At first, Koepp assumed the director was just after some feedback, writer to writer. Eventually, though, Spielberg asked him, “Do you want to do it?”
The result, Disclosure Day, is Koepp’s seventh script for which Spielberg served as either director or producer. It’s a collaboration that stretches back to Jurassic Park—Koepp’s genetic reengineering of the Michael Crichton novel that shot his screenwriting career into the stratosphere—and includes two Indiana Jones movies as well as War of the Worlds.
“He’s a good collaborator because he listens as much to me as I do to him,” Spielberg said in an email. Koepp is willing, said Spielberg, to rework a script “including and often through principal photography.”
Indeed, Koepp wrote 42 drafts for Disclosure Day—a personal record. “[Spielberg] was more exacting than I’ve ever seen him because he knows he’s worked in this area before,” says Koepp. “He wants this one to be the best one.”
Koepp was referring, of course, to Spielberg’s multi-film preoccupation 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 spiritual sequel to, Close Encounters. Asked whether he is a believer, Koepp slips into a contemplation of the limits of human perception. “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 light. “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 office, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, foundational UFO volume The Flying Saucers Are Real sits on the shelf between Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces and a couple of books on interrogation techniques. There are index cards arrayed on most horizontal surfaces and some vertical ones—some for his next novel, some for his next movie project for Universal. Serving coffee to a visitor, he uses a stack of them in lieu of a coaster. There are film posters for the original King Kong and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but notably, apart from a model of a brontosaurus and a fedora, there’s virtually nothing in the way of personal movie memorabilia. Koepp says this is a form of self-preservation. “Otherwise you start thinking, Gee that was a while ago. What have I done lately?”
