Steven Spielberg: “With ‘Disclosure Day’, I Got To Do What I Really Wanted To Do” (EXCLUSIVE)

Fifty-five years after a young, relatively unknown director named Steven Spielberg electrified television audiences with his suspense masterpiece “Duel”, the legendary filmmaker is finally bringing one of his oldest, unexecuted ideas to life.

Following its highly praised world premiere in Paris, Spielberg’s upcoming alien thriller “Disclosure Day” is already generating massive buzz. But while audiences are bracing for a grounded, modern take on extraterrestrial life, the director revealed that one of the film’s most intense sequences actually traces its roots back to his very first feature film.

When “Duel” was originally made for television in 1971, it ran just 74 minutes. To secure an international theatrical release, Universal Pictures tasked Spielberg with shooting an additional 16 minutes of footage. It was during this high-pressure scramble that the director conceived an idea that has lingered in his mind for over five decades.

“I came up with ideas for all these scenes,” Spielberg says. “One of them was going to be that the mysterious truck that is stalking Dennis Weaver’s character pulls up behind his car and starts to push him into a moving freight train. Now, in ‘Duel’, the train passes and Dennis Weaver’s car never gets hit. But with ‘Disclosure Day’, I got to do what I really wanted to do with that sequence.”

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For cinephiles, the revelation that ‘Disclosure Day’ features an evolved, fully realized version of a scrapped ‘Duel’ sequence adds an incredible layer of cinematic history to the upcoming blockbuster. It proves that even when operating on a $115 million canvas, Spielberg remains deeply connected to the raw, suspense-driven mechanics that launched his career.

While Spielberg is bringing his signature tension to the director's chair, long-time collaborator and screenwriter David Koepp (‘Jurassic Park’, ‘War of the Worlds’) was tasked with anchoring the narrative in today’s landscape of government UAP leaks and whistleblower testimonies.

According to Koepp, ‘Disclosure Day’ operates less like the fantasy of E.T. and more like a classic, high-stakes 1970s political thriller.

“They are intense movies that are essentially about the truth,” Koepp explains. “There is a character who wants to tell the truth, and there are a bunch of allied interests who very much want to stop that from happening. Here, the truth pertains to whether or not aliens have visited us."

Though Spielberg has famously touched the stars before, Koepp emphasizes that Disclosure Day is a distinct departure in tone and realism. "While this movie is in conversation with his other films, it is also a new take from him," Koepp says. "I think people will debate how much of this is science fiction or how much of it is, or could be, science fact. From my writing perspective, I would describe it as a sci-fi thriller.”

Rather than completely reinventing the wheel when it comes to alien mythology, Koepp notes that the creative duo chose to weaponize real-world pop culture and established UFO lore to make the threat feel immediate and familiar to audiences.

“The movie plays to what people know because the whole idea is that powerful forces have been covering it up and trying to convince people that what we have heard over the years is not true,” says Koepp. “So it was important to Steven to not deviate wildly from the stories we have been told. That said, we also wanted to bring our own imaginations to it, so we have a lot of original ideas that riff on established tropes.”

With a powerhouse cast led by Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor, a score by John Williams, and action sequences 55 years in the making, Spielberg's latest looks to be an unmissable theatrical event.

Disclosure Day hits theaters on June 12, 2026.