‘Jurassic Park’ Screenwriter David Koepp Says Steven Spielberg Wanted ‘Disclosure Day’ to Be His Best Script Yet
At first, Koepp assumed the director was simply after some suggestions, author to author. Eventually, although, Spielberg requested him, “Do you want to do it?”
The outcome, Disclosure Day, is Koepp’s seventh script for which Spielberg served as both director or producer. It’s a collaboration that stretches again to jurassic park—Koepp’s genetic reengineering of the Michael Crichton novel that shot his screenwriting profession into the stratosphere—and contains two Indiana Jones motion pictures in addition to War of the Worlds.
“He’s a good collaborator because he listens as much to me as I do to him,” Spielberg mentioned in an e-mail. Koepp is keen, Spielberg mentioned, to rework a script “including and often through principal photography.”
Indeed, Koepp wrote 42 drafts for Disclosure Day—a private document. “[Spielberg] “He wants this one to be the best one.”
Koepp was referring, of course, to Spielberg’s multi-film concern with visitors from outer space. But where Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a modern spiritual myth, E.T. a coming-of-age tale, and War of the Worlds a post-9/11 horror movie, Koepp describes Disclosure Day as a ’70s-style paranoid thriller, a “further exploration” of the themes of, if not a religious sequel to, Close Encounters. Asked whether or not he’s a believer, Koepp slips right into a contemplation of the bounds of human notion. “I think they’re out there. I think maybe we’re looking for the wrong things.”
“Our five senses are limited,” he continues. “Visually, we can see between 4,000 angstroms and 8,000 angstroms”—a scientific measurement for wavelengths of sunshine. “That’s pretty narrow. Dogs hear better than we do. That doesn’t mean that other stuff’s not there. Microwaves are bouncing around. We don’t see them. We invented devices to see more and hear more, maybe a hundred years old, and that’s still all we got.”
“Who’s to say they take a form that we understand? Who’s to say they’re not here now, but in forms that we can’t perceive either with our crude senses or technology?”
In Koepp’s workplace, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, foundational UFO quantity The Flying Saucers Are Real sits on the shelf between Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces and a few books on interrogation methods. There are index playing cards arrayed on most horizontal surfaces and a few vertical ones—some for his subsequent novel, some for his subsequent film undertaking for Universal. Serving espresso to a customer, he makes use of a stack of them in lieu of a coaster. There are movie posters for the unique king kong and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, however notably, aside from a mannequin of a brontosaurus and a fedora, there’s just about nothing in the best way of private film memorabilia. Koepp says it is a type of self-preservation. “Otherwise you start thinking, Gee that was a while ago. What have I done lately?”