How the screenwriter behind ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘Mission: Impossible,’ and now ‘Disclosure Day’ helped build some of the biggest movies of all time. “He is an explorer as a writer,” Steven Spielberg says. “He doesn’t consider anything to be final draft.”How the screenwriter behind ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘Mission: Impossible,’ and now ‘Disclosure Day’ helped build some of the biggest movies of all time. “He is an explorer as a writer,” Steven Spielberg says. “He doesn’t consider anything to be final draft.”
Like millions of American kids, David Koepp fell in love with Steven Spielberg before falling in love with anyone else. In the summer of 1975, when he was 12, he defied his mom and dad by riding his bike to the Lake Theatre in his hometown of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, to see Jaws.
“My parents felt like it was going to be too scary,” Koepp says. “We lived on a lake, and they were afraid I’d never want to swim in the lake again.” They were right: “I did not want to swim in the lake after that.” He knew that sharks didn’t live in fresh water, but big fish did. You know, “bad stuff, probably looking up at me in a POV shot at my little swimming legs.”
Koepp was terrified. And also hooked on Spielberg movies “Between 13 and 22, I saw Close Encounters, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark,” he says, “and really formed a lot of my aesthetic and preferences and things I wanted to do.”
While Koepp knew that he eventually wanted to make his own films, he had no clue that he’d become one of his hero’s most trusted creative partners. Starting with Jurassic Park, Koepp has had a hand in writing five Spielberg movies. Their latest collaboration, Disclosure Day, hits theaters on Friday.
By now, Koepp has scrubbed out almost all of his inner fanboy. But that process wasn’t easy.
“It takes a while to get over the ‘Holy shit, I can’t believe I’m in the room with this guy’ feelings,” Koepp says. “But you have to, and he encourages you to get over them in subtle ways without saying, ‘Hey, don’t act like a fan, please. I need a collaborator.’”
Koepp only got to that point after realizing that Spielberg loves ideas, whether they’re good, bad, or impossible. Back in the early ’90s, before advanced CGI made it much easier to make movies about dinosaurs coming back to life, Koepp asked if there were any limitations on the Jurassic Park script. Spielberg’s reply? “Only your imagination.”
“People work with him over and over because he creates an environment where you do feel safe saying the dumbest thing that comes into your head,” the screenwriter says. “Because most ideas are dumb. But out of them might come something good.”
Koepp’s willingness to perpetually, well, try shit in the service of someone else’s vision and voice hasn’t just endeared him to Spielberg. A-list directors like Brian De Palma, David Fincher, and Ron Howard have entrusted him with their blockbusters. Koepp’s movies have grossed more than $7 billion globally.
With Koepp’s box office track record, he’s still a go-to guy for Hollywood studios looking to punch up their biggest franchises. But at 63, while trying to stay relevant in a battered industry that’s long since stopped prioritizing originality, he hasn’t given up on trying new stuff. His last two movies before Disclosure Day were Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh film in the series, and Cold Storage, a gory sci-fi comedy based on his own novel.
“The real danger to it is that you will stop doing other kinds of things that you care about,” Koepp says. “Steven Soderbergh’s been a friend of mine forever, and he said at various times, ‘You have to keep exercising your muscles to the point of failure, and you have to throw them off the scent and keep doing different kinds of things.’ And I already had been, but I keep those words in mind all the time.”
Koepp’s desire to keep on tinkering is what keeps him motivated—and probably employed.
Just ask Spielberg.
“David is always looking to make what he writes better,” the director says. “He is an explorer as a writer. He doesn’t consider anything to be final draft. Everything to David is a work in progress.”
Koepp and Spielberg have spent countless hours brainstorming together. “My favorite thing to do with him is kick around ideas,” the screenwriter says. “And I think it’s still the part he likes best.”
Sometimes those ideas come almost fully formed. Take, for example, Koepp says, Disclosure Day. “It happened almost nauseatingly easily for me in that an email showed up in my inbox one morning, and he said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this idea I’ve been noodling with. Will you take a look at it?’”
What Spielberg sent was a 40-or-so-page document sketching out a sci-fi picture about a group of whistleblowers who attempt to tell the world about a conspiracy hiding a century’s worth of alien encounters. “It had a beginning, middle, and end, and it had all the characters,” Koepp says. “And the end was very much like what you see in the movie now. And by “end,” I mean the whole third act.”
At that point, Koepp just assumed that Spielberg would write the movie himself. “Because he’d written so much already and he’s a terrific writer,” Koepp says. “I said, ‘Great.’ I mean, the third act’s fantastic, which means the movie will work, because no movie ever have we watched and said, ‘Great ending. Terrible movie, though.’”
So, Koepp sent Spielberg a few basic notes. “As you would to any writer/friend who gives you something to read,” Koepp says. After working on the story for about a month, Spielberg sent it back to Koepp with a question: “Why don’t you write it?”
“And I said, ‘I thought you’d never ask,’” Koepp remembers.
What Spielberg said about Koepp is true: Everything really is a work in progress. It took the writer about two years to finish the Disclosure Day script, which he was still tweaking while the movie was being shot. He made headlines last month after telling Vanity Fair that he wrote a whopping 42 drafts of the screenplay.
Exploring the Koepp Canon
Exploring the Koepp Canon
Hey, when it comes to movies about extraterrestrial life, Spielberg has high standards. While working on Disclosure Day, Koepp said, the director was “more exacting than I’ve ever seen him.”
The thing is, Koepp tells me, being asked to do that many rewrites was actually reassuring. “That, by the way, is how you know that Steven likes something,” he says. “If he starts giving you a lot of notes, that means he’s engaged, and he’s now creatively telling you stuff. If he says, ‘I read your draft; let’s see what the studio thinks,’ then you know, ‘Oh, fuck.’ Because I have not engaged. It didn’t grab him.”
Not long ago, Spielberg sent Koepp a text about a script that said, “I read your draft. Please give me a call when you have a chance.”
“I called him, and he said, ‘Well …,’” Koepp recalls, “And I said, ‘You don’t even have to start. Your text was basically, ‘I’ve seen your report card. Please call me and your mother.’”
Learning how to address Spielberg’s notes, which occasionally require on-the-fly subtextual analysis, has been an ongoing process. “I’m better at seeing, sometimes, the note behind the note,” Koepp says. “He’s expressing some lack of comfort with some section of the script, and then I’ll realize, ‘Oh, I think what he’s really saying is …’ and then I’ll pitch that back and he’ll say, ‘Yes, that. That’s what I mean.’”
But even now, after working with the director for four decades, Koepp isn’t immune from performance anxiety. He wants to deliver for Spielberg, especially on a passion project like Disclosure Day.
“Initially, my biggest thought was, ‘OK, this guy who you’ve known for a very long time, who’s a legendary filmmaker, has said, ‘I’ve had this idea for decades. Will you please handle it well?’” Koepp says. “And your primary thought is, ‘Gee, I’d love to not screw this up.’ I mean, this is his dream.”
As usual, though, Koepp got over his fears. “I was like, ‘OK,’” he says. “‘Now just loosen up and write.’”
As a young screenwriter, Koepp learned that the way to Spielberg’s heart wasn’t necessarily through the kinds of movies the director would make himself.
In the late ’80s, Koepp wrote a psychological thriller that caught the eye of Casey Silver, who at the time happened to be head of production at Universal Pictures.
Silver asked Koepp if he could buy the script and turn it into a comedy. “I said, ‘No, because I like it as a thriller. But I’d write you another movie as a comedy,’” Koepp remembers. Impressed that Koepp stuck to his guns, Silver hired him to an overall deal at Universal. The thriller that Koepp protected became 1990’s Bad Influence. The comedy Koepp offered up to Silver, which he cowrote with Martin Donovan, was a surreal satire about two rival Hollywood actresses who find the fountain of youth.
Robert Zemeckis, fresh off directing the Back to the Future trilogy for Universal and Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, read the script, loved it, and agreed to turn it into his next movie. Around that time, Spielberg also got his hands on the screenplay.
“I remember reading a script that Bob Zemeckis was about to make a movie from that was called Death Becomes Her and then calling Bob and saying, ‘Who are these writers?’” Spielberg says. “I was so impressed.”
Death Becomes Her, starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, and Bruce Willis, came out on July 31, 1992, and grossed $149 million at the box office worldwide. It also won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
Meanwhile, Spielberg was busy developing by far his most visually ambitious project yet: an adaptation of the bestselling Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Park. The author had written a draft of the script, but it needed work. “I was still exploring all the different options of where to take the movie based on Michael’s book, and I wanted to bring in a screenwriter and had just read Death Becomes Her, and I went right to David,” Spielberg says. “He was my first go-to person.”
Koepp also says Silver deserves an assist on that connection. “Casey said, ‘Why don’t you try the kid?’ And I imagine part of the conversation was, ‘He’s under contract, and he’s cheap.’”
Koepp whipped through the novel in two days and had ideas, which he shared with Spielberg. “I said, ‘Well, the book really starts like this international conspiracy, and it’s a great engine to run on,’” Koepp says. “‘I mean, you know what’s going on. There’s going to be dinosaurs. It’s on the cover, but the longer you can wait to get to them, the better. Because there’s a whole lot of thriller stuff going on first.”
Spielberg agreed that it was a good way to build tension. “Steven learned early in his career, ‘Hey, sometimes the less you showed, the better,’” says Koepp.
The writer’s other “big idea,” he adds, was to strip out most of the complex scientific theories running through the book. That meant cutting Ian Malcolm, a chaos theorist who seemed to be addicted to monologuing. “I can’t deal with that guy,” Koepp remembers thinking. “He talks for four pages at a time. He’s got to go.”
Spielberg went along with it—at first. “I got about a third of the way through my draft, and he called and said, ‘Hey, Jeff Goldblum just came in and read a bunch of pages from the book. You can’t cut that guy. Please, you’ve got to put him back,’” Koepp says. “So I said, ‘OK, fine.’”
Still, Koepp and Spielberg needed a believably fantastical and concise way to explain to the audience how the hell the scientists could bring dinosaurs back from extinction. This led to an idea for an educational film within a film.
“I said, ‘Oh, it’s like that movie you watch in health class, Hemo the Magnificent,’” Koepp says. “And he said, ‘Yes, exactly.’” The hour-long program—written and directed, incredibly, by Frank Capra—originally aired on CBS in 1957. It explains how blood flows through the human body. The animated title character looks like a Greek god.
Koepp and Spielberg’s version of Hemo was an anthropomorphic DNA strand. “Well, but what are we supposed to call him? Mr. DNA?” Koepp recalls saying to Spielberg. “And he said, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what we’ll call him.’” The discussion led to one of the most memorable sequences in Jurassic Park. (I can still hear voice actor Greg Burson’s Foghorn Leghorn–esque pronunciation of “dinosaurs” in my head.)
Of course, not all of their script tinkering had to be that clever. Koepp remembers talking to Spielberg about the scene where Malcolm feels the Tyrannosaurus rex’s footsteps. “He sees the puddle with the water rippling again, and the others come running up to the Jeep, and he’s like, ‘Come on, come on, come on, get in the Jeep.’ And they get in the Jeep and drive away. And that was the scene.”
After Koepp left Spielberg’s office, the director came to the door and yelled down the hall.
“Have the T. rex chase him for a while!”
When Jurassic Park opened on June 11, 1993, Koepp had just turned 30. Writing what became, for a while, the highest-grossing movie of all time had its perks. In addition to the money—the Los Angeles Times reported that Koepp was making $1 million per script even before the mega-blockbuster was released—studios wanted to make his films.
“I did not have a lot to complain about in that era,” Koepp says. “It was probably hard for my friends to continue to like me during that period. It would be hard for me.”
In 1994, he lived out every writer’s secret fantasy: being profiled in The New Yorker. The article focused on the refreshing fact that Koepp hadn’t become jaded by his extraordinary success. “He is thirty years old but looks about the age of a fresh-man roommate, say,” David Owen wrote, “and he has a Green Bay Packers wastebasket.”
Koepp didn’t see himself as a wunderkind. To him, writing a good script was more about repetition than talent. “Nobody writes first drafts from God, except Mozart,” he told the magazine. “It just takes so, so long. The mark of a good screenwriter, I came to learn, is how often you are willing to return to it.”
Koepp’s dogged approach continued to pay off throughout the ’90s. He made Carlito’s Way and Mission: with De Palma and The Paper with Howard. Then he teamed up again with Spielberg for The Lost World: Jurassic Park, their last collaboration for nearly a decade. “Some of the best partnerships, we go our own way quite a bit,” Koepp says. “It’s nice.”
By the mid-’90s, Koepp had the itch to direct his own movies. His first, a 1996 thriller featuring Elisabeth Shue and Kyle MacLachlan called The Trigger Effect, barely made a ripple at the box office. His second, the spooky film Stir of Echoes starring Kevin Bacon, was only a minor hit in 1999, the year two other supernatural horror films, The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project, became pop culture phenomena.
But there always seemed to be another blockbuster around the corner. Being the guy who wrote Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible, Koepp says, “made it easier to pitch yourself for other things.” Like Spider-Man. For a meeting with Columbia Pictures in the late ’90s, he pulled panels from the comics and put them on big poster boards. One of the images he chose might sound familiar: the superhero hanging upside down while kissing Mary Jane Watson. “I got to then immodestly say, ‘And I think you should hire me to start your franchise because I’ve started a few others.’”
Koepp got the job. And not long after that, he started developing an idea of his own. He recalls reading a newspaper article about the fear of home invasions leading to a rise in the construction of safe rooms. Then he moved to a townhouse in New York City and began a long, costly renovation. At least one good thing came out of his misery. A spot like his, he says, “struck me as a great vertical setting for a thriller.”
He wrote a script, but somewhere along the way, he realized he needed to change the title. “I thought, ‘Safe Room just doesn’t sound very thrilling.’ I mean, they’re safe for God’s sake. So I picked ‘panic.’”
Panic Room found its way to Fincher, who signed on to direct. He and Koepp hit it off right away. “One of the things I liked best about him is he is almost fanatically protective of his writer,” says Koepp, who’d heard great things about the director from his screenwriter friend Andrew Kevin Walker, the man behind Seven. “We would be in a story meeting with the studio, and somebody would have a note, and he would shout them down in a really ferocious way, and I’d say, ‘OK, great.’ And then we’d leave, and he’d say, ‘You should really think about that, though.’ I was like, ‘Wait, you agree?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I agree. I just didn’t want him talking to you directly.’”
Fincher’s Panic Room, which grossed $196.4 million worldwide, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, which amassed $810.9 million, were both released in 2002. It was the second time in less than a decade that Koepp had a billion-dollar year at the box office.
You can’t be the box office king every year. But there might not be a screenwriter on earth better at avoiding extended slumps than Koepp. Since 1990, he hasn’t had more than a three-year gap between movies.
In the aughts, Koepp and Spielberg reunited to make blockbusters War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Koepp also cowrote the hit Da Vinci Code sequel Angels & Demons.
Naturally, there were some misses, too. Mortdecai, the 2015 action comedy starring Johnny Depp and Gwyneth Paltrow that Koepp directed, bombed. He also cowrote The Mummy, Universal’s failed 2017 attempt at starting a franchise based on its classic movie monsters.
Hollywood can be humbling. “I was very young, and I’d had a lot of really nice things happen to me quickly,” Koepp says. “Well, I don’t know if you’ll be glad—I don’t know how much of a sadist you are—but angst caught up with me. Life caught up with me.”
Koepp doesn’t want you to cry for him, though. Through it all, he’s kept working. Over the past five years, he’s written three wildly different movies for his old friend (and new collaborator) Steven Soderbergh: Kimi, Black Bag, and Presence. None was the kind of blockbuster he was known for, but all three earned critical praise. Plus, he had fun getting into his buddy’s head for a while.
“When you know you’re writing for that director, you can’t help but think in their voice,” Koepp says. “You’re not, like, trying to placate him or kiss ass, but you can’t help imagine the way they’d shoot it and who they might cast and what the general tone might be. And you do think Soderbergh’s different. He likes to be a little bit more almost oblique with the audience and let them figure it out.”
Koepp has always enjoyed writing for other filmmakers. But that doesn’t mean he’s lost his own voice. There are too many memorable movie moments that he’s come up with to list here, but he has some favorites. One is a scene in Panic Room where Jodie Foster’s captive character lies to the police about what’s happening to protect her daughter.
“I love scenes in doorways,” Koepp says. “A terrible thing could happen, or a great thing could happen. Who knows?”
It’s hard for Koepp to pick the single line he’s most proud of, but when I ask, one does come to mind. “Although it’s hardly Algonquin Round Table–level writing,” he says, “people do quote ‘Hold on to your butts’ a lot.”
Now that he’s in his fifth decade in show business, Koepp’s basic philosophy hasn’t changed. He wants to keep on tinkering. “I love many different kinds of movies,” he says. “I would like to try and see if I can write those.” Right now he’s desperate to direct a family drama he wrote “that doesn’t have any hooks or gizmos.”
“It’s based on the relationships between these characters, and can we be moved and uplifted by that story?” Koepp says. “So that’s the one right in front of me that I really want to get done.”
Not that he minds, but Koepp’s days of hooks and gizmos aren’t over yet. He does, after all, still work with Steven Spielberg. To this day, Koepp savors their back-and-forths. “Screenwriters, we get a lot of notes,” he says. “Directors, producers, actors, studio; everybody’s got notes. And most notes, my initial response is rage, and then that lasts 36 hours, and then I have the desire to go to bed. And then eventually you get over it. Steven’s notes, even when he’s told me, ‘I think you have major problems, and you kind of need to start over’—he doesn’t say it like that, but that’s clearly the message—I don’t get depressed. He does it in such a way that it’s actually encouraging and I want to get to work.”
And that’s where Koepp is at his best: in front of a keyboard. Writing, legendary screenwriter William Goldman once put it, is about one thing: “going into a room alone and doing it.” And then you do it again, and again, and again. Everything is a work in progress.
“The expression of me gets to come out on the first several drafts. No matter whether I’ve been hired to do this or it’s an original, that’s it,” Koepp says. “But then because of the nature of my field, I’m going to need tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from someone, and I’m going to need some very powerful people who have many choices to get involved—movie star, director, et cetera. So after about the third draft, I do have a moment where I say a little goodbye. It’s been great. I’ve loved my time alone with you, and now you’re going to go off in the world and have a whole bunch of other friends.”
Alan Siegel
Alan covers a mix of movies, music, TV, and general nostalgia. He lives in Los Angeles and is the author of ‘Stupid TV, Be More Funny:
How the Golden Era of “The Simpsons” Changed Television—and America—Forever.’
