Bits and pieces of Jurassic World news have been trickling out recently, both officially and otherwise. We've managed to bring you news, images, set photos, and interviews from director Colin Trevorrow while keeping you spoiler-free, but unfortunately someone out there on the interwebs wants to blow the lid off the whole thing. Well, Trevorrow himself recently addressed these leaks and set the record straight on a number of issues from setting, to timeline, to characters, to the dinos themselves.
Starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Irrfan Khan, Nick Robinson, Ty Simpkins, Jake Johnson, Omar Sy, and Judy Greer, Jurassic World opens June 12, 2015. Hit the jump to see what Trevorrow had to say, which contains spoilers.
In a recent interview with /Film, Trevorrow commented on recent rumors and leaks related to Jurassic World. We've provided a few of his responses below, but be sure to head over to /Film for the full interview:
So the rumors are true?
Yes. 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.
How long has elapsed since the third film and how has the world we knew from those films changed in that time?
This film picks up twenty-two years after Jurassic Park. When Derek [Connolly] and I sat down to find the movie, we looked at the past two decades and talked about what we’ve seen. ... What if, despite previous disasters, they built a new biological preserve where you could see dinosaurs walk the earth…and what if people were already kind of over it? We imagined a teenager texting his girlfriend with his back to a T-Rex behind protective glass. 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.
And as for the dinosaurs themselves:
Will there be crossbred dinosaurs or new species created for the movie?
We were hoping audiences could discover this on their own, but yes, there will be one new dinosaur created by the park’s geneticists. The gaps in her sequence were filled with DNA from other species, much like the genome in the first film was completed with frog DNA. This creation exists to fulfill a corporate mandate—they want something bigger, louder, with more teeth. And that’s what they get.
I know the idea of a modified dinosaur put a lot of fans on red alert, and I understand it. But we aren’t doing anything here that Crichton didn’t suggest in his novels. This animal is not a mutant freak. It doesn’t have a snake’s head or octopus tentacles. It’s a dinosaur, created in the same way the others were, but now the genetics have gone to the next level. For me, it’s a natural evolution of the technology introduced in the first film. Maybe it sounds crazy, but most of my favorite movies sound crazy when you describe them in a single sentence.
While it certainly seems like the modern-day setting of the film is in touch with contemporary audiences and their short attention spans (not to mention how I can already imagine Pratt's performance based on this description of tone alone), the genetically modified dino has me equal parts cautious and curious. As a purist, there are plenty of prehistoric creatures to choose from and no real need to create new ones for the sake of the film, but the fact that this is done as a satirical nod to corporate meddling does make it quite a bit more interesting. Either way, I'll be in the theater for this one next summer!
