What would Guardians of the Galaxy have been like if James Gunn wasn’t involved? Filmmakers like Peyton Reed (Ant-Man) and Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Captain Marvel) were vying for that directing gig at the time, but there’s another filmmaker who was also in contention that we didn’t know about until now: Colin Trevorrow, the director of Jurassic World.

During a live podcast with Empire, Trevorrow praised what Kevin Feige and the Marvel filmmakers have done over the past decade-plus as “one of the most impressive feats of narrative construction in film history.” One of the hosts then asked Trevorrow if he’d ever met with Marvel to direct any of the studio’s movies. Turns out he has, although it wasn’t publicized at the time:

“I did. I met on Guardians of the Galaxy long, long ago. Yeah, very early. It was a great conversation. I was not a comic book kid. That wasn’t my thing. I was a Star Wars kid, an Indiana Jones kid, a Spielberg kid – that was my thing. So I was a great conversation, but a little bit more of a personal understanding of, you need someone who loved this growing up. [They] should be the ones directing these movies. You’ve gotta live and breathe it in the way that I did Jurassic and these films that I get to be involved in now.”

For me, it’s always easier to imagine a different actor sliding into a particular role than a whole new filmmaker’s take on a movie. (Remember when Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jim Sturgess, and Eddie Redmayne were being considered to play Star-Lord?) Even after seeing Ant-Man and Captain Marvel, I can’t quite wrap my head around what Reed or Boden and Fleck’s versions of Guardians of the Galaxy may have been like, and it’s even more difficult to envision Trevorrow’s Guardians since he hasn’t directed a superhero film (yet).

But it all worked out because by Trevorrow’s own admission, he didn’t live and breathe the material the same way that someone like Gunn did. Gunn’s emotional connection to all of the characters (especially Rocket Raccoon) is such a powerful part of that franchise that it’s tough to imagine it working with anyone else behind the camera.

But at least Trevorrow got to work with the one true Star-Lord, Chris Pratt, in Jurassic World, and the two will be reuniting again in Jurassic World 3, which arrives in theaters in 2021. Meanwhile, James Gunn has The Suicide Squad brewing over at DC before he jumps back over to Marvel and closes out his trilogy with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which doesn’t have an official release date yet.

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