NEW YORK (AP) —
EXT JUNGLE NIGHT
An eyeball, big, yellowish, distinctly inhuman, stares raptly between wooden slats, part of a large crate. The eye darts from side to side quickly, alert as hell.
So begins David Koepp’s script to 1993’s “Jurassic Park.” Like much of Koepp’s writing, it’s crisply terse and intensely visual. It doesn’t tell the director (in this case Steven Spielberg ) where to put the camera, but it nearly does.
“I asked Steven before we started: What are the limitations about what I can write?” Koepp recalls. “CGI hadn’t really been invented yet. He said: ‘Only your imagination.’”
Yet in the 32 years since penning the adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel, Koepp has established himself as one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters not through the boundlessness of his imagination but by his expertise in limiting it. Koepp is the master of the “bottle” movie — films hemmed in by a single location or condensed timed frame. From David Fincher’s “Panic Room” (2002) to Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence” (2025), he excels at corralling stories into uncluttered, headlong movie narratives. Koepp can write anything — as 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 too big. If I can put the camera anywhere I want, if anybody on the entire planet can appear in this film, if it can last 130 years, how do I even begin? It makes me want to take a nap.
“So I’ve always looked for bottles in which to put the delicious wine.”
Reining in ‘Jurassic World’
By some measure, the world of “Jurassic World” got too big. In the last entry, 2022’s not particularly well received “Jurassic World: Dominion,” the dinosaurs had spread across 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” movie since the second one, 1997’s “The Lost World.” Back then, Brian De Palma, whom Koepp worked with on “Carlito’s Way” and “Mission: Impossible,” took to calling him “dinosaur boy.” Koepp soon after moved onto other challenges. But when Spielberg called him up a few years ago and asked, “Do you have one more in you?” Koepp had one request: “Can we start over?”
Bechir Sylvain, Jonathan Bailey, and Scarlett Johansson in a scene from ” Jurassic World Rebirth.” (Jasin Boland/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment via AP)
“Jurassic World Rebirth,” which opens in theaters July 2, is a fresh start for one of Hollywood’s biggest multi-billion-dollar franchises. It’s a new cast of characters (Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey co-star), a new director (Gareth Edwards) and a new storyline. But just as they were 32 years ago, the dinosaurs are again Koepp’s to play with.
“The first page reassured me,” says Edwards. “It said: ‘Written by David Koepp.’”
For many moviegoers, that opening credit has been a signal that what follows is likely to be smartly scripted, brightly paced and neatly situated. His script to Ron Howard’s 1994 news drama “The Paper” took place over 24 hours. “Secret Window” (2004) was set in an upstate New York cabin. Even bigger scale films like “War of the Worlds” favor the fate of one family over global 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 two Stevens
Koepp’s bottles can fit either summer spectacles or low-budget indies. “Jurassic World Rebirth” is the third film penned by Koepp just this year, following a nifty pair of thrillers with Steven Soderbergh in “Presence” and “Black Bag.”
“Presence,” like “Panic Room,” stays within a family home, and it’s seen entirely from the perspective of a ghost. “Black Bag” deliciously combines marital drama with spy movie, organized around a dinner party and a polygraph test. Those films completed a zippy trilogy with Soderbergh, beginning with 2022’s blistering pandemic-set “Kimi.”
Much of Koepp’s career, particularly recently, run through the two Stevens: Soderbergh and Spielberg.
“What they have in common is they both would have absolutely killed it in the 1940s,” Koepp says. “In the studio system in the 1940s, if Jack Warner said ‘I’m putting you on the Wally Beery wrestling picture.’ Either one of them would have said, ‘Great, here’s what I’m going to do.’ They both share that sensibility of: How do we get this done?”
Spielberg and Koepp recently wrapped production on Spielberg’s untitled new science fiction film, said to be especially meaningful to Spielberg. He gave a 50-page treatment to Koepp to turn into a script.
“It’s even more focused than I’ve ever seen him on a movie,” 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 wanted to reorder the franchise. 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.), Koepp put down nine governing principles for the “Jurassic” franchise. They included things like “humor is oxygen” and that the dinosaurs are animals, not monsters.
A key to “Rebirth” was geographically herding the dinosaurs. In the new movie, they’ve clustered around the equator, drawn to the tropical environment. Like “Jurassic Park,” the action takes place primarily on an island.
Going into the project, 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.
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 having your own ChatGPT but actually really good at writing.”
‘Everyone’s got a note’
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 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!’”
