LOS ANGELES, March 14 (UPI) — Screenwriter David Koepp turned a movie idea into his first novel, Cold Storage, which is now a film available on digital video-on-demand.
Koepp adapted his own book. In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Koepp, 62, explained how Cold Storage began as a pitch for a movie.
“After two or three pages, I thought there’s no reason this has to be [expletive] prose,” Koepp said. “Let’s try and make it decent prose. Then it just became this different kind of storytelling and I was really enjoying it so I kept going.”
Koepp was joking about criticizing his treatment prose. However, he clarified that the purpose of paragraphs is different between a novel and a screenplay.
“I don’t think my screenwriting really contains prose,” Koepp said. “It contains, I hope, terse and vivid descriptions and good dialogue and well-structured sequences.”
After a long screenwriting career that includes several Jurassic Park films, Panic Room, the first Spider-Man and many others, Koepp said he had to break some screenwriting habits.
“You can’t just lapse into dialogue for long periods,” Koepp said. “The sense of time is different in a book than it is in a movie. They say a few things and you digress or you sum up what they did for the next ten minutes and then you come back into some dialogue.”
The film adaptation of Cold Storage stars Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell as clerks at a storage facility housing a fungus that fell to Earth with Skylab in 1979. Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson), the military lead in the ’70s, comes out of retirement to attend to it.
In the novel, Koepp enjoyed following backstory tangents he never would in a script for a two-hour movie.
“I can suddenly spend two pages where this guy remembers what his dad was like when he was 9 years old or he can talk about his high school job,” Koepp said. “As long as you maintained a sense of forward movement, you could digress the [expletive] out of it.”
Having adapted Michael Crichton’s two Jurassic novels, two Dan Brown novels, Richard Matheson’s A Stir of Echoes, Stephen King’s Secret Window and Spider-Man comics, Koepp had the film adaptation in mind while writing the book.
“I let it be a book, plenty of unfilmable stuff in there, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I had ideas in the back of my head while writing the novel for how I might adapt it,” he said. “I’d cut this, I’d combine these two, I’d have her say that.”
When it came time to produce the movie, Koepp gave his cast the book for further information.
“Actors are always asking about the characters’ background,” he said. “Normally, you’re making it up because maybe you hadn’t thought about that too much when you’re writing a script. In this case, I got to hand them the book and go, ‘It’s all in there.'”
Koepp’s second novel, Aurora, was published in 2022 but he has not slowed down as a screenwriter. He wrote Disclosure Day with Steven Spielberg, their fifth movie together.
“He’d written a treatment of like 40-50 pages that was really quite detailed and very good,” Koepp said. “I think he felt a stronger authorial sense, yes, but he always feels a strong authorial sense, whether he wrote the story or not.”
The plot of Disclosure Day is intentionally being kept vague, but it does revolve around exposing government secrets that pertain to alien life and Area 51. It is a subject Spielberg has returned to in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and War of the Worlds.
“Each of them has a radically different tone,” Koepp said. “Close Encounters is a strikingly different tone from E.T., strikingly different from War of the Worlds which is completely different from this.”
Koepp wrote the first two Jurassic Park films for Spielberg, War of the Worlds and the fourth Indiana Jones for Spielberg. He returned to write Jurassic World Rebirth for Gareth Edwards.
“Sequels are hard,” Koepp said. “You are revisiting material and trying to make it fresh. You have lost the novelty of the idea and now it becomes more what can you do with it? That’s difficult.”
Some of Koepp’s other original screenplays include Ghost Town and Premium Rush with John Kamps, and Kimi, Presence and Black Bag for Steven Soderbergh. Early originals include the Dolph Lundgren alien-hunting film I Come in Peace, under a pseudonym.
Koepp said he and Kamps did not take the pseudonyms to deride the movie. Rather, it was a job they took early in their careers to earn money to finish Koepp’s independent movie Apartment Zero.
“It’s not that we saw the movie and said, ‘Ew, we don’t want our name on it.’ We had no name,” Koepp said. “I’m glad it’s stuck around. I’m glad some people really like it.”
Another original screenplay was 1994’s newsroom drama The Paper which Koepp wrote with his journalist brother, Stephen. David shared that he had an in-person interview at a newsroom recently and missed the bustling atmosphere Ron Howard’s film depicted.
“I went to their offices and they’re 2/3 empty,” Koepp said. “It’s just quiet. A lot of empty desks and I get that even if it’s not that the staff is so dramatically reduced, everybody’s at home.”