Interviews
‘You Should Have Left’: David Koepp Explains the Big Change from the Novel [Interview]
What do Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible and Spider-Man all have in common? They were all written or co-written by David Koepp, a prolific screenwriter and filmmaker who’s penned some of the biggest blockbusters in history, when he wasn’t directing lower budgeted horror-thrillers like Stir of Echoes and the new release You Should Have Left.
Speaking to Bloody-Disgusting from his home in Amagansett, NY – before and after a brief interruption by his friendly pet dog – Koepp revealed the process behind adapting Daniel Kehlmann’s best-selling novel and why You Should Have Left required an unexpected number of flowcharts.
You Should Have Left stars Kevin Bacon, who previously starred in Koepp’s supernatural thriller Stir of Echoes over 20 years ago, as Theo, a banker with a young movie star wife (Amanda Seyfried) and a young daughter (Avery Essex) who vacation at a mysterious house in Wales. The family soon discovers that the house’s many hallways and doors don’t always lead to the same place twice, and gradually become stuck in a literal and figurative labyrinth.
But funnily enough, Bacon’s protagonist wasn’t a banker in Daniel Kehlmann’s novel. One of the first changes the screenwriter made to You Should Have Left was making the protagonist anything but a screenwriter.
“I couldn’t take a movie about a screenwriter,” David Koepp chuckles. “I just, I don’t think anybody really wants to see it. I know I don’t. But even more than that, movies about a writer in a remote house possibly losing his mind? There are several prominent ones.”
Koepp should know, since he wrote one of them in 2004: Secret Window, a Stephen King adaptation starring Johnny Depp as a writer losing his mind from marital jealousy and mysterious accusations by a creepy stalker, played by Jon Turturro.
“Arguably The Shining was even bigger than mine,” Koepp argues, drolly, when this is brought up.
“So we’ve seen that movie and I’ve made that movie, and I felt like I wanted to change that off the bat. It was one of the first changes,” Koepp continues. “It was one of the first things I said: ‘He ain’t gonna be a writer.’ And the other was, because we have questions about this guy and Kevin so beautifully plays characters where you’re not quite sure if he’s a good guy or not, and I wanted to play that mystery of, you know, there’s this cloud in his past and we’re not quite sure how we feel about him and [so] I wanted him to have a profession where he could have made a lot of money and one that suggested there might be this aura of guilt about him.”
“And I think we all have a lot of complicated feelings about bankers these days, particularly the kind who make hundreds of millions of dollars. I just thought it brought some baggage with it that was interesting to me,” Koepp says.
But doesn’t that fundamentally alter the character from the novel; changing a character who’s a writer, a fabulist, to someone who is more business-oriented?
“No question,” Koepp says. “Yes, I think it does. I think in our case it changes it in a helpful way. I think that the writer in the book who is imagining all these things, who imagines things for a living and therefore may or may not be imagining things that are happening in the house – although it seems clear he’s not – I think yeah, it was just a dynamic I didn’t want to explore. But yes, it does certainly change him. No question.”
The character is brought to life by Kevin Bacon, an actor with over 40 years of experience, now reuniting with Koepp after over two decades. According to Koepp, not much has changed.
“I hope I’ve grown as a filmmaker. You hope that in 20 years you pick up a few things,” Koepp admits. “I found him, I don’t know, I guess he was probably in his late 30s when we did Stir of Echoes and late 50s when we did this, he’s so accomplished. This guy was in movies when he was 19, I think, when he started in Animal House? And he’s just the most meticulous professional, highly skilled actor you can imagine.”
“So I didn’t see a great deal of change in that way. I got the same Kevin I got last time. I hope I’ve grown a bit,” Koepp adds.
David Koepp certainly needed his filmmaking experience on You Should Have Left. In addition to the film’s human drama about marital strife, parenthood anxieties and lifelong guilt, the movie represents a complex filmmaking challenge as Bacon’s protagonist gets lost in a house where the geography and geometry can’t be trusted.
“I wanted to create that sense of disorientation. I wanted the movie to increasingly feel as it went on the way you feel if you’re staying in someone else’s house or you’re in a hotel and it’s the middle of the night and you get up to go to the bathroom,” Koepp says. “You kind of forget where you are and the door’s not where you thought. I wanted that moment of, wait, where am I? Wasn’t there a door here before?”
“I wanted that to sustain through the latter half of the film. So I think that geography is something that is incredibly important as a film director. Everybody has to know this is here, this leads to that. That’s what makes a suspense sequence work,” Koepp explains. “That’s why Spielberg’s movies are always so effective, because you know exactly where things are before he starts to screw them up.”
“And so I wanted to lay all that out, which is why you have, when they arrive at the house there’s numerous shots that are devoted to ‘This is here, that hallway is from here.’ I continue the shot so you can see, ‘Look, if you go through here the living room is there,’ so that I’m laying everything out very specifically and clearly, hopefully,” Koepp explains. “So that later, when that door leads back to that instead of here, it works.”
But it takes a lot of careful planning to be completely disorienting.
“We planned out as much as we could in advance,” Koepp reveals. “There were seven different hallways in the movie that are named. […] There’s Light Hallway, Dark Hallway, Study Hallway, Scary Hallway, Black Hallway, Basement Hallway, Basement Hallway 2. And there are probably, in the house, in real life there’s probably a dozen doors. In our movie there’s twice that many and the doors never open, or frequently don’t open to the same place twice.”
“So there really were flowcharts about hallways and doors and that was some of the most exhausting part of the prep, was just getting all that down between me and the production designer and the D.P. and then helping the actors keep straight what emotional state they’re in,” Koepp says. “Because some of it was shot on location in the real house and then some of it was shot in the stage which we built to match the real house. So they’re going through… could you hang on just one second? My dog is whining to get in.”
Ah, the perils of interviews on Zoom. One brief friendly dog interruption later, Koepp is back to the topic at hand.
“So keeping all that straight, how an actor feels… there’s a scene in the middle of the movie, you’ll remember when Kevin is looking and the little girl disappears the first time and he’s looking for her and his alarm is growing and he keeps ending up in the wrong room. Just calibrating that performance over two locations, a set and reality, and none of the doors are doing what they’re supposed to do, was rather a headache,” Koepp admits.
You can see how all these elements came together in You Should Have Left, now available On Demand.
Of all the places to find a coven of witches, the attic above a Christian youth camp is probably the last place you’d think to look. But that’s just what we find in Camp, a surrealist nightmare of feminist empowerment from Canadian filmmaker Avalon Fast.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) is still reckoning with her involvement in a horrific tragedy when she accidentally contributes to the death of her best friend, Charlie (Giselle Morison). Unable to move on, the traumatized teen takes a job at a rural summer camp, hoping to forget her own sorrows by looking after at-risk kids. She quickly connects with a counselor named Clara (Alice Wordsworth) and finds comfort in her close-knit group of female friends. But a mysterious whisper from deep in the woods warns that they may be leading her down a darker path.
Fast burst onto the scene in 2022 with Honeycomb, a psychological horror film that follows a burgeoning matriarchy. Known for their focus on “Girl Horror” stories, the talented young filmmaker tackles similar themes in Camp as Emily leaves the modern world behind to embrace a dark vision of self-discovery through magic.
Ahead of the film’s U.S. release on June 26, Bloody Disgusting sat down with Fast to chat about the nebulous nature of good vs. evil and the intoxicating power of female-driven horror.
Bloody Disgusting: What inspired this unique story? Did you go to religious summer camps when you were young?
Avalon Fast: I did. I went to lots of different summer camps, but all of them were primarily Bible camps. The memory I have of camp is kind of strange. I was very homesick as a kid, and I didn’t necessarily enjoy all my time there. I definitely remember meeting some interesting girls at camp and having that presence of religion hovering around the whole experience.
BD: I really love the film’s gorgeous natural setting. Camp is the kind of surrealist nightmare that you don’t just watch. You feel it too. How did you approach creating this world?
AF: Well, a huge part of it was working with my cinematographer Eily Sprungman, who’s a very close friend. We spent years prepping, shot listing, storyboarding, and mood boarding. She’d had a similar experience to mine. We grew up around the same place, and so we understood each other’s visions from the get-go. But there are so many other pieces that came together. The costuming, the art, and the animated sequences were done by Sofiya Iurkevych. One of our producers, Taylor Nodrick, was obsessed with shooting on Super 8 film. I’ve always wanted to as well, so all the memory sequences were shot on Super 8. It was just a lot of people with an understanding and a vision for what this project was. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.
To the extent that you’re comfortable sharing, what’s your relationship to witchcraft, and what does Camp have to say about modern witches?
Well, that’s the question of Camp. It’s not that I don’t resonate with any of these things, but I specifically wanted Camp to be a little bit ambiguous around what witchcraft looks like. Is this witchcraft? Are these girls witches? Emily explicitly asks if that’s what’s happening here, and the answer isn’t yes. The film isn’t going to answer that question for you. My relationship to magic and witchcraft? It’s tough. I feel like there’s so much magic, connection, and spirituality that comes from these friendships, the closeness of these women, and what’s happening around them. A lot of what Camp is trying to say or show is just that magic can come out of friendship.
I loved watching these female friendships develop. And you’re right. No one ever says the word “coven,” but you can feel that connection, and you can see a change in Emily as those relationships grow. I’m also really fascinated with the way Camp plays with the idea of good and evil. At one point, Clara says, “Maybe God drew us to the devil,” which stopped me in my tracks. How do you view witchcraft or the magic these girls are experiencing in regard to good and evil?
That was such a huge part of the script’s construction. The story is really trying to keep a balance between those two things. I like asking people if they think these girls are good or bad, because I feel like a lot of people come out of the film thinking one or the other. They’ll say things like “thank God Emily found her people” or “God, I really wish she’d gone home.” I just don’t think there’s ever an answer. I wanted to explore the idea of going down the wrong path, especially coming out of grief. What makes you a bad person, and does healing mean you’re looking to become a better person? I don’t have an answer, but I do feel like that’s a huge part of what Camp is asking. What is good? What is bad? Why did God bring me to the devil?
Yes, because this is all happening at “God camp” in Emily’s words. So how can both of those things exist at the same time? Along those lines, I’m also fascinated by the voice Emily hears in the woods. Without spoiling too much, what is this voice asking, and what is required in return?
Emily comes to camp with a shout into the void, asking can anyone hear me? Does anyone want to? And it’s answered so clearly by these girls, specifically responding only with love, care, support, and trust. It’s like her prayers were answered. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be alright, but Emily is looking for peace. She’s looking for a moment where she feels pure good. And I think, even at its surface level, she does get that experience.
Personally, I don’t really think people are good or bad. I think we all exist somewhere in the middle. Camp centers traditionally villainized characters, but that’s where Emily seems to find her peace, however you choose to define it.
I also wanted to show the experience of having decided that you are a bad person, you’ve made mistakes, and you feel cursed. Then when you meet other people who have done things that you would consider worse, you can actually feel good in their presence. You feel like less of a bad person. I think that’s a huge part of the story as well. Emily’s finding her version of other fucked up people, and she feels less fucked up around them. I’ve found that in my own life. It’s a cool thing. I don’t think it’s bad.
I don’t think it’s bad either. It’s finding your home, your people. We meet Emily in the aftermath of unthinkable trauma. Is this a story about mental health and healing?
Witnessing it myself. witnessing other people experience tragedy and then move through grief, you hear a lot of talk about healing or coming out the other side. There’s so much conversation around what that looks like, with self-care and showing up for yourself. I always felt really averse to it. It annoyed me. I think the beginning of the film speaks to that. The therapeutic version of what getting help looks like is obviously very different from what Camp is showing. And again, I don’t have an answer for what you’re supposed to do. But I think that’s another question I was asking: how do you heal? Do you heal at all? Is that the end goal, or are we just trying to get better? It’s something I experienced in my own grief. And the answer, for me, at least now, is just that I’m not looking to get better. So I felt like I hadn’t. I found it hard to find people to have those conversations with. And I think that’s what I ultimately wanted to make a film about.
I love that unanswered question. In my own experience, I’ve had to reframe what healing actually looks like. There’s not really an endpoint. It’s just finding a way to keep going. There’s also an element of sacrifice in this story, particularly regarding another counselor named Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith). What role does she play in Emily’s journey?
For me, Jo is this human embodiment of Charlie, Emily’s friend. As Jo, she had a life at this camp before meeting Emily, and then was kind of taken over by Charlie’s spirit. I think a lot of people view Emily’s final choice as horrendous and tragic. In a way it is, but for me, if Jo becomes her angel, it’s almost like a self-sacrifice. Jo knows that by sacrificing herself, she’ll be giving Emily power to move forward. In the original script, the girls were supposed to bring out another counselor, JB (Aidan Laudersmith), and burn his body. But I just thought, there’s no way sacrificing this guy could give the girls enough power. There’s just no way, right? Logically, that just didn’t line up for me.
I’m glad you mentioned JB, because he has his own tragic arc. How do men factor into the world of Camp?
The way men factor into my world is so bizarre. I have such little respect for them in my films, which is something I’ve been called on. I think I have to challenge myself in the future to make a movie about a boy because, these boys … It’s not that the men in my films aren’t redeemable, but there’s no depth to these characters. They’re just treated with such disrespect. I don’t know why I do that, actually. That’s something for me to look into. It was the same with Honeycomb. They’re just such peripheral characters. I’ve had people ask about Kayne (Henri Gillespi), the scary guy at the fire, what happens to him? I just think, I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point of the story.
Well, I can say after a lifetime of watching women on the periphery of the story, the course correction feels nice. In a similar vein, I’m in love with your homepage, avalonfast.com. There’s an image of girls on a film set and then a still from Honeycomb in which a blood-covered girl is screaming at the sky. And in the middle, it just says Girl Horror. It’s a really powerful statement that gives me chills. How do you define Girl Horror, and what draws you to these types of stories?
I was obsessed with the term when I started making my movies. It was something I’d come up with to kind of brand myself and describe what I was doing. Then I went through a period where I felt like it was a bit gender exclusive and didn’t interest me as much. But now I’ve come full circle on the term. I think it’s a bit of a commentary on youth and the horror of growing up female. But I think everybody can relate to that experience. I don’t want it to feel like this exclusive thing, that I make movies exclusively for girls, because I don’t think I do. I’m interested in exploring what Girl Horror means. Originally, it was just a title, something I came up with, and now it’s become something that resonates with people. You said it gave you chills. That’s cool for me to hear because there’s obviously some depth there.
Are you working on anything new?
Yes. I am actually making a movie about a boy. That’s the next thing.
That’s exciting! The more I think about feminism, the more I end up coming back to men and boys, because they have a place in the world of Girl Horror too.
Absolutely. It’s all just part of being human.
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