Earlier today, Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow delivered a surprisingly honest and revealing interview over at Slashfilm, revealing quite a bit about the nature of the story. Here are some of the juiciest morsels:

The story takes place on Isla Nublar (the original island), twenty-two years after the first film. Jurassic World is a massive, fully functional theme park and luxury resort.

Trevorrow also addressed some of the stranger rumors that have appeared on the web, like the possibility of “good and bad” dinosaurs and trained velociraptors. Here’s what he had to say about that:

“There’s no such thing as good or bad dinosaurs. There are predators and prey. The T-Rex in Jurassic Park took human lives, and saved them. No one interpreted her as good or bad.

Chris Pratt’s character is doing behavioral research on the raptors. They aren’t trained, they can’t do tricks. He’s just trying to figure out the limits of the relationship between these highly intelligent creatures and human beings.”

While I was admittedly intrigued by the nutty idea of hero raptors, this seems much more in line with the spirit of the original film. Trevorrow also confirmed the rumor of a hybrid super-dino, but dispelled some of the weirder ideas surrounding it:

“…there will be one new dinosaur created by the park’s geneticists. The gaps in her sequence were filled with DNA from other species, much like the genome in the first film was completed with frog DNA. This creation exists to fulfill a corporate mandate—they want something bigger, louder, with more teeth. And that’s what they get.

I know the idea of a modified dinosaur put a lot of fans on red alert, and I understand it. But we aren’t doing anything here that Crichton didn’t suggest in his novels. This animal is not a mutant freak. It doesn’t have a snake’s head or octopus tentacles.”

Trevorrow isn’t just talking out of his rear. Michael Crichton’s novel did address that the dinosaurs in the park were genetically modified versions of their ancestors, and their genetic code even had version numbers. The novel even addressed that the animals would be further engineered to make them more suitable for zoo-like exhibits.

From the sound of it, Trevorrow and co-writer Derek Connolly have been given a surprising amount of freedom to tell the story they want to tell:

“…the biggest misconception on this movie is that there’s some massive conference room at the studio where all these cynical story decisions are made. There is no committee. Universal has given us the resources to tell the story we want to tell, on the scale we want to tell it.”

As much as I want to maintain the façade of the skeptical film blogger, I was kind of giddy upon reading this. Jurassic Park is an extremely important film for me, just like it was for filmmakers like Gareth Edwards and (of course) Colin Trevorrow. I think Universal made the right choice with him, but it won’t be ’til summer 2015 until we find out if that’s true. I kinda can’t wait.