Why Even Steven Spielberg’s Go-To Writer Needed 42 Drafts to Get ‘Disclosure Day’ Right

Writing a screenplay can be one of the most frustrating and gratifying things you can do. And guess what? Even when you become a pro, it doesn’t really get any easier.

I just read this great interview with David Koepp, the writer behind movies like Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, and Spider-Man, who recently sat down with Vanity Fair for a career-spanning interview.

During the chat, he covered his highly anticipated sci-fi thriller Disclosure Day, which comes out soon, and was directed by Steven Spielberg.

It’s my most anticipated movie of the summer, but we’re not here to highlight that cool alien invasion story. I want to talk about how Koepp said it took him a mind-boggling 42 tries to finally deliver a script that Spielberg was ready to shoot.

Let’s dive in.

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The Burden of Expectations

You know what I’m going to say right off the top: all writing is rewriting. When it comes to crafting and then taking that story into production, you have to expect changes.

Still, when you have a history like Koepp and Spielberg, you’d think it would be easier. But sometimes some movies just take a little extra work.

In fact, when you have that much chemistry with a director, you probably wind up doing a lot of drafts just because you like working together and you’re both trying to do something creatively fulfilling.

For Disclosure Day, it seems like Spielberg wanted to push back against Hollywood’s obsession with “branded IP” by championing an original, high-concept idea.

And when you’re working with Spielberg, you shouldn’t be aiming for good enough; you always want to be aiming for greatness.

Koepp revealed that the massive number of drafts wasn’t due to a lack of vision, but rather a hyper-focus on calibration.

They both just wanted to get things exactly right.

That meant constantly tweaking the narrative balance and juggling the film’s intense action-thriller pacing against heavy, philosophical themes like religion, agnosticism, and how global society handles absolute, shattering truth.

Rejection Is Just Part of the Process

Forty-two drafts might sound like an exaggeration or a sign of creative friction, but in the studio system, a “draft” can range from a total page-one rewrite to adjusting the thematic weight of the third act.

We’ll never know exactly what got turned in and turned around, but I think it’s cool to hear one of the best writers of all time talk about how much work goes into what you see on screen.

It also speaks to collaboration between artists, each challenging the other to get the best work out of them.

It reinforces the golden rule that you have to write bad pages before you write good ones. At the end of the day, finishing a flawed draft so you can actively fix it is infinitely more important than just holding onto a great idea in your head.

So get it out onto paper!

And then start rewriting it.

Summing It All Up

The next time you’re working on draft number three or four and feeling completely burnt out, just remember David Koepp. Put your head down, accept the notes, and keep typing.

Disclosure Day, starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, and Colin Firth, is one of the major standouts in the Summer 2026 Movie Preview and hits theaters on June 12, 2026.

Let me know what you think in the comments.