He made his feature directorial debut with the science fiction comedy Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) to critical and commercial success.

He was also the co-writer and director of Star Wars: Duel of the Fates until his departure in 2017, although he retained story credit when the project was re-envisioned as The Rise of Skywalker (2019).

[citation needed] In 2008, he paired up with Derek Connolly, ten years after they had first met as NYU students while working as interns on Saturday Night Live, to write a buddy cop film script called Cocked and Loaded.

[11] In 2012, Trevorrow directed Safety Not Guaranteed,[12] a film inspired by a classified advertisement which ran in a 1997 issue of Backwoods Home Magazine that read: "Somebody to go back in time with me.

[9] The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, where it picked up the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.

[15] After the release of Safety Not Guaranteed, Trevorrow and Connolly were hired by the Walt Disney Company to write an as-yet unmade remake of the film Flight of the Navigator (1986).

[26] In March 2015, it was announced that Trevorrow would be directing the sci-fi thriller film Intelligent Life, which was bought by DreamWorks.

In August 2015, Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn announced that Trevorrow would direct Star Wars: Episode IX (2019).

[29] Trevorrow and Connolly subsequently began writing the script for the film; titled Star Wars: Duel of the Fates.

[40] On February 12, 2024, it was announced by Collider that, alongside Eddie Vaisman and Julia Lebedev, Trevorrow would produce Trash Mountain, a film about a young gay man from Chicago returning to his rural Missouri to deal with his father's hoarder state after the latter's death.