In 1999 “The Sixth Sense,” a spooky-ooky movie involving ghosts and a freaky little kid who sees them, opened theatrically and quickly became a cultural sensation and a box office juggernaut. It would end up earning $672 million at the global box office and garnering six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Its signature line of dialogue (“I see dead people”) would enter the lexicon, endlessly quoted, parodied and spoofed.
But there was another, very similar, equally wonderful movie that opened in 1999 that didn’t get nearly the attention that it deserved – or, indeed, the attention that was bestowed upon “The Sixth Sense.”
That movie was writer/director David Koepp’s “Stir of Echoes,” which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary and as such has a brand-new 4K UHD Blu-ray disc out (available exclusively through Amazon). And, incredibly, one of the new special features details how Koepp was aware of “The Sixth Sense” and urged the studio (the now-defunct Artisan Entertainment) to open their movie before “The Sixth Sense.” They didn’t listen and instead put “Stir of Echoes” out just a few weeks after “The Sixth Sense.” The film opened in third place at the box office.
“They really knew what was best,” Koepp joked. “And you don’t want to think of your movie in terms of some other movie.”
At the time of “Stir of Echoes,” Koepp was already one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood, having penned “Jurassic Park” and its first sequel, “Mission: Impossible” and “Carlito’s Way.” He had also directed a single film – 1996’s “The Trigger Effect,” which Koepp said was “about my mid-‘30s and my fears of having young children.” For his sophomore directorial effort, Koepp was “tired of that upper middle class milieu and I also wanted to do something that was squarely in a genre.” He wanted, in his words, to make a movie “about real people and something weird happens to them.”
Koepp was a fan of “Rosemary’s Baby” and was looking for something to adapt. “I wanted somebody else’s viewpoint in it,” Koepp said. “When you write and direct, it’s very lonely. Getting somebody else’s story into my head, I thought would be helpful.” He found “A Stir of Echoes,” a slender 1958 novel by Richard Matheson, perhaps best remembered as one of the most famous writers of the original “Twilight Zone,” alongside Rod Serling. The original cover called it a “novel of menace,” and the story focuses on a man (played in the eventual movie by a never-better Kevin Bacon) who develops psychic powers, which lead him to investigate a missing neighborhood girl.
Once Koepp found the material, he called Matheson, who couldn’t remember who controlled the rights. Eventually they found out that Universal owned the rights to the story, although Universal suggested that they didn’t own it. They finally admitted that they did own it but that “Stir of Echoes” wasn’t very important to them, Koepp said. Finally Koepp and his producers worked out a deal – they would offer the script to them and they could reject it. They did end up rejecting it. “We got to buy it from them for a minimal amount of money,” Koepp said. “And then we went off and made it.”
The project ticked several boxes for Koepp – it was somebody else’s point of view; he changed the setting from Inglewood, California to the South Side of Chicago “because my mother’s from there and she’s from this Irish family of 10 kids in a very working class environment, I knew that neighborhood from having visited it a million times as a kid;” and he wanted to make a ghost story set in a working class environment. “They’re always upper class, beautiful people in a really nice house,” Koepp said. “I wanted to see something else.”
Ghosts and De Palma’s Notes
Koepp leaned on a friend and frequent collaborator, Brian De Palma, for help. At the time, they had recently made “Carlito’s Way” and “Mission: Impossible.” What wound up being their last collaboration, “Snake Eyes,” opened the year before “A Stir of Echoes.” And they have worked on several projects that never got made, including a Howard Hughes movie with Nicolas Cage.
“I asked him for a million pieces of advice. I think I gave him thanks in the credits of the movie. If I didn’t, I should have. Sorry, Brian,” Koepp said. At one point, De Palma and Koepp sat down and connected their computers and went through the script, with De Palma giving it “an exhaustive questioning.” “That was very helpful, because you need to be challenged on stuff,” Koepp said. “He was super helpful through the script and conceiving and shooting. He was always there with some advice.”
One of the many things that makes “Stir of Echoes” so special is Bacon’s character’s reaction to the phenomena – he’s put under hypnosis at a neighborhood party by his sister-in-law (a scene-stealing Illeana Douglas). When he awakes, he is tapped into this power, but he isn’t scared. Instead, like Richard Dreyfuss in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” he becomes obsessed, throwing himself into what he believes, ultimately, is an unsolved murder.
Koepp can’t remember if this element was in the original. “I thought, Well, if this happened, this would be the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me,” Koepp said. He admits borrowing from “Close Encounters,” especially in a sequence where Bacon is ripping apart the house, looking for clues, but that he also cribbed from “Poltergeist,” famously co-written and produced by Spielberg, like in the earlier sequences where Jo Beth Williams is enamored with the house’s spirits. The encounter with the otherworldly in “Stir of Echoes” makes Bacon feel special, empowered. “I think that’s really important,” Koepp said. “If we discovered the gateway to hell in our backyard at first, it would be cool. And then, you realize, well, no, because, horrible demons come out of it. But at first, that’s unusual and that’s exciting.”
Ghosts have popped up in Koepp’s work a few times. In addition to “Stir of Echoes” and the Steven Soderbergh-directed “Presence,” Koepp directed “Ghost Town,” with Ricky Gervais, about a dentist that can see ghosts.
When Koepp started working on “Stir of Echoes,” he started to research when ghost stories started. He found out that they had been around for at least 400 years, which is when the “type-set came into being.”
“I assume they have always been around and popular,” Koepp said. One of the reasons is, of course, that they concern the unexplained, which opens up a lot of possibilities, story-wise. But Koepp said there’s something more. “Their very premise is hopeful, because if you acknowledge there’s a ghost, that means there’s something after and who does not want to believe that? I think that’s why there’s an endless supply, because we want to see those stories, because we want to believe,” Koepp said. In “Ghost Town,” Téa Leoni gives a theory about why ghosts exist and what they might want or need. “I have this theory that anytime you tell a ghost story, you have to come up with a new reason why or how ghosts exist,” Koepp said. “I tried to do that with all three of these movies.”
‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ and the Mystery Spielberg Project
In addition to “Presence,” Koepp has a very big 2025 – there’s another Soderbergh collaboration, the spy thriller “Black Bag,” opening in March (“I love working with him”) and a return to the “Jurassic Park” franchise with “Jurassic World Rebirth,” from director Gareth Edwards and producer Steven Spielberg.
“The idea of starting afresh. You don’t often get that chance where they give you very few guidelines, except there must be dinosaurs in it,” Koepp said about what drew him back to the franchise for the first time since “The Lost World.”
“Writing those first two movies were some of my favorite experiences in my career so far. The combination of grand adventure and real science is right up my alley. And it was fun to be able to decide on a new tone, because every three movies seems like a good time to change tone and characters in a franchise. It was great to be able to work solely with Steven and make up a story and think of all new characters and all in a different tone.”
For the new “Jurassic World,” Koepp made Nine Commandments, based on the Nine Commandments Chuck Jones made for the Road Runner shorts (“My favorite being the coyote’s worst enemy is always gravity”). “Number one was – the events of the previous six movies cannot be denied or contradicted, because I hate a retcon,” Koepp said. Number two? “All science must be real.” Three is “humor is oxygen.” These continue all the way through more spoiler-y territory, like the villains’ motivation. “I thought, Okay, if we can stick to those…”
Koepp said they were going for the “spirit of the first movie, which is the tone that we would like to get closest to.” Walking onto the soundstage in London, Koepp said, “was weird and trippy to step back in time 30 years, with the jungle and the people in the adventure gear. It even smelled the same.” Koepp added: “It felt low pressure, even though Universal might be horrified to hear that.”
And next year, Koepp collaborates with Spielberg again, for an untitled project said to involve UFOs. It stars Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell, Colin Firth and Eve Hewson. Koepp said that the mystery movie starts shooting in February but he couldn’t say anything about the particulars. “I am so not allowed to say anything,” Koepp said. “I think deep down, it bothers Steven that I’ve read the script,” he joked.
It’s the first Koepp script that Spielberg has directed since “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” back in 2008. “It’s great because it’s an original. It was his idea, his story and working on originals is really fun,” Koepp said. “It’s not that different from ‘Presence’ in that OK, you have an idea, you can’t help but think, Oh, what other movies might this be like? Just to kind of get your bearings, you’re not trying to imitate them. You’re just, Where does this fit in my cinema knowledge? And then you’re solving the demands and problems of that kind of movie. You’re still just texting and emailing back and forth with the director a lot, and doing rewrites and trying to get it right, and then you make it and whether it’s $2 million budget or $100 million, it’s the same.”
Also coming (hopefully) soon is another Koepp novel. (His first two, “Cold Storage,” about an out-of-control fungus, and “Aurora,” about a nationwide blackout, are some of the writer’s very best work – funny, thrilling and emotional.) “In the words of my one of my sons when he was a teenager and he had a paper due, I’m all done. I just have to type it up,” Koepp said. “I have this idea. I really like it. I’ve worked out a lot in my head. I just have to type it up.”
But did Koepp ever think that he would still be talking about “Stir of Echoes” 25 years later?
“I’m surprised that I’m still allowed to do this job 25 years later. It’s nice, the way that stuck around. We made it for $10 million, which was not a great fortune, and it did okay at the box office. It had some headwinds but, boy, did it stick around. It sold on DVDs and cable and all the various ancillary markets and people really like it. I’m not surprised because it had tested extremely well. I think it’s still the best testing movie I’ve ever worked on, which was great,” said Koepp.
After 25 years, we’re still happy to be haunted.
