A few years back Colin Trevorrow was attached to direct what became “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” but he stepped away over creative differences with J.J. Abrams coming in to replace him.
Ultimately Abrams created a whole different film to Trevorrow’s vision, a vision that in recent months we’ve all been privy to thanks to some script and sketch leaks going into what his version of the tale would have been.
As part of a pre-recorded ‘Directors on Directing’ discussion session for Comic-Con@Home this week, Trevorrow talked about stepping away after being originally hired:
“I have been very fortunate in the films that I’ve directed.The path that I wanted to follow and the path that everyone involved wanted to follow was the same. It’s totally possible for people to see two totally different paths through the woods.
That was just an experience that obviously, as you can imagine with all of these things, it can get to the point of being traumatic when there’s something that you care about that much and you’ve invested that much in it.
But that’s one of the things you accept when you take on any role in film, especially when you become a storyteller – that there are going to be heartbreaks. There is going to be crushing disappointments, and then there’s going to be victories. Hopefully, they’ll balance out in the end.”
Trevorrow is hardly short of work though – he’s currently shooting “Jurassic World: Dominion” which marks the first major film production to resume during the COVID era. he says:
“The biggest challenge for me is that we have tons of protocol and many layers of safety and protection for everybody because that’s obviously the top priority. But once all of that has been applied, it’s still going to be a couple of people at the center of a circle trying to make something feel real and honest.”
Speaking of feeling real, Trevorrow says they’ve gone more practical with the animatronics on this film than the previous two JW films combined, not to mention that he says with the new film they’ve finally been able to make the animatronic and CG effects indistinguishable:
“We finally reached a point where it’s possible to… digital extensions on animatronics will be able to match the texture and the level of fidelity that, on film, an animatronic is going to be able to bring. And you didn’t use to be able to really mix them. You could really see the seams. And so that part of it is very exciting for me.”
The film was several weeks into filming when the shut down happened. Trevorrow says over the break they didn’t change the script much but they definitely were able to cut and put several sequences through the visual effects pipeline. “Jurassic World: Dominion” is now targeting a June 11th 2021 release.
