The details are deliberately vague, but the implications are vast as Blunt translates the beleaguered gray’s first televised comment to the world: “Listen.”
This stunning finale to Disclosure Day is the first scene that Steven Spielberg wrote when he dreamed up the story for the film. However, the final line was an invention of his longtime screenwriter and collaborator, David Koepp, who we spoke with at length about the ending of the movie.
“[The last line is] in my very first draft,” says Koepp. “As I typed and was reaching the end, I knew she was going to face the camera. So I wanted her to say something and I wrote the first word of the line because I thought it represents quite a bit. She’s saying ‘listen,’ because the space boy just told me a bunch of interesting stuff, and she’s saying ‘listen to one another,’ which is the heart of the message.”
Koepp also adds the word has a lot of meaning throughout fiction and human history: “It just so happens to be the first word of one of my favorite books, Slaughterhouse-Five,” notes the screenwriter. “It’s also the first word of numerous Hebrew prayers. So I wrote ‘listen,’ and then I just typed a period, because I think when you have one word that says everything you want to say, you should stop talking.”
This sequence was, again, always the ending, dating back to the 40-plus page script treatment that Spielberg first emailed to Koepp while asking for notes. The rest of the movie was in essence reverse-engineered to reach this point. According to the writer, there was never any doubt it would end at the very moment the world saw a living extraterrestrial with their own eyes.
“We always wanted to stop that night in the control room or in a studio, in part because the movie is called Disclosure Day,” Koepp explains. “In the beginning, we’re told that this information is super important, and it needs to get out, and at the end of the movie, the information gets out. That is your story. If you continued, you could never stop. If the movie was called ‘Disclosure Day and the Subsequent Week,’ then you know you got a lot of explaining to do. But our story was accomplished and it was time to end it.”
