not only that they’re watching a movie with visual effects, but forget that they’re watching a movie.

Our ability to pull people in now is enhanced by the 3D aspect. It happened with Steven. His comment to me when he first saw the film was that he went through stages. The first one was that he forgot he was watching a movie that he was involved in. Then he forgot he was watching a movie. I knew we’d won at that point, if we could get him there, then we can get everybody there.

The website http://www.jurassicworld.com was a pretty clever part of the marketing.

That was something that was part of the production I actually factored in where we shot footage for that website while we were simultaneously shooting footage for that control room where you can see all those video monitors? That’s all practical. There’s no visual effects involved. Those are closed circuit video cameras from all kinds of locations throughout the entire shoot. We took all that footage and put it onto the website in order to create a real experience.

Chris gets top billing, but it seems Claire’s the one who drives things.

She is the hero. She’s the lead character and the hero. What was most important to me is that we didn’t surrender her femininity in order to make her into an action hero. I don’t think we had to do that. She supported that. Running in heels was her idea. I wanted her to be comfortable. She insisted, “No, this is what she wore to work today. This is how it would go down, all the way to the very end.” She stayed in those heels.

We’ve also heard you shot different versions of certain things.

I shot two different versions of a lot of things, and chose which one to use. We shot a version where Jake kisses the girl, and one where he doesn’t. We designed it so maybe Chris and Bryce were never going to kiss, and maybe they were. That’s just something I do to make sure that I have options during the process.

Did Bryce know about the kiss?

She’s game. He’s a good looking guy. What I did tell her right up front ‘Sometimes we’ll surprise you, and sometimes we’ll try and bring out a genuine reaction’, and what you see on camera is her responding to something that she did not expect. That is very difficult to find.

Are you really not interested in coming back to the franchise again? Are you going back to indies?

It’s not that I’m going to go back to the indie world. I just want to tell different kinds of stories. Man, I just threw every bit of dinosaur that I could ever possibly want to see into this movie. I feel so proud of it, and I had such a great experience but I want to continue to change and evolve.

Honestly, these franchises are very difficult to make sequels to. Just my opinion as someone who is partially responsible for pushing it forward, it’s part of my job. I think that this franchise would best be served by a model similar to what they do with Mission Impossible. That could get repetitive, but it never has because they always bring in new voices and each one is a little different. I think, that’s the best thing for this.