David Koepp is back with a fresh start for 'Jurassic World Rebirth'

An eyeball, big, yellowish, 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's crisply terse and intensely visual.

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It doesn't 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." Yet 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 timed frame. From David Fincher's "Panic Room" (2002) to Steven Soderbergh's "Presence" (2025), he excels at corralling stories into uncluttered, headlong movie narratives. Koepp can write anything las long as there are parameters.

"The great film scholar and historian David Bordwell and I were talking about that concept once and he said, 'Because the world is too big?' I said, 'That's it, exactly," Koepp says. "The world is too big. If I can put the camera anywhere I want, if anybody on the entire planet can ap family over global calamity.

"I hear those ideas and I get excited. OK, now I'm constrained," says Koepp. "A structural or aesthetic constraint is like the Hayes Code. They had to come up with many other interesting ways to tell story."

Koepp's bottles can fit either summer spectacles or low-budget indies. "Jurassic World Rebirth" is the third film penned by Koepp just this year, following a nifty pair of thrillers with Steven Soderbergh in "Presence" and "Black Bag."