Filmmaker Colin Trevorrow has resumed production on “Jurassic World: Dominion,” one of the first major features to start up work again since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
To resume production, a whole bunch of exhaustive safety measures mandated by Universal have been employed and Trevorrow recently caught up with Empire to discuss getting back to work on the dino-fuelled sequel.
He indicates that they already completed about a month of filming before the shutdown, and the extended four-month production shut down allowed him and the Jurassic team to get a considerable amount of post-production work done on some VFX-heavy sequences as a lot of the early shooting involved scenes with dinosaurs:
“For many of us, Dominion was already the biggest creative challenge of our lives, before the lockdown. The shooting schedule really worked to our advantage – the first four weeks we put to film were mostly sequences with dinosaurs in them. So that allowed us to get a head start on VFX and workshop some of the newer elements without the pressure of a looming deadline.
I’m confident our guidelines will keep us safe. The hard part will be constructing a creative environment within all the precautions. Once the cameras roll, we have to forget our world and live in the world of the movie. That may take some practice. I’ve been really moved by the way everyone has shown support for each other. We’re all fired up to get back to work. This is what we do, and we’re all eager to get back out there and do it.”
The story is a bit different for “No Time to Die” director Cary Joji Fukunaga who also spoke with the British film news outlet. Fukunaga had just completed post-production on the Bond film before the pandemic shut down many things and the movie itself was delayed from April to November.
Despite having plenty of extra time now, Fukunaga once again re-iterates he has no plans to make changes to the film and discusses how he’s faced the challenges of large scale pandemics before:
“My first movie, Sin Nombre, came out during swine flu [pandemic in 2009], and it came out in cinemas in Mexico right when the President of Mexico said, ‘Do not go to cinemas’. So I had trauma from that experience, and as I was following the news of this, almost every day I was asking [the producers], ‘What’s the plan, guys? Because this isn’t stopping.’
I don’t think anyone could have foreseen how the world came to a complete standstill, but I did think audiences would not be going to cinemas. You could just fiddle and tweak and it doesn’t necessarily get better. For all intents and purposes, we had finished the film. I had mentally finished the film. Mentally and emotionally.”
“Jurassic World: Dominion” is tentatively slated to open in cinemas on June 11th 2021, while “No Time To Die” is currently targeting a mid-November release this year.
