NEW YORK (AP) —
EXT JUNGLE NIGHT
An eyeball, large, yellowish, distinctly inhuman, stares raptly between wood slats, half of a big crate. The attention darts backward and forward rapidly, alert as hell.
So begins David Koepp’s script to 1993’s “Jurassic Park.” Like a lot of Koepp’s writing, it’s crisply terse and intensely visible. It doesn’t inform the director (on this case Steven Spielberg ) the place to place the digital camera, nevertheless it almost does.
“I asked Steven before we started: What are the limitations about what I can write?” Koepp remembers. “CGI hadn’t really been invented yet. He said: ‘Only your imagination.’”
But within the 32 years since penning the difference of Michael Crichton’s novel, Koepp has established himself as one in every of Hollywood’s high screenwriters not by way of the boundlessness of his creativeness however by his experience in limiting it. Koepp is the grasp of the “bottle” film — movies hemmed in by a single location or condensed timed body. From David Fincher’s “Panic Room” (2002) to Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence” (2025), he excels at corralling tales into uncluttered, headlong film narratives. Koepp can write something — so long as there are parameters.
“The great film scholar and historian David Bordwell and I were talking about that concept once and he said, ‘Because the world is too big?’ I said, ‘That’s it, exactly,’” Koepp says. “The world is just too large. If I can put the digital camera anyplace I would like, if anyone on the complete planet can seem on this movie, if it may possibly final 130 years, how do I even start? It makes me need to take a nap.
“So I’ve at all times regarded for bottles by which to place the scrumptious wine.”
Reining in ‘Jurassic World’
By some measure, the world of “Jurassic World” acquired too large. Within the final entry, 2022’s not notably properly acquired “Jurassic World: Dominion,” the dinosaurs had unfold throughout the planet. “I don’t know where else to go with that,” Koepp says.
Koepp, a 62-year-old native of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, hadn’t written a “Jurassic” film since the second, 1997’s “The Lost World.” Again then, Brian De Palma, whom Koepp labored with on “Carlito’s Way” and “Mission: Impossible,” took to calling him “dinosaur boy.” Koepp quickly after moved onto different challenges. However when Spielberg referred to as him up a number of years in the past and requested, “Do you have one more in you?” Koepp had one request: “Can we start over?”
“Jurassic World Rebirth,” which opens in theaters July 2, is a recent begin for one in every of Hollywood’s greatest multi-billion-dollar franchises. It’s a brand new forged of characters (Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey co-star), a brand new director (Gareth Edwards) and a brand new storyline. However simply as they had been 32 years in the past, the dinosaurs are once more Koepp’s to play with.
“The first page reassured me,” says Edwards. “It said: ‘Written by David Koepp.’”
For a lot of moviegoers, that opening credit score has been a sign that what follows is prone to be well scripted, brightly paced and neatly located. His script to Ron Howard’s 1994 information drama “The Paper” happened over 24 hours. “Secret Window” (2004) was set in an upstate New York cabin. Even greater scale movies like “War of the Worlds” favor the destiny of 1 household over world calamity.
“I hear those ideas and I get excited. OK, now I’m constrained,” says Koepp. “A structural or aesthetic constraint is like the Hayes Code. They had to come up with many other interesting ways to imply those people had sex, and that made for some really interesting storytelling.”
The 2 Stevens
Koepp’s bottles can match both summer season spectacles or low-budget indies. “Jurassic World Rebirth” is the third movie penned by Koepp simply this yr, following a nifty pair of thrillers with Steven Soderbergh in “Presence” and “Black Bag.”
“Presence,” like “Panic Room,” stays inside a household residence, and it’s seen fully from the attitude of a ghost. “Black Bag” deliciously combines marital drama with spy film, organized round a cocktail party and a polygraph check. These movies accomplished a zippy trilogy with Soderbergh, starting with 2022’s blistering pandemic-set “Kimi.”
A lot of Koepp’s profession, notably lately, run by way of the 2 Stevens: Soderbergh and Spielberg.
“What they have in common is they both would have absolutely killed it in the 1940s,” Koepp says. “Within the studio system within the Forties, if Jack Warner stated ‘I’m placing you on the Wally Beery wrestling image.’ Both of them would have stated, ‘Great, here’s what I’m going to do.’ They each share that sensibility of: How can we get this carried out?”
Spielberg and Koepp lately wrapped manufacturing on Spielberg’s untitled new science fiction movie, stated to be particularly significant to Spielberg. He gave a 50-page remedy to Koepp to show right into a script.
“It’s much more centered than I’ve ever seen him on a film,” says Koepp. “There would be times — we’d be in different time zones – I’d wake up and there were 35 texts, and this went on for about a year. He’s as locked in on that movie as I’ve ever seen him, and he’s a guy who locks in.”
‘Your own ChatGPT’
For “Jurassic World Rebirth,” Koepp wished to reorder the franchise. Impressed by Chuck Jones’ “commandments” for the Highway Runner cartoons (the Highway Runner solely says “meep meep”; all products are from the ACME Corporation, etc.), Koepp put down nine governing principles for the “Jurassic” franchise. They included issues like “humor is oxygen” and that the dinosaurs are animals, not monsters.
A key to “Rebirth” was geographically herding the dinosaurs. Within the new film, they’ve clustered across the equator, drawn to the tropical surroundings. Like “Jurassic Park,” the motion takes place totally on an island.
Going into the venture, Edwards was warned about his screenwriter’s convictions.
“At the end of my meeting with Spielberg, he just smiled and said, “That’s great. If you think we were difficult, wait until you meet David Koepp,’” says Edwards, laughing.
However Edwards and Koepp rapidly bonded over comparable tastes in films, like the unique “King Kong,” a poster of which hangs in Koepp’s workplace. On set, Edwards would generally discover the necessity for 30 seconds of latest dialogue.
“Within like a minute, I’d get this perfectly written 30 second interaction that was on theme, funny, had a reversal in it — perfect,” says Edwards. “It was like having your own ChatGPT but actually really good at writing.”
‘Everyone’s acquired a be aware’
In the summertime, particularly, it’s frequent to see an extended record of names underneath the screenplay. Blockbuster-making is, more and more, carried out by committee. The stakes are too excessive, the pondering goes, to go away it to at least one author. However “Jurassic World Rebirth” bears simply Koepp’s credit score.
“There’s an old saying: ‘No one of us is as dumb as all of us,’” Koepp says. “When you have eight or 10 people who have significant input into the script, the odds are stacked enormously against you. You’re trying to please a lot of different people, and it often doesn’t go well.”
The one time that labored, in Koepp’s expertise, was Sam Raimi’s 2002 “Spider-Man.” “I was also hired and fired three times on that movie,” he says, “so possibly they knew what they had been doing.”
Koepp, although, prefers to — after analysis and outlining — let a film topple out of his thoughts as quickly as attainable. “I like to gun it out and clean up the mess later,” he says.
However the string of “Presence,” “Black Bag” and “Jurassic World Rebirth” could have examined even Koepp’s prodigious output. The extreme interval of writing, which fell earlier than, throughout and after the writers strike, he says, meant 5 months with out a time without work. “I might have broke something,” he says, shaking his head.
Nonetheless, the three movies additionally present a veteran screenwriter working in excessive gear, judiciously meting out particulars and protecting dinosaurs, ghosts and spies hurtling ahead. Something like an ideal script — for Koepp, that’s “Rosemary’s Baby” or “Jaws” — stays elusive. However even whenever you come shut, there are at all times critics.
“After the first ‘Jurassic’ movie, a fifth-grade class all wrote letters to me, which was very nice,” Koepp remembers. “Then they wrote, ‘PS, when you do the next one, don’t have it take so long to get to the island.’ Everyone’s got a note!’”
