David Koepp says Steven Spielberg’s request—“Do you want to do it?”—turned the writer’s feedback session into an unusually intense collaboration. Koepp wrote 42 drafts for Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” which he describes as a ’70s-style paranoid thriller explo
There’s a particular kind of silence that lands after you realize the conversation has stopped being casual.
At first, David Koepp thought Steven Spielberg was simply looking for a writer-to-writer reaction. Then the director’s tone shifted. Eventually, Koepp said Spielberg asked him, “Do you want to do it?”
That single moment matters because it’s how Koepp describes the path from an exchange of notes to a project that became something Spielberg wanted to be his best script yet—“including and often through principal photography,” Spielberg wrote in an email.
The result is Disclosure Day, Koepp’s seventh script for which Spielberg served as either director or producer. The collaboration stretches back to Jurassic Park. Koepp’s genetic reengineering of Michael Crichton’s novel—work that launched his screenwriting career into the stratosphere. Their shared filmography also includes two Indiana Jones movies and War of the Worlds.
Spielberg, Koepp says, was an unusually hands-on partner. Koepp describes Spielberg as “a good collaborator” because he “listens as much to me as I do to him,” adding that Spielberg was “more exacting than I’ve ever seen him because he knows he’s worked in this area before.”
Koepp’s involvement reached a level he calls a personal record: he wrote 42 drafts for Disclosure Day.
“[Spielberg] was more exacting than I’ve ever seen him because he knows he’s worked in this area before,” Koepp said. “He wants this one to be the best one.”
Disclosure Day follows that thread of Spielberg’s long-running fascination with visitors from outer space, Koepp notes. He compares earlier Spielberg encounters across wildly different emotional registers—Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a modern spiritual myth. E.T. as a coming-of-age tale, and War of the Worlds as a post-9/11 horror movie.
But Koepp positions Disclosure Day differently. He describes it as a ’70s-style paranoid thriller and says it’s a “further exploration” of the themes of, if not a spiritual sequel to, Close Encounters.
When Koepp is asked whether he believes in extraterrestrial life, he doesn’t answer with certainty so much as with limits. He shifts into a contemplation of human perception—what it can’t see, what it dismisses, and what might still be present.
“I think they’re out there. I think maybe we’re looking for the wrong things.”
Then he lays out the argument in the plain language of biology and physics. “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.”.
For Koepp, the point isn’t only distance or technology—it’s form. “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?”
The setting around him matches the idea of a mind staying open. In Koepp’s office on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. 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. On many horizontal surfaces are index cards. along with some arranged vertically—some for Koepp’s next novel. some for his next movie project for Universal.
There are film posters for the original King Kong and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but Koepp says there’s virtually nothing in the way of personal memorabilia beyond a model of a brontosaurus and a fedora. He frames the restraint as self-preservation.
“Otherwise you start thinking, Gee that was a while ago. What have I done lately?”
The arrangement reads like a quiet refusal to coast—mirroring the way Spielberg pushed him into rewriting and rewriting again. When Spielberg asked Koepp, “Do you want to do it?” the question wasn’t just about accepting work. It was about reaching for a version of the story Spielberg believed could be better than anything before it. right down to the final refinements done. Koepp says. “including and often through principal photography.”.
David Koepp Steven Spielberg Disclosure Day Jurassic Park Indiana Jones War of the Worlds Close Encounters of the Third Kind E.T. UFOs extraterrestrial life paranoid thriller