Colin Trevorrow Reveals the Jurassic Park Quote That Inspired the Jurassic World Sequel

The upcoming Jurassic World sequel was inspired by a quote from the original film

It was no surprise when Universal Studios set a release date for an upcoming Jurassic World sequel earlier this summer, especially considering the film had just crossed the $1.5 billion mark at the global box office. Speaking on the Jurassic Cast, director Colin Trevorrow spoke about coming up with this new trilogy of films with co-writer Derek Connolly on a road trip the pair took and how specific quotes from the original Jurassic Park informed their approach to each film.

“Honestly, the trilogy is articulated in Jurassic Park, it’s all in there… Jurassic World is all based on Ian Malcolm’s quote, ‘You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you wanna sell it.’ That to me is Jurassic World, that’s why I had all the product placement, that’s what it was. The second one, Jurassic World 2, and as we were driving we tried to find, what is the foundation? ‘Dinosaurs and man, separated by 65 million years of evolution have been thrown back into the mix together. How can we know what to expect?’ That’s why it’s exciting that the movie did well, that leaves us a lot of room to run, and it was part of this design, it had a beginning, middle, and end when we wrote the first movie. Now that the movie did well, we get to play that out.”

Trevorrow went on to talk about the larger themes of the films and how the success of “World” will allow them to do things a little differently.

“It will get to be a different kind of film. The audience has given us permission to a certain extent to take this to the next level, and I don’t necessarily mean in scale, I feel very strongly that it’s not about more dinosaurs or bigger and better dinosaurs, it’s about using this as a starting point for a much larger story about our relationship with these animals and about animals in general and the dynamic created by bringing them back to life.”

The director also got more specific about the film and the arc of Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s characters.

“Jurassic World was very much made with the fans in mind, and I’m not going to forget it, but now we’ve seen a lot of ‘dinosaurs chasing people around on an island’ movies. I think you guys and also the general audience is going to be down to explore where else we can go. We know Owen is going to be in it and Claire will be in it and neither will be in the same place that we left them in this movie, Even though Claire is the one who evolves the most over the trilogy, it’s her story that mirrors this changing world, Owen has s**t to deal with. The two of them opened Pandora’s Box in Jurassic World and each of them are responsible for different elements of it in different ways, and I think the way that these characters are connected to the circumstances of what’s happening it’s different than the previous films. It’s not ‘Let’s manufacture a way to get them somewhere,’ they’re embedded into it now in a way that as story tellers makes it much easier for us to keep them involved and doesn’t feel as contrived.”

Trevorrow won’t be returning to direct the Jurassic World sequel, instead he’ll be traveling to a galaxy far, far away for Star Wars: Episode IX, and though he didn’t get specific about the sequel, he expressed his excitement about getting to work in that sandbox.

“I obviously can’t talk too much about Star Wars, but the idea of that ‘Universe,’ that word gets thrown around a lot as far as movies are concerned and what people are building, that one’s an actual universe. I think that the size and scope of that… Every kind of story we can think of can be told in the Star Wars universe, because it is endless and boundless.”

You can listen to the full interview with Trevorrow in the player below. The Jurassic World sequel will open in theaters on June 22, 2018 with Star Wars: Episode IX following in 2019.