Colin Trevorrow, director of Jurassic World and writer of its sequel, revealed a bit about the Jurassic World 2 plot during an appearance on the Jurassic Outpost podcast, InGeneral (embedded below).
“It will be more suspenseful and scary. It’s just the way it’s designed; it’s the way the story plays out,” Trevorrow said of the Jurassic World 2 script.
Trevorrow described developing the plot around new director J.A. Bayona’s abilities, which he previously applied to horror in The Orphanage. “I knew I wanted Bayona to direct it long before anyone ever heard that was a possibility, so the whole thing was just built around his skillset.”
“A mistake made a long time ago just can’t be undone,” Trevorrow described as a major theme in Jurassic World 2. “You just can’t put it back into the box.” How that plays into the plot is unclear, but Trevorrow described the structure as similar to the first Jurassic Park, with big set pieces in the middle narrowing to a more intimate, personal ending.
While Trevorrow didn’t provide much in the way of plot specifics, he did disclaim the popular assumption that Jurassic World 2 would go further into the world of militarized raptors that obsessed Hoskins until his bloody end. “I’m not that interested in militarized dinosaurs, at least not in practice. I liked it in theory as the pipe dream of a lunatic. When that idea was first presented to me as part of an earlier script it was something that the character that ended up being Owen was for, that he supported, something that he was actively doing even at the beginning. Derek and I, one of our first reactions was ‘No, if anyone’s going to militarize raptors that’s what the bad guy does, he’s insane.’” Trevorrow is likely alluding to the early draft for Jurassic Park 4 by John Sayles (Lone Star, Alligator), which starred a velociraptor Special Forces squad. Trevorrow and his writing partner, Derek Connolly, scrapped that idea in favor of an invisible, mutant T. Rex that knows how to speak the raptor language.
“Jurassic World War feels like a cartoon to me. I’d watch that cartoon with my kid, but I wouldn’t make it,” Trevorrow said.
Bayona, who pops in toward the end of the podcast, said, “I was very surprised by the story… There are things you really don’t expect and it is very exciting.”
The success of the first Jurassic World will mean a bigger budget at his disposal for Jurassic World 2. Colin Trevorrow and J.A. Bayona hope to spend some of the money on animatronics. “We’ve written some animatronics into [Jurassic World 2] — because it has to start at the script level — and I can definitely tell you that Bayona has the same priorities. He is all about going practical whenever possible.” Trevorrow also hinted at better CGI for the sequel, with ILM testing the possibilities of motion capturing live animals.
Though Trevorrow spoke at length about the Jurassic World 2 plot, disowning battle raptors and the militarization subplot of Jurassic World leaves us even more in the dark than before. Just get us off the damn island, Colin!
