David Koepp

Thanks for asking, Neil.

Most certainly, yes, you are.

The screenwriter's responsibility is everything an audience sees or hears.

Yeah, and if you're writing a scene really well, you're not using so much dialogue.

You're using images, visuals, movies or visual experiences.

Those are the powerful memories that we have from them.

Yeah, the only things we can perceive in a movie are what we see and hear.

Those are the two senses we bring to a movie.

It depends.

The director can come in from the very beginning and ask you to start.

The director then comes in.

The good ones, they can come in later after you've written the script.

The good ones don't just record what you wrote, they interpret it.

So they will say things that look at your material from a different point of view.

I wrote this movie called Snake Eyes, Brian De Palma directed, and he asked me after one or two drafts, can you make this first 15 pages so I can do it in one shot?

And I said, no.

And he said, okay, give it a shot.

So I went and gave it a shot and rewrote it.

It never would have occurred to me.

I never would have imagined it that way.