Jurassic World director responds to Joss Whedon’s critique

You might remember that, back in April, Avengers / Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Firefly director Joss Whedon tweeted about this clip from Jurassic World, which depicted Chris Pratt’s character, Owen, and Bryce Dallas Howard’s character, Claire, locked in an awkwardly flirtatious encounter. Deeming it ’70s era sexist’ in his tweet, Whedon later regretted saying anything at all, stating that, ‘I don’t ever say things about other people’s work that are negative.’ But now Jurassic World‘s director, Colin Trevorrow, has made his own response. Speaking to Bad Taste, Trevorrow said:

‘I wasn’t bothered by what he said about the movie… and, to be honest, I don’t totally disagree with him… I wonder why they [the studio] chose a clip like that, that shows an isolated situation within a movie that has an internal logic… That starts with characters that are almost archetypes, stereotypes that are deconstructed as the story progresses. The real protagonist of the movie is Claire and we embrace her femininity in the story’s progression. There’s no need for a female character that does things like a male character, that’s not what makes interesting female characters in my view. Bryce and I have talked a lot about these concepts and aspects of her character.’

This is a refreshingly level-headed response from Trevorrow. Here, he’s openly admitting that it may not have been exactly the right decision to release that particular scene to the world, isolated from the film itself, in what was probably a misjudged move from the studio behind the film, wrongly thinking this would show off the more human aspect of Jurassic World aside from the 65 million year-old main attractions.

Regardless, it’s nice to see Trevorrow respond in anything other than a heated defence of his movie, and stating that you actually have to see the movie first to get a proper perspective on what it promotes.

Jurassic World is released June 12.