This is the Jurassic World production office. No, really.
Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow spoke candidly to /film about those gleefully insane plot details, confirming some of the rumors and clarifying others. He started by bemoaning how everything is spoiled for movie audiences nowadays, adding, “I hope whoever leaked it is actively trying to undermine what we’re doing. Because if they’re trying to help, they’re doing it wrong.”
We already knew Jurassic World will pick up in real time, 22 years after Jurassic Park. Trevorrow reveals more about the setting to /film.
Jurassic World takes place in a fully functional park on Isla Nublar. It sees more than 20,000 visitors every day. You arrive by ferry from Costa Rica. It has elements of a biological preserve, a safari, a zoo, and a theme park. There is a luxury resort with hotels, restaurants, nightlife and a golf course. And there are dinosaurs. Real ones. You can get closer to them than you ever imagined possible. It’s the realization of John Hammond’s dream, and I think you’ll want to go there.
I want to go to there.
Trevorrow then spoke about two trends he and Derek Connolly wanted to weave into the story. The first is that “money has been the gasoline in the engine of our biggest mistakes. If there are billions to be made, no one can resist them, even if they know things could end horribly.” The second is our daily dependence on technology, making us “numb to the scientific miracles around us”.
Trevorrow paints a picture of a humanity that’s grown jaded toward dinosaurs. “We imagined a teenager texting his girlfriend with his back to a T-Rex behind protective glass.” I just want to pause for a moment to point out that’s pretty brilliant. He adds, “For us, that image captured the way much of the audience feels about the movies themselves. ‘We’ve seen CG dinosaurs. What else you got?’ Next year, you’ll see our answer.”
He goes on to debunk a couple of the rumored plot details. Chris Pratt isn’t teaching the raptors how to do tricks (damn), but he is doing behavioral research on them. There will also be a new dinosaur genetically engineered by the park’s scientists, but it isn’t a crazy hybrid Sharktopus or anything like that. Trevorrow describes her as being “bigger, louder, with more teeth”, with gaps in her DNA sequences filled with DNA from other species in order to “fulfill a corporate mandate”.
Trevorrow closes the interview with a word about nostalgia and sequels in general.
We’ve all been disappointed by new installments of the stories we love. But with all this talk of filmmakers “ruining our childhood”, we forget that right now is someone else’s childhood. This is their time. And I have to build something that can take them to the same place those earlier films took us. […] I’m not going to pass the buck if it doesn’t work. This one’s on me.
Check out the full interview over at /film.
Jurassic World will move in herds to theaters on June 12th, 2015.