Written by Jake Coyle
NEW YORK (AP)
JUNGLE NIGHT EXT
A enormous yellowish eyeball, part of a massive box, stares raptly between wooden slats. It is clearly otherworldly. The eye moves swiftly from side to side, alert as hell.
David Koepp’s script for the 1993 film Jurassic Park starts here. It is sharply concise and strikingly graphic, much like a lot of Koepp’s work. It almost tells the director—Steven Spielberg in this case—where to position the camera.
Before we began, I asked Steven, “What are the limitations regarding what I can write?” Koepp remembers. In actuality, CGI had not yet been created. “Only your imagination,” he said.
However, in the thirty-two years since he wrote the adaptation of Michael Crichton’s book, Koepp has become one of Hollywood’s most renowned screenwriters—not because of his limitless imagination, but rather because of his skill at keeping it in check. Koepp is a master of bottle movies, which are movies with a single location or a short time frame. From Steven Soderbergh’s Presence (2025) to David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002), he is a master at distilling tales into coherent, rushing film narratives. As long as there are guidelines, Koepp is free to write anything.
When I was discussing that idea with the renowned history and film researcher David Bordwell, he responded, “Because the world is too big?” “That’s it, exactly,” I replied, echoing Koepp. The globe is too vast. How do I even start if I can position the camera anywhere I choose, if anybody in the planet can be featured in my movie, and if it has a 130-year runtime? I want to nap because of it.
I’ve therefore always searched for bottles to hold the delectable wine.
The Jurassic World universe grew too large in certain ways. According to the previous entry, 2022 is not very warmly welcomed.Dinosaurs had taken over the earth in Jurassic World: Dominion. Koepp says, “I don’t know where else to go with that.”
Koepp, a 62-year-old Pewaukee, Wisconsin native, had not written a Jurassic film since The Lost World, which came out in 1997. Koepp’s co-star on Carlito’s Way and Mission: Impossible, Brian De Palma, used to call him “dinosaur boy.” Shortly after, Koepp went on to other tasks. However, Spielberg questioned him, “Do you have one more in you?” when he phoned him a few years ago. Koepp asked if we could start anew.
With its July 2 theatrical release, Jurassic World Rebirth marks a new chapter in one of Hollywood’s most successful multibillion-dollar franchises. There is a new director (Gareth Edwards), a new plot, and a new ensemble of characters (Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey co-star). But the dinosaurs are once more Koepp’s to play with, just as they were thirty-two years ago.
“I felt reassured by the first page,” Edwards says. Written by David Koepp, it stated.
Many audiences have taken that opening credit as a clue that the rest of the film will probably be well-written, lively, and well-located. The events in his script for Ron Howard’s 1994 journalistic drama The Paper happened over the course of a day. The setting of Secret Window (2004) was a cabin in upstate New York. The destiny of one family is prioritized over the fate of the entire world in even larger-scale movies like War of the Worlds.
I get delighted when I hear those concepts. “All right, I’m confined now,” Koepp says. The Hayes Code is an example of a structural or aesthetic restriction. It made for some quite engaging storytelling since they had to think of a lot of other intriguing ways to suggest those folks had sex.
Koepp’s bottles are suitable for both low-cost indies and summer spectacles. After a clever pair of thrillers with Steven Soderbergh in Presence and Black Bag, Koepp’s third picture this year is Jurassic World Rebirth.
Similar to Panic Room, Presence takes place in a family house and is viewed solely from a ghost’s point of view. Black Bag, which revolves around a dinner party and a polygraph exam, deftly blends spy film and marital drama. With Soderbergh, those movies finished a fast-paced trilogy that started with the scorching pandemic-set Kimi in 2022.
Koepp’s career, especially in the last few years, has been dominated by the two Stevens: Spielberg and Soderbergh.
According to Koepp, they are similar in that they would have both been fantastic in the 1940s. Jack Warner would have said, “I’m putting you on the Wally Beery wrestling picture,” under the 1940s studio system. Great, here’s what I’m going to do, would have been the response from either of them. They both have the same sensibility: How can we accomplish this?
Production on Spielberg’s untitled new science fiction movie, which is reportedly particularly significant to Spielberg, was just completed by Koepp and Spielberg. He provided Koepp with a 50-page treatment to write into a screenplay.
According to Koepp, it’s even more focused than I’ve ever seen him in a film. We would occasionally be in separate time zones, and for over a year, I would wake up to find 35 texts. He’s a person who locks in, and he’s as focused on that film as I’ve ever seen him.
Koepp intended to rearrange the franchise with Jurassic World Rebirth. Inspired by Chuck Jones commandments for the Road Runner cartoons (the Road Runner only says meep meep ; all products are from the ACME Corporation, etc.), Koeppput down nine governing principlesfor the Jurassic franchise. They mentioned that the dinosaurs are animals, not monsters, and that humor is oxygen.
Herding the dinosaurs regionally was a crucial aspect of Rebirth. Attracted to the tropical climate, they have gathered near the equator in the new film. The majority of the action occurs on an island, just like in Jurassic Park.
Edwards was forewarned about his screenwriter’s beliefs before beginning the job.
Upon concluding our meeting, Spielberg simply grinned and said, “That’s fantastic.” If you think we were difficult, wait until you meet David Koepp, says Edwards, laughing.
But Edwards and Koepp quickly bonded over similar tastes in movies, like the original King Kong, a poster of which hangs in Koepp s office. On set, Edwards would sometimes find the need for 30 seconds of new 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 to having your own ChatGPT, but with exceptional writing skills.
In the summer, especially, it s common to see a long list of names under the screenplay. Blockbuster-making is, increasingly, done by committee. The stakes are too high, the thinking goes, to leave it to one writer. But Jurassic World Rebirth bears just Koepp s credit.
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 only time that worked, in Koepp s experience, was Sam Raimi s 2002 Spider-Man. I was also hired and fired three times on that movie, he says, so maybe they knew what they were doing.
Koepp, though, prefers to after research and outlining let a movie topple out of his mind as rapidly as possible. I like to gun it out and clean up the mess later, he says.
But the string of Presence, Black Bag and Jurassic World Rebirth may have tested even Koepp s prodigious output. The intense period of writing, which fell before, during ( Black Bag was written on spec during the strike, not for hire, without being shopped) and after the writers strike, he says, meant five months without a day off. I might have broke something, he says, shaking his head.
Still, the three films also show a veteran screenwriter working in high gear, judiciously meting out details and keeping dinosaurs, ghosts and spies hurtling forward. Anything like a perfect script for Koepp, that s Rosemary s Baby or Jaws remains elusive. But even when you come close, there are always critics.
After the first Jurassic movie, a fifth-grade class all wrote letters to me, which was very nice, Koepp recalls. 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!
