Colin Trevorrow

• 1. Introduction

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  Colin Trevorrow grew up singing in the chorus of the San Francisco Opera, a detail that seems almost too cinematic for a boy who would later direct one of the highest-grossing films in history. Born on the 13th of September, 1976, in San Francisco, Trevorrow was raised in Oakland by a country rock musician father and a mother who split her time between photography and running a day-care center. That household of creative contradictions produced a filmmaker who has spent his career jumping between the intimately strange and the enormously expensive. What drew a teenager who won awards at the Mill Valley Film Festival to a franchise about resurrected dinosaurs? And how does a director go from that to losing Star Wars and giving the residuals to charity? The answers trace through a friendship forged on the set of a late-night sketch show, an ad that ran in a survivalist magazine in 1997, and a Sephardic Jewish grandmother whose ancestors settled in the Caribbean centuries before he was born.

• 2. Oakland to NYU

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  Piedmont High School, a public school in Piedmont, California, was where Trevorrow finished his secondary education before heading east. He enrolled at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 1999 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in film and dramatic writing. That degree came with a connection that would shape the next two decades of his career. While working as interns on Saturday Night Live, Trevorrow met a fellow student named Derek Connolly. The two parted ways after graduation and would not collaborate for nearly another decade. When they reunited in 2008 to write a buddy cop script called Cocked and Loaded, Trevorrow found the partnership so satisfying that he decided to give up solo screenwriting entirely. The decision was not a small one. His first solo spec script, titled Tester, had already sold to DreamWorks in 2006, proving he could work alone. But the Connolly collaboration would define the next phase of his filmmaking life.

• 3. Safety Not Guaranteed

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  In 1997, a classified advertisement appeared in an issue of Backwoods Home Magazine. It read: "Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 322, Oakview, CA 93022. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before." That ad became the seed of Trevorrow's breakout film. Connolly wrote the script with the intention that Trevorrow would direct it, and the resulting 2012 film earned Trevorrow a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. At Sundance, the film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and took home the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. By 2012, Trevorrow's debut short film from 2002, Home Base, had quietly accumulated over 20 million hits online. Safety Not Guaranteed arrived at a moment when critics and distributors were paying close attention, and what followed for Trevorrow and Connolly was a commission from the Walt Disney Company to write a remake of the 1986 film Flight of the Navigator.

• 4. Jurassic World

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  Jurassic World opened in 2015 and earned more than $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office. Trevorrow co-wrote and directed the film, and also provided the voice for the character Mr. DNA. The scale of that success was almost incomprehensible for a director whose previous theatrical feature had been a low-budget time-travel comedy. Trevorrow and Connolly subsequently co-wrote Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, released in June 2018, for which Trevorrow served as executive producer but did not direct. On the 30th of March, 2018, it was announced that Trevorrow would return to direct the third installment, Jurassic World Dominion, which was released in 2022. That franchise work extended beyond the cinema. Trevorrow was involved in Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous, which ran from 2020 to 2022, and its follow-up series Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, running from 2024 into 2025. He also contributed to theme park development, designing a TIE fighter Echelon ship for Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge in 2019.

• 5. The Star Wars Departure

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  Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn announced in August 2015 that Trevorrow would direct Star Wars: Episode IX. Trevorrow and Connolly began writing a script they titled Star Wars: Duel of the Fates. In August 2017, writer Jack Thorne was brought in to rewrite the script because Lucasfilm was dissatisfied with what Trevorrow and Connolly had produced. By September 2017, Trevorrow was let go due to creative differences. J. J. Abrams, who had directed The Force Awakens, stepped in as director and co-wrote the film with Chris Terrio. The project was re-envisioned and released as The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. Trevorrow and Connolly retained story credit alongside Abrams and Terrio. Trevorrow donated the residuals he earned from the film to charity. The same year he was removed from Episode IX, his film The Book of Henry was released by Focus Features on the 16th of June, 2017. Written by Gregg Hurwitz, it received generally negative reviews, though Trevorrow publicly stood by it.

• 6. Metronome and What Comes Next

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  In 2019, Trevorrow founded Metronome Film Co., a production company based across London and Los Angeles. The company's first film as a banner release, Deep Cover, is set for release by Amazon MGM Studios on the 12th of June, 2025, and is scheduled to serve as the Centrepiece Headliner at the inaugural SXSW London festival. Projects in development spread across several genres. War Magician, announced on the 16th of March, 2021, is a historical war film about Jasper Maskelyne, a British illusionist said to have used stage magic against Nazi forces in World War II, with Benedict Cumberbatch attached to star. A film titled Atlantis, announced on the 5th of February, 2023, is set up at Universal Pictures with a script by Charmaine DeGraT. In May 2025, Paramount Pictures and Maximum Effort announced Trevorrow as director of a thriller set around Area 51. And in October 2025, he was reported to be in talks to write and direct a live-action adaptation of The Jetsons for Warner Bros. Pictures, with Jim Carrey in discussions to play George Jetson alongside co-writer Joe Epstein.