David Koepp is one of Hollywood’s preeminent screenwriters ever since Steven Spielberg recruited him to pen Jurassic Park in his twenties.
But between spectacle features, he has returned to more contained settings, as with David Fincher’s home invasion thriller “Panic Room” or Soderbergh’s own tech-skeptic “Kimi.”
But “Presence” put Koepp in darker place than usual. After beginning work on the screenplay, he began dreaming from a ghost’s perspective. He began writing immediately after waking up, doing most his work before 6:00 a.m.
Writing for Jurassic or Indiana Jones
Those are harder because of the lack of restrictions. The first “Jurassic” was at the dawn of CG. I asked Steven [Spielberg], “Well, what are my limitations here?” And he said, “Only your imagination.” I was like, “Okay, well, that’s a little hostile.” But we were making up whatever we felt like, then he was seeing if we could figure it out. Those are giant movies, so there’s a lot of expectations and there’s a lot of money. The level of tension and anxiety surrounding it is a lot higher. On this one, by virtue of the fact that its budget was a lot smaller and Steven was paying for it himself, there were whole levels of approval that just weren’t present.

Jurassic’s World Rebirth
The first 2 movies were two of my favorite experiences ever. And Soderbergh said, “What about starting over? Let’s try something all new.” I said, “That’s cool idea. You do that all the time with your collaborators: throw ideas back and forth. Sometimes they catch, usually they don’t. There is pressure because it’s going to cost a lot of money and there are going to be big expectations. But there was no pressure at first — just the pursuit of our ideas.
Source Material
I reread the two novels to get myself back in that mode. We did take some things from them. There was a sequence from the first novel that we’d always wanted in the original movie, but didn’t have room for. But just to get back in that head space 30 years later — is it still fun? And the answer is yes, it still really is. Dinosaurs are still fun.