Director Colin Trevorrow popped up on Hollywood radar with the quirky 2012 sci-fi indie movie Safety Not Guaranteed. His debut feature, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier that same year, ended up receiving critical acclaim and set him (along with his screenwriter collaborator, Derek Connolly) on a course for bigger - and hopefully better - things.

Trevorrow's next film, Jurassic World, premieres this summer; it required the filmmaker to make a complete 180 turn from his previous project, by tacking a big-budget tentpole franchise title (full of action sequences and CGI dinosaurs) rather than another original indie cinema vision. The risk inherent to such a maneuver already seems to have paid off, though, because the director's new film will see him continue his foray into studio-backed science fiction - with an original project, this time around.

THR reports that DreamWorks has picked up the science fiction thriller Intelligent Life, written by Trevorrow and Connolly (who also co-penned the Jurassic World script). Trevorrow is attached to direct, while Jurassic World producers Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall are once again going to be onboard as the money-men behind the film.

Details about the story are being kept under wraps, but the project is said to be based on an early script draft for a project that Trevorrow and Connolly developed some time back, then called The Ambassador. A low-budget sci-fi thriller, Ambassador reportedly followed a U.N. worker, whose job is to represent mankind in the event of alien contact - something that proves to be problematic, when he falls in love with a mysterious woman who then turns out to be an extraterrestrial.

Director Colin Trevorrow working on Jurassic World
Colin Trevorrow working on 'Jurassic World'

It's easy to see why DreamWorks and Spielberg would be interested in Intelligent Life. The premise harkens back to Spielberg's genre movies from earlier in his directing career (blending fantastical spectacle with sentiment) and his longtime interest, as a storyteller, in seeing what happens when ordinary characters come into contact with extraordinary beings. That being said, this movie seems like it could be a bit darker than Spielberg's 20th century fare - maybe close to the director's work in the 2000s (see: A.I., Minority Report, etc.).

Sources close to the project say Intelligent Life will be more like Safety Not Guaranteed in tone. In fact, it was originally supposed to be a follow-up to Trevorrow's first movie, before he decided to make a visit to Jurassic World's Isla Nublar. No doubt, though, the final result will be different now than it might've been, had Trevorrow not worked on a Jurassic Park movie first.

What do you think, Screen Rant readers? Would you be interested in seeing the Jurassic World team together again for Intelligent Life? Let us know in the comments.

Source: THR

'Jurassic World' Fan Art by WEVART @ DeviantArt