When Steven Spielberg decided to revisit his long-held fascination with government UFO cover-ups, there was only one writer he wanted in the room: David Koepp, the screenwriter behind some of the biggest blockbusters of the last three decades, and now his most frequent creative partner.
Koepp’s career took off in the early 1990s when Spielberg tapped him to adapt Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, a job that instantly catapulted Koepp into Hollywood’s must-hire tier. From there, his resume became a who’s-who of blockbuster cinema: the first Spider-Man, Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, and a string of additional Spielberg collaborations. With Disclosure Day, Koepp has now worked on five Spielberg-directed films, cementing his status as the director’s most frequent screenwriting collaborator, a relationship that has also extended into script guidance on the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park franchises even after Spielberg stepped back into a producing-only role.
The origin of Disclosure Day traces back to Spielberg’s own curiosity. He’s said that a 2017 New York Times investigation into the Pentagon’s secretive UFO research program reignited his long-dormant interest in the subject. Rather than handing the project to a writer cold, Spielberg drafted his own extensive treatment, reportedly written largely in his iPhone’s Notes app, and sent it to Koepp. Initially, Koepp assumed Spielberg simply wanted feedback. Instead, he found himself hired as the screenwriter, with Spielberg staying closely involved at every stage of the process.
What followed was, by Koepp’s own account, the most demanding writing process of his career. He produced 42 separate drafts of the screenplay, a personal record, even after nearly four decades in the business. Koepp has described Spielberg as more exacting on this project than on any of their previous collaborations, treating the story with the kind of urgency and care of someone working at the peak of their creative drive.
Despite the grueling rewrite process, Koepp has spoken about the experience with genuine affection, describing Spielberg as a director whose enthusiasm for storytelling remains as vivid now as it reportedly was decades ago. He’s also revealed a small but telling detail about the finished film: the movie’s final line, delivered in its emotional closing scene, was something Koepp wrote into his very first draft and never changed, even through all 42 rewrites.
The result is a film that Koepp has framed as a spiritual successor to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, following a cybersecurity whistleblower and a meteorologist whose separate discoveries about extraterrestrial contact put them on a collision course with a shadowy government agency. For Koepp, Disclosure Day represents both a culmination of his decades-long partnership with Spielberg and a reminder that, even after Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, and dozens of other credits, the work of finding the right four minutes, or the right single line, never really gets easier.
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