With ‘Cold Storage,’ David Koepp Adapts Himself

As Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter, David Koepp is used to the art of adaptation. He’s adapted novels (like Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park,” Richard Matheson’s “Stir of Echoes” and a pair of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon novels), television shows (“Mission: Impossible”), comic books (Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man”), short stories (Stephen King’s “Secret Window, Secret Garden”), even old-timey radio serials (the sorely underrated “The Shadow”). At one point he was even working on “Spy vs. Spy,” a script based on the interstitial comic strip in Mad magazine, for Ron Howard and Universal.

But with “Cold Storage,” in theaters now, Koepp is adapting his own material – his debut novel of the same name from 2019.

A canny concoction that mixes elements of “Clerks” and “Return of the Living Dead,” “Cold Storage” is centered on a pair of young slackers (“Stranger Things” breakout Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell from “Barbarian”) working the graveyard shift at a self-storage facility tucked into the Kansas hills. What they don’t know is that a deadly fungus was smuggled away decades ago, when the storage company was a government vault. Now that fungus has awakened and is turning whoever it infects into a shambling, zombie-like ghoul (who will eventually explode, spreading spores in a cascade of flying viscera). An old-timer who previously encountered the fungus, played by Liam Neeson, shows up to help, which adds to the fun.

When Koepp started writing “Cold Storage,” there was no plan to later adapt his own work.

“I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was in the back of my mind from the moment I started typing,” Koepp said.

The project started out as a movie idea, at least initially.

“I usually write some things about a character to learn that person before I start outlining a movie. And when I started, I thought, I’ll write the part where he arrives at work. This guy comes to work and his boss is a jerk and there’s something beeping. So I wrote it,” Koepp explained. “And then I thought, well, there’s no reason not to make some decent prose. It doesn’t have to be a movie treatment. Those are awful to read.”

He wrote two or three pages before thinking, Oh, I really like this persona and this perspective. I should keep going. He thought maybe it would be a short story, then a novella. Finally, at around the 100-page mark, Koepp realized that he was probably writing a novel and that he should just finish it.

“But as I was writing, because 30 years of screenwriting doesn’t just go away, in the back of my head, I was thinking, Oh, I’d cut this. And you can combine this – but don’t think about that,” Koepp said.

Koepp was encouraged by his producer Gavin Polone, who typically works on the movies Koepp directs himself (or ones based on his original ideas). “We did start talking about a movie fairly early,” Koepp said.

While “Cold Storage” is coming out from Samuel Goldwyn Films, it was originally a Paramount project and survived two regimes at the studio, going through the tenures of Wyck Godfrey and Emma Watts before eventually being sidelined under Brian Robbins. Koepp isn’t sure why the studio ultimately dropped the project. It’s certainly commercial enough, has a great cast and was written by someone with a proven track record of big hits.

“Everything I hear after the word ‘no,’ I turn into white noise. I don’t really care why you don’t want to do my project. I only wonder how quickly I can get off this phone call so I can find somebody who does,” Koepp said. “People have their own priorities and their own tastes.”

They pitched the movie to Universal, who haggled about the price of the movie. Not that Koepp blames them. “Mixed genre stuff has a very spotty track record. It can be great. For a lot of guys like you and me, it’s our most beloved films. But ‘Tremors,’ for how much we all still talk about it and love it and for how many of them they’ve made over the years, was not a hit,” Koepp said. “It’s hard to convince people, particularly the big studios, of a trajectory that will include, ‘Oh and this movie will become beloved, and you’ll be delighted to have it in your library.’ And they’re like, ‘You mean long after I’m fired for having made it, someone else can profit from it? No.’”

Luckily, French film production and distribution company StudioCanal came on board and partially financed the movie, while selling off rights to foreign territories to cover the rest of the budget. “That’s because they have the wide-ranging worldwide relationships, that they were able to finance it that way,” Koepp said.

But the international aspects of “Cold Storage” didn’t stop with an American screenwriter and a French studio. The team looked to Jonny Campbell, a British filmmaker who had impressed Koepp and Polone with the BBC and Netflix adaptation of “Dracula” (he’d also directed episodes of “Westworld” and the legendary British sci-fi series “Doctor Who”), to direct “Cold Storage.” They wound up filming mostly in Italy, with a brief prologue set in Australia and filmed in Morocco.

“The nice thing about having a subterranean storage facility be the setting for your movie is, you’re going to have to build it and you can build it pretty much anywhere in the world,” Koepp said, citing the European tax incentives as the reason to film in Italy.

“Cold Storage” is such a David Koepp production – boldly mixing genres and tones, full of snappy, smart-ass dialogue, with a contained setting whose built-in claustrophobia ups the thrills considerably – that it’s surprising that he didn’t just direct it himself. (His last feature as a director was the underrated Kevin Bacon/Amanda Seyfried ghost story “You Should Have Left.”) But Koepp said he wasn’t interested.

“No, never for a second because I’d written the book, which is, writing a novel is a big experience and a long time to live in your head with something. Then I wrote the screenplay, and that’s a long time to live in your head with something. And I thought, I don’t have anything else to bring that’s fresh or dynamic,” Koepp explained. “I have the ideas the way I see them, and I’ve always seen them, and somebody else, I think, is going to be better. Also effect shots for me are, as a director, I’d rather stick needles in my eyes. They’re really tedious and hard to get right.”

Koepp is a little concerned that “Cold Storage,” a smaller movie on fewer screens, will get gobbled up by the truly insane amount of big movies opening this weekend – among them Amazon MGM’s “Crime 101,” Warner Bros.’ “Wuthering Heights” and Sony’s animated “Goat.”

“It’s tough out there for an original film, and it’s tough out there for a smaller film. If we can book enough theaters, I’ve seen it with enough audiences to know it plays really well and reviews seem to be going our way. We’ve just got to get enough people to see it so that it acquires some a life of its own,” Koepp said.

He’s still somewhat burned by what happened to “Black Bag” last year, his marital drama-slash-spy thriller that was directed by Steven Soderbergh and released by Focus Features. Koepp was thrilled about the experience of making the movie, his third collaboration with Soderbergh after “KIMI” and “Presence,” but was disappointed that more people didn’t show up. “I get mad at people who say, ‘Boy, they don’t make them like that anymore.’ ‘Yeah, where’d you see it? At home, right? That’s why they don’t make them like that anymore,’” Koepp said. “I’m thrilled that many, many people did catch up with it at home. I just wish more of them had gone to the movie theater.” (Koepp concedes that while he and Soderbergh haven’t found another project yet, “I’m sure it’ll line up again soon.”)

But, ostensibly, “Cold Storage” is a more commercial movie, in the sense that it is a great date night choice, where your date will get scared and squeeze your hand real tight. And gooey horror movies always appeal to younger audiences.

It’s a perfect Friday night movie, full of laughs and scares, the kind of thing you’d take home from your local video store or, if you’re younger, try to sneak past your mom. Koepp said that someone online remarked, “This movie desperately wants to be a VHS,” and provided a mock-up of a “Cold Storage” cassette from Blockbuster, with the stickers and the frayed cover.

As for what’s next, Koepp said that he is working on a third novel. After years of thinking about the right idea, he was sidelined by a busy few years of writing movies. But he’ll get back to it soon. “I’m working on it,” Koepp promised.

He also wants to direct “Yard Work,” based on a short story that he wrote for Audible (it was narrated by Bacon), with Samuel L. Jackson. While the original story, about a widower trying to clear out brush at the home he once shared with his wife, had horror elements including a killer vine, Koepp has jettisoned the genre elements for the movie. Instead, it’s a straightforward family drama.

“Getting those made is the hardest thing any of us will ever do. I would really like to get some money together and make that,” said Koepp.

As for the change in tone, he said, “I liked it as a drama. It’s more interesting. The vines aren’t killing you. Dad’s just obsessed. All I care about is the old man and his relationship with his daughter and his grief. And that was what I wanted to do.”

Koepp also wrote “Disclosure Day,” the highly anticipated new Steven Spielberg film that stars Josh O’Connor, Emily Blunt and Colman Domingo and just had a killer Super Bowl spot. This new film, about the existence of extraterrestrial life, is the latest collaboration between the writer and director that began back with the original “Jurassic Park” and has included its sequel “The Lost World,” “War of the Worlds” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”

Not that he can reveal anything about “Disclosure Day.”

“I can’t say anything about it, except that it does exist because now you’ve seen a trailer and know it’s real. I think it’s a very emotional movie. At least it was for me, very emotional. I think it’s going to be great,” Koepp said.

The secrets of “Disclosure Day,” like the killer fungus of “Cold Storage,” are locked tightly in an underground vault.

“Cold Storage” is in theaters now.

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