‘Presence’ writer David Koepp on N.J. haunt, Spielberg’s Jersey movie and ‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’

David Koepp has brought us stunning dinosaurs, persistent ghosts and slick spycraft galore.

Many of the screenwriter’s credits read like a list of Hollywood blockbusters — “Jurassic Park,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Spider-Man” among them.

“I like popcorn movies,” Koepp says.

His new film “Presence,” an unconventional haunted house movie directed by Steven Soderbergh, was filmed entirely in a New Jersey home.

Koepp’s upcoming film with Steven Spielberg is also about to film in Jersey, while his official return to all things prehistoric is just months away in this summer’s “Jurassic World: Rebirth.”

The writer-director sat down with NJ Advance Media to talk about the Jersey haunt that is “Presence,” the Spielberg production, his “Jurassic” comeback and more.

A new (Jersey) adventure with Steven Spielberg

Koepp has been working with Spielberg for more than 30 years.

The first “Jurassic Park” movie — directed by Spielberg, co-written by Koepp and Michael Crichton and based on Crichton’s novel — hit theaters in 1993.

Koepp also co-wrote Indiana Jones movies including the Spielberg-directed “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008).

“He wrote the story for this new thing that we’re about to start shooting,” Koepp says of the prolific, Oscar-winning director.

The “new thing,” Spielberg’s upcoming movie, is set to film in Cape May this March.

It’s reportedly a story that deals with UFOs — working title: “The Dish.”

“He wrote the story and said ‘what do you think of this?’” Koepp says of writing with Spielberg. “And I said ‘great. What if you did this, this and that?’ And, you know, then we went from there.”

Emily Blunt (”Oppenheimer”) stars in the movie alongside fellow Oscar nominee Colman Domingo (”Sing Sing”), Emmy winner Josh O’Connor (”The Crown”), “Bad Sisters” star Eve Hewson and Oscar winner Colin Firth (”The King’s Speech”).

Koepp is staying vague about the story’s details, which have not been announced, but says he values the way Spielberg can collaborate without too much outside interference.

“What’s really great working with him is that it’s pretty much just him,” he says. “The big movies, you often get a lot of opinions from a lot of sources because there’s a lot of money at stake. Somebody’s giving you $100 million or $200 million so they naturally have concerns and they got things to say.”

READ MORE: Steven Spielberg’s new UFO movie with Emily Blunt is filming in N.J., casting locals. See the details.

Spielberg’s Amblin and Universal are producing the film. A recent open call for extras and background actors sought locals in Cape May to take part in the production.

“When it’s Steven’s and he’s fully involved, they tend to leave him alone,” Koepp says. “Universal’s had some good and helpful points but it’s kind of just the two of you making it up. And I do feel sometimes that the focus of that viewpoint being limited to just a couple people is really good for the movie. Same with Soderbergh. I like working with these guys both because people trust them and you don’t get excessive amounts of involvement from a variety of sources.”

Life — and Jurassic Park — finds a way

Koepp says he had a similar experience working with Spielberg on “Jurassic World: Rebirth.”

The seventh installment in the Jurassic universe and fourth of the “Jurassic World” series, which is also a Universal film, is set to open in theaters July 2.

Scarlett Johansson leads the cast with Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Rupert Friend, Ed Skrein, Luna Blaise and David Iacono.

“Rebirth,” written by Koepp, is his first official return to the “Jurassic Park” films since the original movie and its first sequel, “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” (1997) — the last to be directed by Spielberg, who serves as an executive producer of the franchise.

“I have very fond memories of those first two Jurassic Park movies,” says Koepp, 61. “I just turned 30 when the first one came out. So they were early in my career, quite formative, and a great deal of fun. Those were really fun movies to make. It’s a great sandbox to play in. And I’m delighted by how long interest in those kinds of movies has hung around.”

Gareth Edwards (”The Creator,” “Monsters,” “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”) helmed “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” which follows the 2022 movie “Jurassic World Dominion.”

“It seemed to me, when we started talking about another one, that they seem to change tone and characters every three movies,” Koepp says. “So that, to me, said well, this is the start something new. Let’s go with all new characters and let’s have a slight change in the tone. So we did that, and that chance to start over and create something new while still working in this obviously familiar thing, we didn’t want to change a bunch of rules. We wanted to say, no, we’re still in the world that we left after the last movie, but that world has changed. How has it changed? And who are the new people that are involved, and why? Figuring that out with Steven was really fun.”

Haunted family

“Presence,” Koepp’s film with that other Oscar-winning Steven — Soderbergh — is currently in theaters.

The movie, released Jan. 24, takes place in a haunted house.

But it’s not the typical approach to a haunt, because the whole film is shown from the spirit’s point of view.

That perspective effectively made Soderbergh the “ghost,” requiring him to move quickly with the camera the whole movie in order to follow a family through the house.

Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang and Eddy Maday star as the new residents of the home.

Soderbergh chose a house in Cranford to be the center of “Presence.”

Koepp would have been on set, but filming took place in 2023 during the Writers Guild of America strike, so he couldn’t be there (it was also the Screen Actors Guild strike, but the production obtained an interim agreement to proceed).

“I never got to go, which was really disappointing because it’s a cool aesthetic concept and I wanted to see Steven dragging his -ss up and down those stairs with a camera strapped to him all day,” Koepp says.

The screenwriter calls Soderbergh, who won an Oscar for “Traffic” in 2001, “a relentless experimental innovator.”

READ MORE: Do you feel a ‘Presence’? Inside Steven Soderbergh’s reverse ghost story, filmed in N.J.

“We both like to work a lot,” says Koepp, who also co-wrote “Death Becomes Her” (1992). “I write quickly, he makes movies quickly.”

In fact, they already have another movie, the spy thriller “Black Bag,” starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, opening in theaters March 14.

With “Presence,” it was Soderbergh’s idea to tell the story from the ghost’s point of view.

“It causes me to make certain mechanical changes to the way I write,” Koepp says. “Normally, you never refer to the camera in the screenplay, you let the director figure that out. But since the camera is now a character in the story, I had to. So: ‘we move over here.’ ‘We go in the closet.’ ‘We seem scared.’”

“I can’t fall back on the standard things that you might use in any movie script, namely cross-cutting, jumping from one place to another, intercutting action or suspense,” he says. “None of that is now available to me, so every scene must be written so that it can be performed in one shot or captured in one shot, because you can’t cut to so-and-so for a close up … But once those rules are sort of firmly embedded in my mind, the way I write the story is exactly the same.”

“Presence” may be the story of a haunting, but it’s also a “very intense family drama,” Koepp says.

In more ways than one, the “call” is coming from inside the house in this movie. The story is as much about the conflicts that haunt a family as it is a ghost tale.

Liang plays Chloe, a teen mourning her best friend. She’s the first of the family to notice the “presence” in the house, which follows her and hides out in her bedroom closet.

Chloe’s brother Tyler, played by Maday, is dismissive of her grief. He tries to distance himself from his sister and her ideas about the ghost haunting their new house.

One of the “rules” Koepp developed for the story was that people would be more susceptible to sensing the “presence” if, like Chloe, they’ve experienced trauma that opens up their perception. It’s a rule grounded in real life, a place where the ghosts of trauma don’t have to be supernatural to change people.

“They become sensitive to the pain of people around them because they know what that suffering is like,” Koepp says.

He found it interesting that in standard ghost stories, we automatically accept that a spirit from, say, 1892, might be haunting an old house. For Koepp, that means that such a ghost can move forward in time.

“I thought ‘well, if we’re saying that time is not linear, why can’t it go back?’ … So I just said ‘let’s extend that rule.’”

A personal ghost story

Koepp has written and directed other movies that deal with spirits and “the other side.”

They include the supernatural thriller “Stir of Echoes” (1999) with Kevin Bacon (adapted from Richard Matheson’s 1958 book) and the comedy “Ghost Town” (2008) with Ricky Gervais.

“Presence,” he says, combined various elements and scenarios he likes.

“I love a story that takes place in a confined space,” he says, pointing to his previous work in the thriller “Panic Room” (2002), directed by David Fincher and starring Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam.

While people can leave the house in “Presence,” the ghost does not. And while the film has an interesting take on time in general, all the events onscreen take place within a relatively short time frame.

“I like the stories that are confined in terms of time … over a few days or 24 hours,” Koepp says. “I love all those, I call them bottles. And so that was good. But I also liked one thing that the horror renaissance of the last 10 or 15 years has done. It allows us to sort of smuggle in other kinds of stories into the context of a scary movie, or in our case, more of a spooky movie. And I like the idea of being able to tell a family drama. Writing about family dynamics is the most interesting thing to me because we all know it, we all come from a family in one form or another, and so those relations can be really complex and really emotional.”

The revealing conclusion of “Presence” is designed to haunt both the audience and everything that has happened in the movie until then.

With this revelation in hand, scenes inevitably replay in the viewer’s mind as the credits roll.

It’s the kind of movie that might have you looking over your shoulder, but also turning inward.

Because of the nature of the ghost, why it’s there and what it does, the film can feel very personal — a story than might even spark some self-reflection on your own presence.

“People’s reactions are fascinating and touching,” Koepp says. “I woke up to an email from a friend of mine who said he was so distressed and it left him with such a really powerful air of melancholy. He was quite moved and he didn’t expect that.”

“Presence,” rated R, runs 1 hour and 24 minutes and is in theaters. “Jurassic World: Rebirth” opens July 2. Steven Spielberg’s new movie, working title “The Dish,” is filming in New Jersey.