'Jurassic World' Director Talks Sequel's Exciting New Dinos

We’re all still a little excited about that ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ trailer, but the first official full-length trailer for ‘Jurassic World’ also debuted a few days ago, and we’re still thinking about a few things: The giant aquatic dinosaur leaping through the air to eat the shark, the super-smart hybrid dino that serves as the film’s central conflict, and the implication near the end of the trailer that Chris Pratt’s protagonist is using the velociraptors to help track down and kill the super-smart killer dino. Director Colin Trevorrow knows exactly what we want to talk about, in a new interview, he’s talking about all of it.

Empire caught up with Trevorrow and made sure to ask him all the right questions. First, about the hybrid dino:

This new creation is what gave me a reason to tell another Jurassic Park story. We have the most awe-inspiring creatures to ever walk the Earth right in front of us, but for some reason that’s not enough. We’re always hungry for the next thing, and those who profit from it are always looking to feed that hunger. The focus groups want something bigger than a T-Rex. And that’s what they get.

As for the aquatic dinosaur, it’s called a Mosasaurus, and he developed the concept in a pitch meeting with producers Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall:

I thought it would be cool if we had this massive animal and the park used one of our most fearsome modern predators as food. There could be a whole other facility where they used shark DNA to mass-produce them to feed the bigger beast.

It’s implied in the last shot of the trailer that Chris Pratt’s character has trained the velociraptors to work with him to hunt the hybrid, but Trevorrow explains that it’s not quite what you think:

Owen’s relationship with the raptors is complicated. They aren’t friends. These animals are nasty and dangerous and they’ll bite your head off if you make the wrong move. But there are men and women out there today who have forged tenuous connections with dangerous predators. That’s interesting territory to me.

Interesting indeed. And what about the Tyrannosaurus Rex? We don’t see a single shot of our favorite massive dino in the trailer, and when asked if we’d see one in the film, Trevorrow responded, “You bet your ass you will.”

We’ll see when the film hits theaters on June 12, 2015.