Colin Trevorrow Talks Jurassic World's Adopted Jurassic Park T-Rex!

Fans who have been following production on Jurassic World as long as we have will have already known that yes, Jurassic World will have a T-Rex and even better, she is the same Tyrannosaurus from the first Jurassic Park! Since Jurassic World takes place 22 years after Jurassic Park, the iconic T-Rex has aged, but as director Colin Trevorrow reveals in a new interview with SlashFilm, she's still as ferocious as ever. Read on for excerpts!

/Film: You mentioned earlier that there’s a dinosaur that we have seen in the previous films that we’re going to get to see.

Colin Trevorrow: The T. rex that’s in the film is the T. rex from the original Jurassic Park. She is 22 years older. But she’s not limping around.

Will audiences immediately recognize that it’s the same–?

I hope so. Yeah. I mean, we took the original design and obviously, technology has changed. So, it’s going to move a little bit differently, but it’ll move differently because it’s older. And we’re giving her some scars and we’re tightening her skin. So, she has that feeling of, like, an older Burt Lancaster. And this movie is her Unforgiven.

Did you get to build her again?

We got to build everyone from the ground up because technology has changed so much that everything is a rebuild. And I got to bring in dinosaurs that I’ve always thought deserved a big scene. There’s an Ankylosaurus in this movie; was a really big scene and that’s just a bad ass dinosaur. And there are others. There’s smaller appearances, some bigger appearances. You know, we have an underwater reptile. I’m sure you’ve heard about that. That thing is pretty cool. We have a new kind of flying dinosaur that no one’s ever seen before, you know, in addition to the Pteranodons that are really scary. And I didn’t want to just throw the kitchen sink at it. Each of these movies has done a good job at just very carefully, in a measured way, increasing the new dinosaurs that you see. But, there’s a lot of dinosaurs in the movie for sure.And then there’s the new approach used in this film, which perhaps emulates films like the recent Planet of the Apes movies more than it does the original Jurassic Park. While there are some animatronic elements this time, the major dinosaur presences are created with performance capture.

Can you talk a little bit about some of the practical versus CG dino creations?

A little, yeah. I mean, we have one scene that is an animatronic animal. I don’t want to tell you the nature of it, but it’s really beautiful and it’s a real tribute to Stan Winston and what he did. And there’s other elements of–it’s just a very special moment. So, that’s something I want people to discover. There are other elements where animatronics are used just so people can touch them. And there are other moments where maybe in the past they would’ve used an animatronic. They might’ve built, you know, a giant head but because a scene is so short or brief in which you just see the head, we’ve tried to, you know, keep that motion and that sense of, like, slow wait.

Be sure to read the entire interview over on SlashFilm to learn more about Jurassic World's use of performance capture!