‘Stir of Echoes’ at 25: Kevin Bacon, David Koepp Discuss the Influence of Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg, and the Shadow of ‘The Sixth Sense’

In 1999, there was a film released about a child who sees ghosts that was a massive hit. Five weeks after it came out, “Stir of Echoes” was released.

“There’s no way that ‘The Sixth Sense’ wasn’t going to be a massive hit,” remembers Kevin Bacon. “Both myself and [writer-director David Koepp] — and probably our agents — begged them to put ‘Stir of Echoes’ out first.”

Their plea fell on dead — I mean deaf — ears, and Koepp’s second directorial effort earned $23 million in theaters against the $672 million Shyamalan’s thriller eventually grossed. Yet “Stir of Echoes” was well-received by critics and went on to have a thriving afterlife on home video, where it was successful enough that Lionsgate Films, the company that purchased original distributor Artisan, created a sequel, “The Homecoming,” in 2007.

Commemorating the film’s 25^th year, and a new 4K UHD disc packed with new bonus content, Koepp and Bacon spoke to Variety about their work in bringing it to life. In addition to reflecting on the advice Koepp received from longtime collaborator Brian De Palma (and the inspiration he drew from Steven Spielberg, whose “Jurassic Park” films he wrote), Bacon recalled his reluctance in real life to go through the same kind of hypnosis his character did, and the two of them look back together at the long shadow of Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” — and how time (and the then-nascent DVD market) helped them get out from under it.

You’re a longtime fan of Richard Matheson, writer of the novel that “Stir of Echoes” is based on. What was your approach in adapting this 1958 material for 1999 audiences?

David Koepp: I wanted to do a scary movie. It was the second movie I directed, and the first one [“The Trigger Effect”] was kind of this upper-middle-class drama, bit of a thriller, but it was very much up my own butt. I wanted to work squarely in a genre and I wanted to do something spooky, and I also wanted someone else’s voice because writing and directing both can get a little lonely. I love Matheson — growing up, I remember seeing his name on “Twilight Zone” [episodes] and just knowing this guy was special — so I found his book and I thought it was great, and found Richard and asked him if he’d mind if we moved it. It was set in southern California in the 1950s during the aircraft manufacturing boom, and it was just a specific place that he knew exactly what he was talking about, and about which I knew nothing. And so that working class, Chicago environment that you see in the movie, I knew really well from having visited all my aunts and uncles a million times as a kid, and I felt like that was something I hadn’t seen before.

What were the initial ideas in David’s script that drew you to Tom Witzky?

Kevin Bacon: He’s a guy at a point in his life where his dreams have gone away. He wanted to play music as a career, and as it happens to a lot of people, you turn around and you got responsibilities — you’re married, you got a kid, and you’ve got a mortgage and you can’t really do that. And I think that being out at a party and experimenting with drugs is a way to hold onto a bit of that youthful nature. David, right away, was interested in collaborating on the character. And I’d worked in Chicago a few times, but I’m often drawn to men who, like myself, come from big urban centers and work hard and don’t grow up with money or power. To explore that in Chicago seemed fun.

How did you and Kevin collaborate on the role?

Koepp: I wanted him to be someone who had been thwarted in their dreams and viewed themselves as much less special than they thought they were. When Kevin came in, we took it further because music was going to play an important part in the movie, and Kevin’s a musician and knows — though his success came quickly as an actor — he understood wanting to make the music thing work in a way that maybe it hadn’t yet. He’s a very sensitive and intuitive guy. And it was a great collaboration right from the get-go.

David, I understand you got hypnotized yourself as research.

Koepp: I wanted to have the experience of being hypnotized because I never had been. I believe I went with Ileana Douglas, and I had an experience that was not as deep as I would hope, but I did go into a state of very deep concentration. And I remember when I was under, he had me go into a room and it was a very pleasant book-lined study, and there was a fire burning and a comfortable chair. And I sit down and there’s a pad of paper and I pick up a pen and he said, “Write something and fold the paper over.” And then he had me unfold the paper and read what I’d written — in my mind, not in reality — and I had written, “You’re kidding yourself.” And I don’t know what that meant exactly. I’ve been trying to figure it out for 25 years.

Kevin, you didn’t participate?

Bacon: Very uncharacteristically for me, I said, “No fucking way.” I don’t like that idea of somebody being in control of me. I just had a really bad association with it. But over time I started to meditate, and I started to think about hypnosis as a mode of therapy, and not only did I find it beneficial, but they say that there are people who are for whatever reason open to it — and I’m completely open. I’ve continued to do self-hypnosis and stuff like that has become a part of my life, but at the time, when I was in that movie, I was like, “Nah, not for me.”

After discovering that he can see the dead, Tom becomes obsessed with figuring out why he’s being haunted. How did you prepare for that escalation?

Bacon: I rely on a director to be able to lead me through that journey of tone and intensity and how it plays out. “Maxxxine” is a heightened movie, and [Ti West] said, “I want it to be big. I’ll make sure you don’t look terrible, but I think we should just go for it.” I was like, “That’s perfect for what this movie is, and it makes complete sense.” But “Stir of Echoes” needed to feel grounded.

How did you decide on the visual language of the supernatural?

Koepp: I like the idea of an unsettling movie. And when you make them, it’s all about how well can you create an atmosphere. The more real it seems, the more unsettling it’s going to feel. The idea of having the kid start the movie talking to the presence was in the script. Brian De Palma, who I was working with a lot then, read the script and one of his first ideas was, “Why doesn’t he look right down the barrel of the lens whenever he is talking to the ghost?” And I knew enough to hear a good idea and take it when I was handed it. And then the rest was a collaboration between the production designer and the director of photography Fred Murphy. We just tried to really get everything very, very specific and accurate.

Were there other inspirations or influences from folks that you had worked with, be it De Palma or Steven Spielberg? I guess every filmmaker to some extent steals from Spielberg.

Koepp: They’re not that hard to spot. “Close Encounters,” obviously there’s a great deal in common — there’s something wrong with dad. He’s obsessed. He’s wrecking the house. There was a moment in “Poltergeist” where when the weird things first started happening in the house, Craig T. Nelson comes home and there’s JoBeth Williams on the floor with the kid and the football helmet and lets the kid slide across the floor and she whoops and jumps up and down. It’s fun at first, and I think it’s very true to human nature. If something extraordinary happens, it’s fascinating and exciting, you can’t leave that out just to have the spooks and scares and jumpstarts. So Spielberg, obviously not so much for visuals or shots, but for thematic things like extraordinary things happening to normal, regular people. And there’s some of “The Shining” in that.

As a writer of many stories full of fantastical ideas, what’s your barometer for storytelling where you give a character a choice that may not be the most believable choice, but you know that it serves a story?

Koepp: It goes back to Hitchcock’s thing — in every thriller, and ghost stories are thrillers of a different type — where you must answer the fundamental question, why don’t they call the police? And sometimes the answer is they do, and the police don’t do anything, or they do and that makes it worse. Before my first movie, as long as you’re encouraging me to name-drop, Bob Zemeckis had said, “You’ve got to read ‘Hitchcock/Truffaut’ twice before you do anything.” His other advice was, “Go stand in an airport for 12 hours. That’ll train you to be a director.” I didn’t do the airport one, but I read “Hitchcock/Truffaut” a few times and I picked that up from there. And in “Stir of Echoes,” I have [Tom’s wife Maggie] say, “We’re calling the police.” And he says, “And tell them what? Run it by me. I want to hear how it sounds,” which I thought adequately addressed that. But I also think the answer for Kevin’s character was because he’s compelled and he has to know.

This film comes after you’d worked on “Jurassic Park” and “The Lost World,” which used computer-generated effects in such an inventive and groundbreaking way. What was your experience like with CGI on this film?

Koepp: The CGI stuff we did was less fun, certainly, and less effective than practical solutions that we found. The thing where he pulls his tooth out was very old-fashioned kind of switcheroo makeup. And for the movements of the ghost, Fred and I watched this music video that we liked, and there was some very strange movement in it. So we shot at six frames a second whenever the ghost appeared, but we told the actress to move at quarter speed. So if she was walking across the room, it plays at apparently normal speed, but with a very bizarre shudder about her. Even when she’s just looking at him, there’s these tiny little movements in her face. And it was real, so that made it work better.

Kevin, given all of the digging Tom does and its physical challenges, how taxing was making the film?

Bacon: It was a physical movie in a good way, but I like that. I like physical challenges. I think that they feed into the emotional reality of the character. Even at this age, I’m like, “Yeah, put me in coach, I want to do it.” In fact, I argued for a while to call the movie “Dig.” But there was an interesting moment in that scene. We were shooting in the backyard of this house, and there was only really one small window, and in an improvisational moment, I got frustrated with the digging and threw the shovel away and saw this bucket there and kicked it as hard as I could, and it flew up perfectly and arched and took a window out.

Koepp: You absolutely couldn’t plan it. After it went through the window, I was just behind the monitor praying, please keep going. Please go in the house, please go in the house. And he did.

Bacon: That was completely serendipitous, and it was one of those moments where everybody was trying their best not to say anything because we didn’t want to ruin it. But finally [David] said, “Cut,” and it was like, “Holy shit. That was crazy.” I’m not an athlete, I’m not a kicker. I wasn’t even supposed to kick the bucket, actually, to tell you the truth. It was there.

David, what other unplanned moments made it into the movie?

Koepp: I think the other unplanned things occurred because we had a five-year-old on the set. Zachary David Cope was a terrific child actor who was very unpredictable because he was five. And there’s a moment when he’s at the top of the stairs where he says, “Don’t be afraid of it, daddy,” and Kevin looks at him, and then when we cut back, he seems to just disappear. He just darted behind the thing, because his mom was over there and he was tired and he wanted to leave. But when you take out the sound of him yelling, “Mom,” it was just an odd moment. Working with a really young kid, always you just buckle up, be patient, roll film and see what happens.

“The Sixth Sense” was released five weeks before your opening day. Given the similarities between that and “Stir of Echoes,” were you concerned that Shyamalan’s movie might’ve eaten your lunch?

Bacon: Boy, did we ever.

Koepp: We heard about them when we were in post-production. We got the script and read it and said, “Oh, yeah, there’s a lot of similarities. Psychic kid,” et cetera.

Bacon: I don’t remember the details of how and why and to what extent this happened, but both myself and David — and probably our agents — begged them to put “Stir of Echoes” out first.

Koepp: [We said,] “We should come out first and we can be done in March if you guys want to come out April, May, June, July, anywhere in there.”

Bacon: It’s one of those moments that sometimes happens where you’re told by the powers to “Stay in your lane, actor boy. We know marketing,” and whatever.

Koepp: They said, “No, we read that. It’s soft. We’re not worried about that. We’ll come out four weeks later.”

Bacon: There’s no way that “The Sixth Sense” wasn’t going to be a massive hit. But if we came out first, it would’ve had no effect on “The Sixth Sense.” But the problem for us was that “The Sixth Sense” was such a phenomenon because people went multiple times. It had, really, a terrible effect on “Stir of Echoes.” I also know, out of respect to Matheson, I think that they really wanted to hold on to the title, but it’s not a title that really rolls off your tongue. People to this day will say, “Oh, I loved your movie, ‘Stirring the…’ what was it? So I don’t think that really helped.

Was there a moment of validation for you and the film that came later?

Koepp: Yeah. Whoever owned it — Artisan or it was after Artisan — when they called and said, “We want to do a sequel.” I said, “Oh, I guess you guys did OK.” And they said, “No, no, no. We lost money. We don’t owe you anything, but we’re going to do a sequel.” But it was fine. Would it have done more theatrical business if we’d come out first? I don’t know. But we certainly have had a long tail. It was really discovered on DVD and has stuck around a lot. And look, you and I are talking about it 25 years later, so I’m grateful for what we got.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.