How the Jurassic Era comes to an ‘epic’ end in Dominion
MANILA, Philippines — It’s the end of an era.
Almost 30 years after the release of the original Jurassic Park, the more than $5 billion franchise is coming to a conclusion with Jurassic World Dominion. Making it a more “epic” ending is having two generations — Jurassic World’s Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard and Jurassic Park’s Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill — joining forces in one film.
In a virtual presscon and separate roundtable chat The STAR attended ahead of Dominion’s premiere in Philippine cinemas today, June 8, filmmaker Colin Trevorrow shared what it was like to be the custodian of three Jurassic films (after the first trilogy) based on the world created by filmmaker Steven Spielberg and author Michael Crichton.
He was director and writer of Jurassic World, which reignited the franchise to the tune of over $1 billion global box-office earnings in 2015; executive producer of Fallen Kingdom in 2018 (in collaboration with its director J.A. Bayona); and director-writer again of this year’s Dominion.
He told The STAR: “I was thinking about earlier today as I was driving over here — and you think about your whole life on your way to interviews — is that on the first film I was playing, in some ways I had to assume the character of someone who had directed a bunch of these movies and just almost convinced myself I knew how to do it.
“Whereas on this film (Dominion), I was that person and I had made a bunch of these movies. I think you deal with pressure in different ways because there’s a little bit more confidence on the technical side. There’s some way less confidence on the creative side because I’m probably less confident as a creative person now than I was when I made the first film for ways I can’t really explain (laughs). It’s just what happens. So, I relied on my collaborators a lot, in the actors and everyone else I worked with, to really kick the tires on all the choices we were making and make sure it was going to come together and it’s something that could withstand being as ambitious as I knew it was.”
Dominion was also ambitious for being the first major studio production to be filmed at the height of the pandemic in 2020. “I would say it was my most challenging film ever. Absolutely. For a bunch of reasons. But it wasn’t a negative experience. It was amazing how positive it was even in the context of, you know, this thing that was happening on our planet that was so scary to so many of us,” Colin further told The STAR, describing the film as kind of a miracle.
“Everyone who made this film, there was just a real urgency and desire to tell this story because we felt like what we were doing if we were able to get back into theaters again, would be meaningful to people to be able to come back with their families and see a film and scream and laugh and cry.”
For the US filmmaker, his biggest takeaway from doing Jurassic movies is how audiences continue to be fascinated by dinosaurs. “You can’t underestimate the world’s fascination with dinosaurs. There’s something about them that is different from monsters or kaiju. Or any other kind of fantastical creature that people all around the world feel a real connection to and it must have something to do with our shared history on this planet. The fact that we know that they walk the earth, that their bones are in the ground, there’s something really meaningful about that.
“It’s also very rare that with the diversity of our cultures all around the world, there can be something like this, that unites all of us, that we’re all fascinated by. It’s an extremely rare gift for a storyteller.”
Dominion, from Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, also propels the Jurassic World story into uncharted territory, featuring never-seen dinosaurs.
Taking place four years after Isla Nublar has been ruined, dinosaurs now live — and hunt — alongside humans all over the world. This fragile balance will reshape the future and determine, once and for all, whether human beings are to remain the apex predators on a planet they now share with history’s most fearsome creatures.
Said Colin, “Jurassic World Dominion is about the need for us to respect the power of the natural world — if we fail, we’ll go extinct just like the dinosaurs.”
Asked how he made the balance between so many characters and dinosaurs in one story, Colin said, “Very carefully. A lot of that was in the process of making it and working with each of the actors to make sure they felt they had a beginning, middle and end to their story.
“I hope when you look at all of them lined up together, you feel that each one of them has been respected, represented and cared for over the course of the film so that you don’t leave with a sense that anyone didn’t get the part of the movie they deserve.”
Colin also discussed how he chose the dinosaurs to be included in the film. “There’s a part of me that’s just a little kid in the sandbox picking up one carnivore and then looking for the biggest one that could fight it. There’s another part of me who thinks about the human and animal relationship and that interpersonal connection a lot of us have with our own animals with dogs and horses,” he said.
He cited the special relationship between the character of Jurassic World lead star Chris Pratt and Blue, the female Velociraptor. “That’s something that was new to our trilogy, the idea that a human and a dinosaur can have that kind of bond that humans animals have. I know that it’s partially a ridiculous idea and then partially something we felt we could sell by connecting to those emotions that we have with our animals. I think, largely because of Chris Pratt and his soulfulness, and in the way he connected with Blue, I believe audiences were convinced because of what he brought to the role and I think it was extraordinary,” he said.
Every dinosaur in the film existed in real life and had to be approved by the movie’s paleontologist consultant. To bring these extinct creatures to life, it wasn’t all CGI as Colin’s goal was to include animatronics. The director revealed,“We have more animatronics in this film than certainly the last two Jurassic World movies combined… and we did it because in a lot of ways I’m fascinated with how real and textured they all feel. I wanted as many as possible because our technology allowed us to digitally extend animatronics so we could have animated elements of them while having puppeteers working on others.
“We manage to have a movie full of dinosaurs that are really there, that humans can reach out, touch, run from and potentially be eaten by it. Hopefully, it feels seamless and you forget you’re watching a movie with visual effects and it just feels like dinosaurs are as real as the humans.”
Meanwhile, Colin was asked if he always had this end-game in mind when he reignited the Jurassic franchise in 2015.
“There’s a series of images at the end of the film that I did imagine, a place that we could reach that represents the idea that humans and dinosaurs must coexist on this planet the way that we coexist with animals now,” he said.
“How we were going to get there is something that evolved over time and especially after the first film when we looked at making another two with the help of (co-writer) Derek Connolly and now, Emily Carmichael, wrote this film with me and a lot of other writers and thinkers and scientists, paleontologists, geneticists we spoke to in building something that, hopefully, in this film feels scientifically plausible and grounded in the world we live in. I know that they put me here to be the one talking but I represent thousands of people who brought these movies to you over the past nine years.”
Pressed if Dominion is truly the epilogue of the Jurassic saga, Colin said, “I definitely wanted to tell the ending of the story that we’ve been telling for 28 years and to me, the ending of a good story is we ended in a completely different place from where we began, and everyone and everything has fundamentally changed and this felt like the way to end a six-episode story.
“That said, if there’s a new story to be told, especially with the characters we created in this film, who I love, and there’s a young filmmaker or filmmaker of any age, who has the belief in their story which I had back when I started on on this, we look forward to hearing from them.”
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