David Keopp Intro: 5:33 God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs. David Koepp writes Jurassic Park screenplay. TIFF screens Jurassic Park with David Koepp in person. The celebrated screenwriter and director discusses his work on the iconic Steven Spielberg blockbuster, his career, and his new novel, the sci-fi thriller, Cold Storage, and joins us before the event for a book signing. Copies of Cold Storage available for purchase at TIFF Shop.
Programming Partner: Harper Collins Canada
Guest
Radheyan Simonpillai
Radheyan Simonpillai is a culture writer for Toronto’s NOW Magazine and a film critic for CTV’s national breakfast show Your Morning. He also contributes to CTV News and CBC Radio.
headshot-david-koepp
David Koepp
David Koepp is an American director and screenwriter, best known for his work on Jurassic Park (93), Mission: Impossible (96), Spider-Man (02), Panic Room (02), and War of the Worlds (05). His work onscreen has grossed over $6 billion worldwide.
Jurassic Park
Steven Spielberg
USA | 1993 | English
127 minutes
On a small island off the coast of Costa Rica, billionaire tycoon John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) invites two paleontologists (Sam Neill and Laura Dern) and a suave chaos theoretician (Jeff Goldblum) to be the first to witness and endorse his new venture: an amusement park populated by genetically engineered dinosaurs. When an unscrupulous computer programmer attempting to swipe Hammond’s bioengineering secrets shuts down the park’s security system, the visiting scientists and Hammond’s young grandchildren find themselves stranded in the middle of the wilderness with a horde of hungry prehistoric predators on their heels. Spielberg’s adaptation of Michael Crichton’s bestselling novel set a new bar for the modern blockbuster, both commercially and technologically. Jurassic’s photorealistic, computer-generated dinosaurs revolutionized Hollywood special effects, and so galvanized Spielberg’s friend Stanley Kubrick that he restarted development on his long-gestating sci-fi project A.I., which Spielberg would end up completing after Kubrick’s death.