David Koepp was only 29 years old when he first sat down with Steven Spielberg. Despite having a recent hit under his belt, 1992’s dark comedy Death Becomes Her, Koepp was largely an unknown in Hollywood. And Spielberg—who was then in the process of looking for a new screenwriter on a project called Jurassic Park—was not.Yet based purely on the strength of an initial pitch in his office about dinosaurs and the theme park tourists they would eat, Spielberg liked what he saw in the energetic scribe.“I think he takes me seriously, and he took me seriously from a young age,” Koepp says about the seeds of their decades-spanning collaboration. “I was 29, and early on in your career you’re looking for that kind of confidence from somebody, anybody. Please. And he gave it to me. So I think I’ve rewarded it.”cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});By Koepp’s own estimation, he and Spielberg have a lot in common. They enjoy popcorn entertainment, the thrill of spitballing audience-friendly ideas, and have developed a bit of a constructive candor (“He gives me notes in a way that is ultimately encouraging rather than discouraging, even when he’s telling me you need to start over.”) However, the screenwriter allows that he’s a little more cynical than the director. “Steven’s more hopeful. That actually makes for a nice combination.”It’s a combo Spielberg’s maintained on a lot of his most populist movies during the past 30 years. It continued of course in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), the only other dino flick Spielberg helmed, but also War of the Worlds (2005) and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). And now it is perhaps reaching its apotheosis in this week’s highly anticipated Disclosure Day, their first film together not based on a book or within a long-running franchise, In fact, it is an original story concocted by Spielberg—a rare thing that’s only occurred a few times in movies like Poltergeist (1982), A.I. (2001), and… Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).For Koepp, that connection crystallized the day he received an email from his friend, as well as a detailed treatment for what would become Spielberg’s fourth alien movie (or fifth if you count Indy 4).“We bat ideas around a lot,” says Koepp. “That’s one of the things I love about Steven. His favorite part of the process is still making them up. So we throw ideas around, but what was unusual about this email was getting stuff this formed. This is 40-some pages long, and it was largely the movie you see. It had a beginning, middle, and end.”Initially, Koepp assumed Spielberg would write the full screenplay himself, however as he took on more notes from Koepp—suggestions that this section of the story should be sped up, those characters should be combined, etc.—the more it became apparent Spielberg was looking for more than just advice. Eventually, four weeks into correspondence, an email came asking if Koepp would write it. “I thought you’d never ask,” Koepp typed back.While the pure Spielbergian nature of the ending scene in Disclosure Day remains largely untouched from that first treatment—though Koepp hints he came up with the film’s superb final piece of dialogue—much of the rest of the action-packed narrative about a series of events leading to the government disclosing aliens exist, and that they’ve been visiting us for a long time, went through a lengthy metamorphosis. One element that Koepp particularly brought to the fore was the daily anxieties and rigamarole endured by Emily Blunt’s central heroine, Margaret Fairchild, a thirtysomething television journalist anxious about moving on from her lot as a local weatherwoman in Kansas City, Missouri.There’s a lot of quick-witted but detailed worldbuilding early in the movie about the type of person who might be particularly enamored with disclosing the truth, and it’s a career path that Koepp has intimate familiarity with in his family and professional life. Indeed, Koepp’s screenplay for 1994’s underrated newsroom comedy, The Paper, remains a personal favorite for this writer.“Spoken like a journalist,” Koepp chuckles when we mention admiring the film. “My wife was a producer at ABC, so I have some knowledge of that through her and was able to ask her questions about character stuff. So yes, I thought of [The Paper], but I love journalists, and I love journalists not just because I’m married to one and my brother’s one. I love them because they’re very goal-directed. They’re great characters in movies because they want to find out, and so they are driven to find out, which makes for great storytelling.”The search for truth is also apropos in a movie about the fallout that would come from total, even radical transparency. While the plot of Disclosure Day is being kept under careful wraps, it is fair to say that an extralegal government conspiracy, led by a lifelong believer in the system played by Colin Firth, experience a breach within their midst when a former employee (Colman Domingo) orchestrates an Edward Snowden-like operation to extract evidence of not only UAPs, but cover-ups, manipulated alien technology, extraterrestrial autopsies… and even interrogations of little gray men.“You know those stories where they say ‘everything you thought you knew was wrong?’” asks Koepp. “We wanted to tell a story that said, ‘Everything you thought you knew was right.’ I viewed this as a sort of unified theory of everything for UAPs. This is a story that encompasses all the lore we’ve heard, aside from the preposterous ones that are clearly reality challenged, but we wanted to incorporate all the lore into a credible story where it fit together.”David Koepp on the set of DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven SpielbergThe process of making it, has even led some folks to muse that the characters resemble its makers, specifically critics who’ve noted the similarity between Spielberg and Domingo’s older, commanding yet empathetic leader who believes in total disclosure. Koepp says any overlap was unintentional, but he can’t help but see a bit of Steven in Domingo’s performance—as well as an unlikely avatar for himself.“It’s funny, I was watching a cut of the finished movie a few weeks ago, and I was watching the scene between Colman and Colin Firth where they debate the central issues of the movie, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, most of what Colman says is Steve’s viewpoint, and most of what Colin says is my viewpoint.” That give-and-take has long existed between the longtime collaborators, although it was different on this one given Spielberg’s own personal stake.“It’s something he had carried around in his head for decades,” Koepp notes. “So in the beginning, I felt a particular obligation to not fuck it up. But then over drafts, it became my story too. At first, you’re always trying to be deferential to where the idea comes from. With Jurassic Park, I’m trying to respect the book as much as possible; War of the Worlds, same thing; Indiana Jones? Talk about deferential. That was a hard one. But in this, I’m helping this guy tell his story, even as it grew into my story too.”It’s a tale about aliens, about secrets, and about a kind of spiritual coda to dreams Spielberg first shared with the world nearly 50 years ago in Close Encounters—although as Koepp is quick to point out not literally so (don’t expect a Richard Dreyfuss cameo). But it’s also about embracing, and more keenly empathizing with the unknown instead of fearing it. That’s a far cry from Spielberg and Koepp’s War of the Worlds film 21 years ago. The mission state also is in deliberate conflict with our current cultural moment.“It feels so terribly precarious right now,” Koepp says, “and divisions are so sharp. Wouldn’t thinking about things from the other person’s point of view help? I think also having empathy for the extraterrestrials is important in this movie… they’re vulnerable creatures like us.”Disclosure Day is in dialogue with Spielberg’s older films, but Koepp’s as well, especially whenever he’s collaborated on or off-screen in the last 30 years with the man in the beard. Hence before the conversation ended, we felt obliged to raise a query we’ve long wondered: Whose idea was it for Koepp to play, and be named, “Unlucky Bastard” in the second Jurassic Park movie when Koepp appeared on-screen as the one San Diegoan to end up inside a T-Rex’s tummy?“That was mine!” laughs the writer. “That was one of my best character names ever! Yes, I wrote that part for myself and said, ‘Steven I’ll give you this rewrite if you’ll agree to let me play Unlucky Bastard.’ Happily, he agreed.” According to Koepp, if you’re going to write yourself a cameo, you must be killed off, preferably in a gruesome fashion.“I haven’t been in a movie since because I don’t know how you top getting eaten by a T-Rex,” Koepp observes. “I really can’t walk through the background. So I’ve retired.”Disclosure Day opens on Friday, June 12.The post How 30 Years in the Trenches with Spielberg, Aliens, Indy and Dinosaurs Led to Disclosure Day appeared first on Den of Geek.