Trigger Happy
Jurassic Park scripter David Koepp takes aim with The Trigger Effect
By Helen Lee
This article appeared
in the September/October 1996 issue
of Cinescape magazine.
To someone whose screenwriting credits include the effects extravaganzas Mission: Impossible, Jurassic Park and the upcoming Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World, the low-budget thriller The Trigger Effect might seem like small potatoes. But scribe David Koepp hopes that the $8 million Gramercy release, his first directing effort, will deliver the kind of human-scale drama and suspense that Spielbergian fare overwhelms.
Starring Kyle MacLachlan, Dermot Mulroney and Oscar nominee Elisabeth Shue, The Trigger Effect, which is set for release on Sept. 13, centers on a married couple and their best friend who experience a terrifying blackout that renders all their telephones, television and other appliances useless. The three characters, occupying a house at the end of an isolated cul-de-sac, don't know how pervasive the blackout is, and as a result, they make a series of bad decisions. Eventually their fear and uncertainty lead the characters to leave town, a move that only worsens their situation.
With just one big effects scene (depicting the blackout itself), The Trigger Effect is certainly more of a character-driven piece than the high-tech action movies Koepp has worked on in the past. "[In The Trigger Effect the relationships--what goes on between the three main characters--is, in my mind, just as important as what happens to them," Koepp says. "Much of the drama comes from the relationships themselves, while the danger comes through the outside circumstances they have to deal with."
Naturally, Koepp wrote the screenplay himself, and his reluctance to let someone else direct it is a product of his personal involvement with the characters. "When you're a first-time director you don't have a lot of technical expertise. You're not really familiar with the tools of filmmaking. And so you've got to have something that's your strength, you've got to have some reason why you're the guy in the big chair behind the monitor. I felt that...having written this script, I was the guy to do it. It gave me a leg up because I relaly understood the material, but also it was a script that I really wouldn't want to give away and see someone else interpret."
Feeling a personal connection to the characters helped too, Koepp adds. "The main couple, Kyle MacLachlan and Elisabeth Shue, are in their early 30s, and they have an eight-month-old baby. At the time I wrote this I had a baby that was under a year old...and I just felt like that terrain of early marriage and early parenthood was something I could relate to."
So for Koepp, guiding The Trigger Effect was especially rewarding because it was almost like cataloguing a part of his life--and he could decide on all the cross references. "Even when you as a screenwriter do the best possible job, the screenpaly is only a blueprint of what might be. There's a point [as a writer] at which you always have to shut up and leave it to the director, something that's not easy to do when you've been living with these characters for so long." On The Trigger Effect, he says with a grin, "it was nice to not have to stop talking."