Colin Trevorrow Went Back to the Books for ‘Jurassic World 2’s Ian Malcolm
Whether you are someone who loved or hated Jurassic World when it first hit theaters, there’s probably something we can all agree on: the movie needed itself some Jeff Goldblum. Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm — mathematician-turned-dinosaur-expert-turned-intellectual-action-hero — is one of the standouts of both the original Jurassic Park film and its direct sequel, and the news that Goldblum would be returning for Colin Trevorrow’s sequel was a welcome one. Goldblum may not have been enough to save Independence Day: Resurgence, but its a quantifiable fact that all movies are better with a little bit of his signature ‘ums’ and ‘ahs.’
To write for Goldblum in Jurassic World 2, though, Trevorrow needed a little inspiration. In a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via ComingSoon), Trevorrow admitted that he went back to Michael Crichton’s original novel for inspiration for the character. This led to Trevorrow and Goldblum having a phone conversation that I would kill to get a recording of:
You know, I did rely on [Michael] Crichton for a lot. I used a lot of Crichton dialogue. Maybe one of my highlights of this whole process is Goldblum. Jeff Goldblum called me — and I’m not going to do an impression — but he was like, ‘Look, I’ve added a couple of things, and I thought I’d perform it for you.’ [Laughs] Oh, great, okay. So, we sat on the phone for an hour as he ran these lines, and I talked about it. And, I mean, that’s — it was almost better than being there on set. It was great.”
Of course, here’s hoping that Trevorrow didn’t go too far back into the books for Goldblum’s character, because if he did, then Ian Malcolm would be dead. Those who know their Crichton novels will remember that Goldblum’s character did not survive the first novel; I still remember my naive teenage outrage at discovering that an author would make changes to his book franchise to better accommodate a lucrative movie sequel. This passage near the end of the book makes it pretty clear that Malcolm succumbs to his injuries on the island:
Under the circumstances, the government was not disposed to release survivors in a hurry. They did not even permit the burial of Hammond or Ian Malcolm.
So, to recap. Trevorrow is touting the authenticity of his movie by saying that he went back to the written source material, except the original source material was immediately retconned by the author himself to better serve the authenticity of a movie. Any questions? Put your hands down, everyone. This is the end of the article.