The past and future of the Jurassic Park franchise exist alongside each other on the Louisiana soundstages that house the set of the upcoming film Jurassic World. In fact, they’re literally linked by an ordinary hallway: Just down the corridor from the soundstage that’s home to the high-tech control room for Jurassic World’s titular amusement park — where big-spending tourists come to gawk at genetically reborn dinosaurs — there’s another set that re-creates a key location from Steven Spielberg’s 1993 franchise-launching blockbuster, the original Visitor’s Center where Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and his makeshift family faced down a gang of wily velociraptors before being saved by the arrival of a snarling T. rex. The center may be a weed-covered ruin now, with dinosaur bones strewn about and the “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” banner still lying where it fell two decades ago. But seeing this particular Jurassic Park locale preserved in such loving detail can’t help but send a shiver of excitement through any visitors, just as its appearance in the new film will no doubt thrill audiences when Jurassic World opens its doors to the general public on June 12.



So it’s only appropriate that this is the place where Jurassic World’s director, Colin Trevorrow, is spending his lunch break one day in July of last year with a group of visiting reporters, including one from Yahoo Movies. And even though he’s been on this stage many times before — having directed a set piece that will unfold in this location about halfway through the film — like those of us sightseers, he seems galvanized to be standing in a place that’s hallowed ground to the millions of moviegoers who visited Jurassic Park over and over again back in the summer of 1993. Trevorrow would have been one of them; born in San Francisco in 1976, the filmmaker was a teenager when Park hit theaters. Now, two decades later, he’s shepherding the franchise’s rebirth after two disappointing sequels, 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park and 2001’s Jurassic Park III.

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It’s a task he didn’t take lightly when he was initially offered the job by Spielberg himself. Ultimately, it was his passion for Jurassic Park that made him want to be the one to continue its legacy. “I felt like I had a responsibility to do it,” he explains. “Mostly for Steven, in thanks for all he’s done for all of us and how much his movies meant to me in my childhood. But also, if one is asked to do this, it’s almost insulting to everyone else to say no. We’d all love this privilege — to be able to re-create a film that meant so much to us.”

Of course, Jurassic World isn’t a mere re-creation of Jurassic Park; it’s a direct sequel to the original, set some 20 years after the events of Spielberg’s film. (According to Trevorrow, the previous sequels aren’t being written out of continuity so much as placed to the side, as they both unfolded on a different island.) In that time, a functioning theme park has been constructed on Isla Nubar, overseen by operations manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and employing hundreds of staffers, including velociraptor trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt).

And, of course, there are dinosaurs. Lots and lots of dinosaurs, all grown in labs via the same process that John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) developed — and Mr. DNA so helpfully explained — in the first movie. Industrial Light & Magic once again provides the digital magic that brings these creatures to life, using both traditional CGI imagery and, in a franchise first, motion capture for specific dinosaurs. And, just like their ancestors, these dinos turn on the human interlopers at a certain point, and the theme park becomes a feeding ground.

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