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Why Jurassic World Rebirth screenwriter David Koepp doesn’t like a world ‘too big’

Koepp, who also wrote the first two Jurassic Park films, talks about ‘bottle’ movies and working again with Steven Spielberg

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US screenwriter David Koepp at the world premiere of Jurassic World Rebirth in London on June 17, 2025. Photo: AFP

An eyeball, big, yellowish and distinctly inhuman, stares raptly between wooden slats, part of a large crate. The eye darts from side to side quickly, alert as hell.

So begins David Koepp’s script to 1993’s Jurassic Park. Like much of Koepp’s writing, it is crisply terse and intensely visual. It does not tell the director – in this case Steven Spielberg – where to put the camera, but it nearly does.

“I asked Steven before we started: ‘What are the limitations about what I can write?’” Koepp recalls. “CGI hadn’t really been invented yet. He said: ‘Only your imagination.’”

In the 32 years since penning the adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel, Koepp has established himself as one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters, not through the boundlessness of his imagination but by his expertise in limiting it.

Koepp is the master of the “bottle” movie – films hemmed in by a single location or condensed time frame. From David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002) to Steven Soderbergh’s Presence (2024), he excels at corralling stories into uncluttered movie narratives.

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