David Koepp discusses his return to the Jurassic franchise, his writing process, and advice for screenwriters ahead of Jurassic World: Rebirth.
blog.finaldraft.com
'Jurassic World Rebirth' Writer David Koepp on the Screenwriting Mistake That Dooms Scripts
David Koepp is a Hollywood legend. One of the most successful screenwriters of all time, Koepp is the iconic voice behind works like
Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Death Becomes Her, Mission: Impossible, and many more.
Koepp is known for his versatility. He has achieved both critical and commercial success in a wide variety of genres, including thriller, science fiction, comedy, action, drama, crime, superhero, horror,
adventure, and fantasy. He can write in essentially any world or tone and deliver consistent blockbusters.
Recently, he rejoined Steven Spielberg to take on dinosaurs again for
Jurassic World Rebirth, the next entry in the
Jurassic franchise. Set five years after the events of
Jurassic World Dominion, in Rebirth the world’s environment has become mostly inhospitable to dinosaurs, leaving them only the tropical regions that feel like their original habitats. Directed by Gareth Edwards, the film stars Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali.
We were delighted to be able to speak with Koepp ahead of Jurassic World Rebirth and learn about his process on the film, as well as get his advice on structure and more.
Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Final Draft: You’ve been so important to the Jurassic franchise. What got you excited to come back to it?
David Koepp: An
idea. I did the first two, and I watched the others with great interest. Occasionally I’d give some thoughts on a script if Steven asked, but I’d been off pursuing other things. And Steven called, probably about two years ago now, and said, “What do you think? Would you want to do another one of those? I might have an idea.”
And that’s how all our stuff has started, with one of us saying, “Hey, do you think it would be cool if…?” and then off we go into the idea. So he told me his idea and I said, “That’s cool.” It’s an idea which became this mosasaurus section of the plot in the movie, which is really spectacular. There’s like 20 minutes in the middle of the movie that’s really just like an oceangoing adventure, and it’s just so thrilling and so brilliantly directed. I really love it.
But he had this idea, and so the next six months we spent sending emails back and forth and saying, “What about this?” and “What about this framework?”
One thing for me was I felt like every three movies seemed like a logical time to change tone and change characters. I think they did it after the first three movies, [and] the Jurassic World three movies. Dominion seemed like it ended on a valedictory note, and that part of the story was done.
So I thought, “Do you think I could start over?” Not in the sense of denying any of the events that have already occurred in the previous movies. I hate when they do that, but where else can we look? Where else can we turn our attention? What other characters can we turn our attention to?
And can we change tone a little bit? Because the tone that I feel most comfortable writing is more similar to the first movie. So he said, “Yeah, let’s run with it. Let’s go where your imagination takes you.” So off we went, and it was a great chance to work on something. Of course, I was worried I’m going to try and recapture past magic and won’t find it. I guess audiences will judge for themselves if we did or not. I think we did. I certainly know that when I started writing, I was having a ball, and it was as if no time had passed since writing the first movie.
Final Draft: I know that you created “nine commandments” for writing this, and one of them was no ‘retconning’. Why is that something that’s so important to you?
David Koepp: It seems like such a cheat. I hate when I go and they say, “Oh, yes, that happened. But you weren’t looking at what you thought you were looking at. You were actually looking at her twin, and her twin is from another timeline and you never…”
I just hate that. I’m like, no, you asked me to come to your movie, and I gave you $15, and I saw it, and I have the right to believe that that really happened. It feels obvious to me and labored, and there’s always a lot of explanation for why this wasn’t what you thought it was.
I think it’s also kind of disrespectful to all the movies that come before. A lot of filmmakers worked really hard telling those stories. You can’t then deny that they occurred. That’s just a personal preference. I don’t like a retcon.
Final Draft: Is that something that’s part of your process, setting guidelines like that for every project?
David Koepp: Yes. I love boundaries, as any of the nuns who taught me in elementary school will tell you. I do better when there are limits placed on me. I love what I call “
a bottle.” The whole story can only take place in 24 hours, or it’s all inside this house, or it’s only from Tom Cruise’s point of view in War of the Worlds. We said, let’s limit this movie to just what our main character sees or feels or experiences. Let’s never go to big global shots because we’ve seen that before.
I think when you have restrictions like that, you are forced into creative solutions that I actually find quite liberating. Instead of confining for [Rebirth], one of the first challenges was, how do we make dinosaurs feel special and unique again? Because when Dominion ended, they’re everywhere, and they’re out there and they’re swimming in your pool and on top of the Chrysler Building and renting apartments.
And how do we make it in a believable way? How do we advance the story to say, “Okay, that didn’t work for dinosaurs and humans. We did not coexist well. We hoped we would, but we didn’t.” And so where are they now and how can that feel special and exciting?
For that, I went back to [Michael] Crichton’s first novel, and I think you’re never in trouble when you go back to the original source and say, “What worked here?” He has a thing where Jeff Goldblum’s character is berating John Hammond, the guy who brought the dinosaurs back, and says, “You plopped them down in a world that isn’t suited to them.” Everything about this planet is different than it was 65 million years ago. The oxygen levels are different. The land itself is different. The general temperatures, the humidity, the diseases. All that was reason, to me, why they have to exist only in this narrow band of places around the equator where the environment is more similar to the Cretaceous. And we ran from there.
Final Draft: There’s a scene that you pulled from the original book for this. You didn’t have room for it in the earlier movies. What made that moment stick out as something that would work in this movie?
David Koepp: The setting. We were on a tropical island, so we wanted to be back more in the environment of the natural environment of dinosaurs than in the natural environment of humans.
And that’s more like Jurassic Park, the novel, and The Lost World, the novel. So the setting was there and it’s just a great scene. It was a wonderful scene. I can’t remember why it was cut. It was never shot. It was storyboarded for the first movie. I imagine it was budget and time like most things.
That was one of the first things Steven and I said to each other was, “Hey, we can put the raft scene back in.” So it was a scene 32 years in the making, and it really works.
Final Draft: You’ve said that you hate the second act, which many writers famously do. Do you have any tips for tackling that part of a screenplay?
David Koepp: My tips for everything are breaking into chunks. That applies to your homework, your work life, your exercise regime. If you want to get in the weeds with screenwriter shop talk, and you being Final Draft, I assume you do—there’s a lot of talk about whether the three-act structure is actually a
four-act structure. It probably is, but I call it three.
Finding the midpoint of a story is really important to me, because then I can start to view things as the first half and the second half. And if you look at significant plot points, like the end of the first act, the end of the second act, and the midpoint as moments at which something happens that spins the action off in another direction, then it becomes manageable. Now I’m looking at, ballpark, maybe a 25-page first act, a 70-page second act, and a 20-page third act.
And I break that 70-page second act into two. So really I’m looking at part one of act two as 35 pages, and part two of the second act is roughly the same. That makes it a lot easier.
Middles are hard because momentum becomes hard to [maintain], for all the obvious reasons. The first act, everything’s new. People are new, the premise is laid out. You probably had an exciting scene in your head already, and that’s there.
And third acts tend to be quick. All the groundwork’s been laid, and now you’re just finishing your story. Middles can drag on forever. If somebody tells me they’re on page 71, I always say, “I’m so sorry.” It’s brutal. It’s going to be brutal ‘til you get to about 90, and then you’re going to smell the barn, and you’ll pick up momentum again.
Final Draft: You’ve also talked about pitching and how horrible that is. Do you have any advice for writers who might not have pitching skills?
David Koepp: I don’t think I’m very good at pitching, either, but I am good at working it out privately and then talking about it.
So I would not go into a pitch cold. I would ask them to read this
10-page outline, and if you’re still interested, let’s talk. That to me is a much more successful approach. Or make it six pages, if you feel like 10 is too much. But you can get your premise across. You can get your two main characters, so they can picture a movie star or two if they like, and you can get a complication and hint at an ending.
And that is so much better than going in and trying to tell someone a story cold. It’s awful trying to tell someone a story cold. I always picture them thinking about lunch.
I’ve had pitches where they self-consciously look at their watch. Somebody yawned in my face once. It’s just horrible. And I’m thinking, “Yeah, I don’t blame you. I’m bored. This is terrible. And by the way, I forgot to mention earlier a car was parked out front,” and then you screw it up, and the voices in your head are going crazy. So I like to give them something to read.
Final Draft: Is there one bit of advice you think all screenwriters should learn early?
David Koepp:
Outline. I think most people who want to have 20 pages of a movie in them, and they could sit down and write it, and it might not be bad. And if you don’t have an outline, that’s exactly where it will die.
I’m not saying that that outline has to be in painstaking detail. In fact, it shouldn’t. You’ve got to leave yourself room, and don’t get hung up on your outline. I still think scene cards on a coffee table are the best way to do it. Things on a screen don’t register right for us. But behind me over there, there’s my coffee table. There are no scene cards on it because I’m not working at the moment. But look, here’s a stack of empty ones just waiting to be deployed.
I think if you write ideas you have for a scene—”they rob the bank.” Well, that sounds like a set piece that’s probably going to go around here. And I put it sort of in the middle. “She betrays her sister.” Oh, I don’t know why I’m writing that, but okay, she betrays her sister. Maybe they rob the bank together in here, around here. So I know these scenes I want to do, and I just start gunning them out onto the table. And then you move them around into what looks like a manageable structure.
And if you’ve noodled by writing little character bios, you know who your people are, and now you’ve moved your scenes around a little bit. Now you get to start.
Write seven pages and see how you feel. And then go back to the cards and flesh them out a little, and then write a little more, and then move things around because you realize it didn’t work.
But it all starts with a rough outline. You are a choreographer, and you have to suggest dance moves and put them up on the stage so everybody can see if they work or not. And then you change it. But if you don’t start with an outline, I think you’re doomed.
Final Draft: Is there anything that you wanted to talk about that I didn’t bring up?
David Koepp: I really like the movie, Jurassic World Rebirth, coming to theaters July 2nd—but that’s probably out there already. It’s an enormous amount of fun. I felt like when I went back on this, I was worried. “Oh no, I’m trying to recapture past magic. Will that work?” And within a few days of starting writing, I felt like no time had passed. It felt as fresh and fun as the first one. I think it’s worth checking out.