Screenwriter David Koepp is responsible for scripting some of the most popular and important movies in recent pop culture, including Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible and Panic Room. Alongside his work as a screenwriter, he's also directed a series of smaller thrillers and horror movies, including Secret Window and Premium Rush. He brought both his writing and directing talents to the new psychological head-trip You Should Have Left, starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried.

In an exclusive interview with CBR, Koepp explained how You Should Have Left came to be, the kinds of stories he enjoys directing, and whether he would ever want to write another superhero movie after helping kick off the current superhero boom with 2002's Spider-Man.

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CBR: What made you want to adapt this particular story?

David Koepp: Well, Kevin [Bacon] and I did a scary movie [Stir of Echoes,] together a long time ago, and we stayed friends ever since. And we're always talking about finding something else to do. And a couple years ago, he said, "Why don't we do a scary movie, not too expensive, about a marriage." So, my favorite movie of all time is Rosemary's Baby, so I said, "I'm in." And the trick then is to find what is the fraught marital relationship? Because scary movie, you take a combustible relationship and then they go somewhere weird -- either literally or metaphorically or both -- and there's your movie….

And I said, "Well, what if we do the thing where Hollywood casts an actress who's completely inappropriately young for the leading man, but instead of trying to pretend that's not the case, we make that the story. And let's really address that imbalance and the tensions and suspicions that must be in those relationships." Because we all see them, and maybe we know somebody who's in one of those kind of relationships -- certainly in my line of work, you do see it from time to time. And I wondered, what if we just acknowledged from the very first time we see them, these people don't belong together. There's a big problem in this relationship. They're not talking about it, but that's what the movie’s about.

And so I told him, "If we do that, I'm going to have to make a lot of jokes about how old you are, and I got to do it right away so that we're not misinterpreted. So no offense, I'm that old too. But let's do this." And he was very game, and said, "Go ahead, I am old." And so we did….

We were talking about that and our characters, and he came across Daniel Kehlmann's new book, which he said, "You're not going to believe this, but... a lot of what we were talking about is in this new book. Why don't you read it?" And of course, my first reaction was, "No, I don't want to read your stupid book. It's my story." But then I read it, and said, "Okay, there's a lot of great stuff in here, and it is very much what we had in mind." So we were able to option it and go from there.

Amanda Seyfried

What about this project made it something you would want to direct versus only write?

You know, I have a very fraught relationship with directing. I do it, and then I hate it and I swear I'll never do it again. And then that burns off in a year or two, and I say, "Oh, well, this one feels kind of personal. This one feels intimate. This one feels the scale that I like, and the kind of movie that I most like." And I don't really want to give those away…. When something really feels like it's in my wheelhouse, not necessarily what I can do well, but what I love to watch, then I want to do it…. I can usually tell. Once I start writing, I can tell.

Today in movies, there’s this dichotomy where there are these big blockbusters, but then there are also a lot of small-budget indies, but this movie is sort of in the middle. It’s an adult-oriented movie with major movie stars, but it’s not intended to be a huge blockbuster. What is it about that kind of story that attracts you from a director's point of view?

Well that’s the great thing about this horror renaissance that we've been enjoying for like 10 years now. And in general and Jason Blum's work, in particular, if you can keep within certain manageable budgetary limitations and you can make it scary, you can do whatever you want. And you can sneak in a marital drama, which we don't really get to make that much anymore in Hollywood movies. You can sneak in… commentary on race relations, as Jordan Peele did so brilliantly [in Get Out]. And that's great, you get to make an adult movie….

But horror has always been this. Horror in the 1950s was… so much about the fear of communism and the fear of the others and the fear of society changing. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, famously, about Red paranoia; people argue about which way that fear went, but… It Came From Outer Space is fear of the other and society changing. And then in the ‘70s, The Exorcist is this growing fear of our own children and what are they becoming.

Horror lets you become very, very topical, but within this commercial movie package. And that's, I think, some of what movies do best. That's what we're supposed to do on our best day is we're supposed to put in something worth talking about or worth thinking about, but in an entertaining package so that we actually feel like watching it.

Child characters in films can be cloying or irrational, so one of the things that really impressed me about You Should Have Left was the way you wrote 6-year-old Ella. She’s sweet and she behaves like a child but her responses make sense. How did you go about writing her to achieve that? That seems very tricky to me.

Yeah, it is. I mean, it helps that when I was writing her, my daughter, who's now nine, was about seven, so it was easy to just listen to her and try and see her as a person. It's also a little deceptive because I had the benefit of a really terrific actress. I mean, Avery Essex is fantastic. And I don't think it's just my innate my-movie bias, I think she is legitimately a fantastic actress. She's got this thing where she can lock in. When you say action, she becomes that person and her degree of focus is remarkable. And then you say cut and she's this crazy kid bouncing off the walls again.

So some people have it and I don't know her plans to make a career of this or not, or her family's plan, but she can have it if she wants it because she's really great. And I think sometimes you just get lucky. And I know our casting director Terri Taylor looked for a long time for her but we also all just got lucky that she's so good and natural.

The teaming of Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried works really nicely in the movie. How did you go about casting Amanda?

We sent it to a few people that we thought would be good, actors whose work we admired. And Amanda was one of them, and she read it and said, "I think it's interesting." She was the first and only person we met.... I think she was really drawn to the fact that the character has shading and secrets, and she was going to be allowed to play someone of questionable sympathy. And that is not something she gets to do very often, because when you are Amanda's age and you're an actress and you look the way she looks, Hollywood wants you to play a certain kind of part and there's not a lot of leeway. So I think she was pleasantly surprised that she would have an opportunity to play someone who had some darker stuff to her. And so it just clicked right away and worked really well. And she's, of course, terrific in the movie.

You are responsible for writing some of the biggest movies of the past few decades, including Jurassic Park and Spider-Man. Would you ever be interested in directing one of those?

No, that is my nightmare. I love writing them, because they're always great fun to write and the only limitation on you is your imagination. You get to make up pretty much anything you want to, and they'll go out and figure out how to do it. But I've seen what those movies are like to direct. And there's two things: there's the fact that there are a number of directors out there who have a whole package of skills that I don't touch where they can figure that stuff out; and then there's the personal-life aspect, the degree of upheaval to your life that a great big movie like that causes for a director is just something I've never wanted to experience. So I think there’s a lot of people who do it much better than I do. And I like writing them, I like to make them up and I like them to go figure it out.

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Recently, it was reported that you turned in a script for Bride of Frankenstein, and that it looks like they may be looking for directors soon.

Yeah!

Is there anything you can tease about that project?

Well, it's interesting. So a couple years ago, Universal had this big Dark Universe thing they were going to do, and famously that went up in flames. And what I loved about them was they took a minute and said, "Okay, okay, okay, okay, everybody get out of the pool. Cancel everything. We're going to think about this for a while." And so then Invisible Man kind of famously broke through with another way of doing these. Like let's make these stories contemporary, let's not spend vast fortunes on them and let filmmakers do something interesting and new.

And I'd been thinking about an idea since The Bride went down originally. I had another idea for how to do it, and I kept asking Universal, "Why don't you let me do that?" And so they said, "Okay, fine, go ahead, but this is your last try." So I wrote it, turned it in about a month ago and they said, "Great." And now they are talking to directors. So hopefully there's something to announce soon, but as of this moment, not yet.

For many people Spider-Man was a pivotal moment in the history of pop culture. Is there any other superhero that you would be interested in writing for?

I don't think so. I mean, I've loved seeing superhero movies since then. I never in a million years imagined they would become what they have become. When we did the first Spider-Man, comic-book movies, there hadn't been a good one since the second Batman in the mid-'80s, right.... But really taking a superhero movie seriously and putting really good actors in it and spending a lot of time establishing character and spending a lot of money on it, that hadn't been done for a long, long time. And so it was kind of surprising that it did so well.

Now, there are so many expectations and fans are so demanding and… those are scary waters to put my toe back in. I think there's a lot of people out there who spend their whole lives doing it, and I think I'll go see their movies.

You Should Have Left was written and directed by David Koepp and stars Kevin Bacon, Amanda Seyfried and Avery Essex. It is available on demand on June 18.

KEEP READING: You Should Have Left Is a Tense, Mind-Bending Psychological Thriller