Writer-director Colin Trevorrow has had a meteoric rise in Hollywood, kicking off his career with acclaimed indie Safety Not Guaranteed before crafting global smash Jurassic World, which is currently the fourth most successful film of all time.
His latest film – The Book of Henry – hits UK screens this week, and is an ambitious combination of genres that concerns a mother trying to rescue a girl from her abusive stepfather with the help of book written by her genius son. See – we told you it was a heady mix.
Trevorrow’s next movie is Episode IX, and with that in mind, we asked him in the above video interview how working on Book of Henry will inform the way he approaches the Star Wars franchise.
“I think that I had to exercise the muscle of being able to find performances from different actors who are varying ages” explains Trevorrow. “Who are dealing with extremely challenging subject matter and a story that’s constantly changing around them and making the arguably at times fantastic real. There’s no spaceships or dinosaurs in this movie, but the places that it goes border on the hyper-real. It almost feels like a nightmare at times.
“When I compare it to anything I think more of films like Poltergeist. Things where you see a very happy family showing up at a new house and you don’t really think anything wrong can happen. Then by the time you get to the end it’s truly horrifying. Even something like Jurassic World starts with a family packing up to go on vacation. So I thought that this was a way that we could take a film that was dealing with some pretty unbelievable incidents, and make it feel human and real and honest, and even when you look at the larger films I have to do, the next film is a family drama that’s in the context of something spectacular and fantastical. They’re not that far away.”
The Book of Henry hits UK screens today (June 23) while Episode IX is released summer 2019.