Interview: Colin Trevorrow On Jurassic World Easter Eggs, Editing With Spielberg, Working At SNL
By Peter Sciretta/June 12, 2015 9:30 am EST
In the interview, Colin talks about the Flight of the Navigator remake, how the voice cameos in the movie came about, the ideas of commercialization and sequels in the movie, how Steven Spielberg helped change the edit of the movie, the fan reaction to the trailers and the struggle to preserve surprises, how he met his writing partner Derek Connolly while working at Saturday Night Live, featherless dinosaurs in an age when science thinks different, and would he be interested in directing a Star Wars movie.
After the jump, you can read the whole interview (a couple of excerpts have run earlier in the week) which is virtually spoiler free (I have removed one question and answer which I will run next week after everyone has seen the film).
Peter Sciretta: (referring to the Jurassic World security command center backdrop in the room where we conducted the interview) This is really cool. Colin Trevorrow: You remember this stuff. You were there. That’s all the same graphics, same footage that we had up on the wall.Peter Sciretta: That is cool. Very cool. I think this is like the third or fourth time I’ve talked to you about this movie.Colin Trevorrow: It’s been a long two and a half years as we’ve been through so much together.Peter Sciretta: First off, before I talk Jurassic World, I hate to be annoying blogger person that sounds like he’s trying to get a scoop or whatever but I’m a huge fan of Flight of the Navigator. So I have to ask you what’s going on with that? Colin Trevorrow: You know, I haven’t thought about it for quite… Derek and I did a draft of that and it was just one of those things that I don’t know if they’re still developing it. I know they were thinking of doing it for a while and I wonder if the priorities of Disney have just changed or evolved. You know, that was pre, Marvel expanding universe, pre Star Wars. There’s a lot of things that have changed over there. So I don’t know what’s going on with that one. I know that I probably only if at all I only have one more make a movie from my childhood card to play. So I may hold it.Peter Sciretta: What was your unique take on that since it sounds like it’s maybe not happening?Colin Trevorrow: It was about brothers. I remember what the themes of it were. It was, maybe we didn’t change it enough. I found actually that movie to be, that movie didn’t make a lot of money. It’s something that we loved ‘cause we saw it at a certain time, but I found a lot of the elements in that movie to be pretty great. And we made it a little that we got off the planet a little bit and we made it different in scope. And in the end, it was about those brothers. But I honestly it was so much has happened since then that I’d have to go back and look at what we did.Peter Sciretta: Yeah, you’ve been on this for a while.Colin Trevorrow: Yeah.Peter Sciretta: I noticed in the credits that there’s a few cameos, or at least voice cameos. [Note: this is not something most people could possibly notice when watching the film]Colin Trevorrow: Yeah.Peter Sciretta: I was wondering if you could tell us about those and how those came about?Colin Trevorrow: Brad [Bird] is one of them and he’s been a great mentor and friend. And he actually invited me to the set of Tomorrowland. And allowed me just to kind of watch him for a couple days. And he gave me great confidence that I at least understood what a day to day experience on a giant blockbuster movie is for a director and we both mixed up at Skywalker Ranch. And he was up there ahead of me and they were doing some pre-dubbing stuff. And I asked if he would be the guy. And I remember writing him a detailed character description of who that guy was. He worked on the tram and he lives in North Hollywood and writes screenplays at night. Yeah, I had this whole thing that I laid out as like just put that into the character. And he did it. And the other one that you’re probably referring to is me as Mr. DNA. Which again was something that happened very organically. We were–
[This is where my iPhone stopped recording for the first time in the history of me using the device to record interviews. I was able to notice this before the next question but do not have a transcript of the rest of this answer, so I’ll just tell you what he said: He recorded the voice for Mr. DNA as a scratch track, much like how animators do that for animated features. The sound guy put a few effects on his voice and it ended up sounding so close to the original that they decided not to rerecord with an actor. So while it wasn’t planned, the director has a voice cameo in the movie as Mr. DNA]
Scientificly accurate art concept of a T-rex with feathers (not from Jurassic World)
Scientificly accurate art concept of a T-rex with feathers (not from Jurassic World)
