Jurassic World Dominion director reveals the one rule he had to obey when making the sequel

Four years have passed since Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and dinosaurs no longer lurk only on an island off Costa Rica but inhabit every corner of the Earth. That premise offered Colin Trevorrow the biggest sandbox imaginable when forging the sequel, Jurassic World Dominion – so big, in fact, that the director chose to play by some important rules.

"I know that there’s something in all of us – it’s probably the child in all of us – that imagines dinosaurs running randomly through the streets of cities, and eating people out of their Starbucks, and causing cars to crash into each other," he says in the new issue of Total Film, sparking memories of the San Diego sequence that closed out 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

"But it was important to me that we try to at least approach it from a place of reality: what if this insane thing actually happened? The rule that we made was, we tried not to have dinosaurs do anything or interact in any way that animals wouldn’t in our modern world. You know, we have bears and tigers and lions and things that will eat you if you go into their territory, or mess with their young. We have animals in zoos. We weaponize them. We put them in our homes as pets. We sell them in markets. So all of these different realities are in this film in different ways."

It sounds thrilling. And you know what? The child in us might just get a bit of urban carnage after all. Trevorrow grins. "There is one city. There’s a sequence in Malta. The dinosaurs didn’t come there by choice. Malta is really the hub for the dinosaur underground black market. It’s where they’re imported and exported, bought and sold. And that’s part of our world, too – the animals are displaced from their natural habitat, as they were in the last movie, and brought to other places where they don’t necessarily belong. And chaos can easily ensue there..."

Jurassic World dominion manages to bring together the stars of the Jurassic Park and World movies for a thrilling ending to the saga. Total Film spoke to Trevorrow and the cast at length about the new movie in the new issue of the magazine – which you can pre-order here!

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Jamie Graham is a freelance writer and former Editor-at-Large of Total Film magazine. You'll likely find them around these parts reviewing the biggest films on the planet and speaking to some of the biggest stars in the business – that's just what Jamie does. Jamie has also written for outlets like SFX and the Sunday Times Culture, and appeared on podcasts exploring the wondrous worlds of occult and horror.

With contributions from

Jack ShepherdFreelance Journalist