What do the movies Ghost Town, Jurassic Park, and Mission: Impossible have in common? Seemingly, very little. But maybe singularly, and most importantly, they all came from the brilliant mind of David Koepp, the most recent guest of Molner’s Table.

Koepp is one of the most successful screenwriters of all time with billions of box office ticket sales associated with his films, including the three mentioned above as well as The Mummy, Spider-Man (2002), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and dozens of others, some of which he also directed. 

While he’s clearly had an incredibly successful career in film, he recently felt the urge to move into books. His second novel, Aurora, comes out June 7 and focuses on two very different but connected communities as they face a solar storm that’s knocked out the power for the entire planet. 

I sat down with Koepp for a 2-part video interview to find out why he decided to write a novel after decades of writing screenplays. We also spoke about doomsday prepping and what he really thinks of some of the cinematic icons he’s worked with. Watch both videos for my full conversation with Koepp, and read the highlights of our interview below. 

Part 2

JM: You published your first book Cold Storage in 2019 and you’re following it up with your new book, Aurora. Why did you decide to start writing books now?

DK: I kinda had it in the back of my mind that someday I should write a book. But my ideas always tend to show up as movies because that’s just the medium I worked in for so long. But I had this idea, which would become Cold Storage, and I sat down and just put a few sentences on paper about it and started thinking about the characters. And I wrote a paragraph and I thought, “Gee, that’s a nice paragraph. Let me see if I can do another one of those.” And after about a page and a half, I thought, “Hey, I could make this a short story.” And then after about 10 or 20 pages, I thought, “No, I could make it a novel.” So I just kept going and it was liberating and incredible fun. 

JM: Well, after all those years of writing those treatments and, even as a successful screenwriter, having committees to answer to, you were finally really writing for yourself.

DK: Yeah. That’s the thing: Movies are just relentlessly collaborative endeavors. You’re collaborated upon in movies. And the problem is, you need to ask somebody for millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars at some point. So you’re going to get a lot of input and there are a lot of people to try to please. 

JM: So, in this book, it’s interesting because you have this global catastrophe that’s affecting all parts of the planet. But you decided to only focus on these two very specific communities. Why is that?

DK: Well, because it’s too hard to tell the story of what happens to the entire planet and that would quickly become a Hollywood disaster movie. And I didn’t want to see the lot of the tropes that we would see in that kind of big movie. So I choose to focus on these two communities. One is in the desert where this guy, the wealthy Silicon Valley-type character, has built his survival compound, and his community of people who are obsessed with prepping. They have these survival bunkers, which I became fascinated by because they’re big enough for a whole community. Sometimes they’re decommissioned nuclear missile silos that have been built out as apartments.

And then I focus on Aubrey, the woman who’s ill-prepared who lives on a cul-de-sac in Aurora, Illinois, hence the title, and on that community and how they function. And the communities move in opposite directions. The one that you think would do extremely well doesn’t and vice versa.

JM: So tell us a little bit about the characters that you set forth in the book. The central characters are brother and sister. Somebody who’s thought about outcomes like this a lot and somebody who hasn’t.

DK: Yeah. That’s what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write two parallel stories that would converge. And I wanted one of the characters to be completely prepared for an event like this, because there are a lot of people in the world who enjoy prepping — for them, it’s more than a hobby. You become convinced that this will be needed and that you have to be doing this. So I wanted someone who is quite wealthy and has the means to prep extensively and try and plan for every contingency that could possibly go wrong. And then I wanted another character who had done absolutely nothing. After COVID, she put a storage rack in her basement, she printed out a list of emergency supplies and that’s where it stayed. There’s an empty rack and a list, and that’s all she’s done because that’s how most of us are. Even though we’ve been through COVID, we may have some extra paper towels in the garage, but most people are not prepared for any kind of massive interruption of their life.

JM: After researching and thinking about prepping as much as you have to write this book, do you have extra canned goods in your basement? 

DK: Oh no. We still can’t conceive of a disaster like a solar storm, even though some really wild things have happened to us in the last couple of years. And also there’s a human tendency and a governmental tendency to plan for the last crisis instead of anticipating the next one. So I think maybe we all have extra masks and COVID tests. But it’s not going to be that next time. It’s gonna be something else. 

JM: I noticed it’s being made into a movie. So it comes full circle. And you’re writing the screenplay for the film and you’ve hired a director, right?

DK: The director hired us, I might say, because she’s Kathryn Bigelow, who’s a brilliant film director. She directed Zero Dark Thirty, Hurt Locker, and many others. I sent her the book because we’d spoken a few times over the years looking for something to do together. I admire her work and…she thought I typed well. So I sent her an email and said, “Hey, I wrote this book and nobody else has read it. And I wonder if it might be up your alley, take a look.” And she really loved it. And so we sold it to Netflix and hopefully, we’ll start shooting just after the first of the year. 

JM: And as you’ve talked to Kathryn Bigelow about the book, does she see things differently for the film than the way you imagined it?

DK: Yes, she does. And that’s good. That’s what’s supposed to happen. That’s what a good director does. A not-so-good director just sort of records what you write down and a very good director interprets that and then it has to become like something she’d make. 

In the book, there’s a lot of people sitting in rooms talking, there’s a lot of people philosophizing because the power’s out for a long time and they have time on their hands and that’s terrific in a book, I think it makes it read very nicely. It gives us a lot of things to chew over and think about. But in a movie, it’s not very exciting. The book is tense. I think the movie version will be significantly more tense, which I think is funny.

JM: Indulge me for a moment while I read off some of the titles that you’ve written Jurassic Park, Spider-Man (2002), Mission: Impossible, Carlito’s Way,  Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Ghost Town, War of the Worlds, Death Becomes Her, Stir of Echoes, The Paper, The Trigger Effect.

You also directed some of these. But are there films that you wrote that you think back on now and say, “wow, I wish I had directed that”?

DK: Not a single one. Directing’s a tough experience. It’s a hard way to spend your time. I’ve done it, I’ve done seven, and every time I swear I’m never doing that again. And then about three years go by and I get over it. And I have some idea where I feel like, “well, I’d like to be the one to see this through.” And I go do it again. They are different personalities — the writer and the director. A writer enjoys being in a room alone and making stuff up and the lack of interaction with others and the ability to live in your head. And a director is the exact opposite. A director does nothing but interact with others and has to persuade others to come along and see this the way they do.

JM: Is it possible to have a great film without a great screenplay? 

DK: I don’t see how. It kills me. Oftentimes, reviewers, God love them, they don’t really know what they’re watching and who did what. And when you write, “the director and these actors, laboring mightily, nearly overcome a bad script” — Come on. The things that they did well were probably good in the script. The things that they did poorly might have been done poorly and been bad in the script, or maybe they were just done poorly. Everybody has to work together. If you take a movie that’s indisputably a classic — let’s take E.T: Steven [Spielberg]’s clearly at the absolute peak of his powers. But so is Melissa Mathis who had the idea and wrote the brilliant screenplay. So is John Williams, who wrote a score that is inseparable from the film. So is Drew Barrymore, who is this amazing kid actor who’s obviously going to go on to have a long career in a number of fields. The cinematographer — it’s absolutely stunningly shot. The effects are groundbreaking. Everybody had to be at their peak for that lightning to be caught in that bottle. 

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Here’s David’s thoughts on working with the biggest names in Hollywood – and on the craft of screenwriting vs. directing: