Script Apart with Al Horner

We’re starting 2025 way down in the hole, with a look back on one of the undisputed great TV series of our time. Our guest today is a storyteller responsible for shows like Treme, Generation Kill, The Deuce, The Plot Against America and We Own This City, but best known of course for The Wire – a show that began at a crime scene, with blood splattered across granite, police lights painting the pavement red, white and blue. It was here that audiences first met Detective McNulty, played by Dominic West, chatting with a murder witness. A kid had been killed for trying to rob a dice game – a stunt he tried to pull often. Usually, the kid in question, named Snot Boogie, got away with just a beating. This time, not so lucky. “I gotta ask you,” McNulty asks the witness. “If Snot always stole the money, why’d you always let him play?” The witness sighs, and the camera cuts to Snot’s motionless body, gazing towards us from the floor. “Got to,” replies the witness. “This is America.”

That line was the first clue that The Wire wasn’t going to be like other television series. David wanted this police procedural, informed by his own experiences reporting on crime in the area as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun, to be more than another show about cops and criminals; it was to offer a microcosm of America itself. The Wire won no awards. Just 70,000 people tuned into the show’s final episode, capping five critically and commercially overlooked seasons in 2008. Its creator didn’t watch TV – David, in fact, pretty much hated the medium. And yet, The Wire has become recognised as one of the most important pieces of American pop culture of the millennium so far: a novelistic cross section of the Land of the Free, that bloomed from a tale about a phone-tapping team of lawmakers into an interrogation of media, education and everything in between.

The spoiler conversation you’re about to hear is a window into everything that is possible in the medium of television – and everything that’s perhaps wrong with it right now, too. David was really candid about his struggles to get new work off the ground and onto screens in 2025 despite the enormous influence of The Wire. You’ll hear how McNulty came to be, the real-life inspirations behind the show’s most iconic character Omar, how far western society has come in addressing the systemic problems exposed in The Wire (spoiler alert: not very) and much, much more. And you’ll also discover the lost season of The Wire that David devised, but that never made it to air.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Justin Kuritzkes is the very talented writer behind Challengers, the Luca Guadagnino love triangle topping all sorts of end-of-year lists right now. The film is a tennis drama that declared game-set-and-match with critics and audiences alike on release in April, becoming a pop culture sensation in ways usually reserved for franchise films. Steeped in the messy wants and desires of three complicated characters, it's the sort of film that doesn't often dominate discourse. But that didn't stop Challengers becoming a phenomenon whose influence altered fashion, music, memes and more in 2024.

Which for most writers would be enough achievement for one year thank you very much. But Justin’s 2024 didn’t end there. Queer – also directed by Guadagnino – is a William Burroughs adaptation that hit cinemas this month. The film stars Daniel Craig as William Lee – an American expatriate living in 1950s Mexico City who becomes obsessed with a younger man and goes on a quest into the jungle in search of unlocking drug-induced telepathic communication. Both films bear the hallmarks of a storyteller insistent upon bringing deeply nuanced explorations of flawed people searching for connection into multiplexes.

In the double-bill episode you’re about to hear, breaking down in spoiler-filled detail both acclaimed films, we discuss the overlaps between Challengers’ carnal chaos and Charli XCX’s Brat Summer, and what both say about this moment in the culture. We get into the tragic real-life death of Burroughs’ partner, killed by the famed author in an supposed accidental shooting, that lends uncomfortable context to the story of Queer (and that Justin threaded into the movie). And you’ll also hear his thoughts on whether both of these films could be a bellwether moment for movies. In a year that saw franchise after franchise struggle for critical applause and box office might, does the success of a movie like Challengers suggest that an appetite might be growing again for original stories? Now there’s an exciting thought to carry into 2025.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Today, we’re heading in our proverbial Popemobile to Rome, with the BAFTA Award-winning writer of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Men Who Stare At Goats and more. Peter Straughan's latest film, Conclave, directed by Edward Berger, is essentially Succession at the Vatican – a masterful, muted thriller about the election of a new head of the Roman Catholic Church. It tells the story of Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, who's been tasked by the late Pope with overseeing the selection of his replacement. Surrounded by powerful religious leaders in the halls of the Vatican, he soon uncovers a trail of deep secrets that could shake the very foundation of the Roman Catholic Church.

There are more twists and turns in this film than the ruthless Cardinal Tedesco could shake a vape pen at – and in the spoiler conversation, we get to the bottom of each and every one of them, including the shocking revelation at Conclave’s conclusion – an ending that Peter says is both radical and at its core, deeply Christian.

Get ready to discover how the writer's own background as a lapsed Catholic helped guide his writing process. Discover whether or not Donald Trump and Joe Biden served as inspirations for certain members of this warring clergy. And find out what’s really happening as bombs explode outside the Vatican’s walls – a plot thread that we as an audience, sequestered with these cardinals, never quite see the full truth of.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Richard Linklater is a hit man, but not in the assassin sense of the word. No, the hits he trades in are of the movie variety – stylish cult classics that vary in genre and form, but always manage to ignite something powerful in viewers. It’s been that way for three and a half decades now: among his hits, dating back to 1990, are Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, Boyhood, School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly, Slacker, Waking Life, Everybody Wants Some, Fast Food Nation… the list goes on. No wonder the Texan is one of the most respected names in modern American cinema – a force both prolific and patient, as his multiple movies shot across numerous decades prove. 2014 coming-of-age drama Boyhood was filmed across twelve years, with Merrily We Roll Along – a Paul Mescal-starring Sondheim adaptation, to be shot across twenty years – among his current projects.

Earlier this year, he released Hit Man – a romantic comedy of sorts, with a hint of thriller thrown in for good measure, about a bashful college professor with a unique side hustle. Gary, played by the film’s co-writer Glen Powell, has a recurring gig with the New Orleans police force, pretending to be an contract killer. He wears a wire to meet with people seeking to order a hit on their spouses, their work colleagues, their parents and so on. It’s a gig that’s going smoothly for Gary, until he meets Madison, played by Adria Arjona – a woman trying to escape an abusive husband, who Gary begins to fall for. What follows is Linklater in full-blown crowd-pleasing mode.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, we discuss what it was about this true-ish story, adapted from a newspaper article by journalist Skip Hollandsworth, that spoke to Richard. We talk about the baseball injury that put him on a path to filmmaking (and how it might have led to the unstoppable pace with which he makes movies). And we break down every detail of Hit Man, one of the movies of 2024, in spoiler-filled detail.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Season’s greetings, Script Apart listeners. As you may have noticed, it’s the last week before Christmas – the year’s coming to an end, and so, we figured, let’s end 2024 strong. So all this week, on this podcast about the first draft secrets of great movies and TV shows – interviews with the writers behind some of the best movies of the last twelve months that we didn’t manage to cover upon release. And holy prince of House Atreides, what a way to begin today. 

Our guest today made one of the most pulse-racing crime thrillers of the century so far, in the form of 2015’s Sicario. He’s made one of the greatest movies about the power of language of all-time, in 2016’s Arrival. And in 2017 and 2021, he took on the impossible twice – crafting first a sequel to one of the greatest blockbusters ever, in the shape of Blade Runner 2049, and then a movie adaptation of a novel previously thought unfilmable: Frank Herbert’s Dune. 

Yes, the great Denis Villneueve is with us today, stopping by for a chat about how his gargantuan Dune: Part Two – starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendeya – helped define 2024. Not just in the way it dominated the box office, earning almost three quarters of a billion dollars (which by the way, is not bad for a hallucinatory epic full of spice-induced visual experimentation). No, it’s reflective of the year just passed because notions of fascism, faith, false messiahs… these have all been uncomfortable parts of the backdrop of 2024.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Al had thirty minutes to ask Denis his most probing questions about the script. Questions like: was there ever a moment in the making of Dune: Part Two when he contemplated keeping Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen – played by Austin Butler – alive to explore in further films? What does the ending of the film, which veers away from Frank Herbert’s source material, mean for the future of the franchise? And if Dune: Part Two is a film that warns about colonialism and facism, does he believe that cinema has the power to actually dismantle those structures, or is just about expressing a kinda howl of resistance?

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Motherhood is a doggone nightmare in the new film from Marielle Heller. This week, the writer director of movies like The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood returns to cinemas with one of the more surreal-sounding offerings of the year – Nightbitch, a drama in which Amy Adams plays a parent by day and a dog by night. If you weren’t already familiar with the 2021 Rachel Yoder novel on which it’s based, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this film is a frantic comedy, or possibly the mad fever dream of Charlie Kelly from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia – a character with his fair share of hound-based ideas for movies. But no, Nightbitch is something else – an affecting, magical realist tale of a woman pushed over a feral brink by the physical and societal demands placed on women, that needs to be seen to be believed.

On today’s episode, Marielle joins Al Horner to break down in spoiler-filled detail this remarkable film. We get into why the realities of birth – the body horror of it all – are so under-acknowledged in pop culture. We talk about why, after the gentleness of films like A Beautiful Day In The Neighbourhood, Marielle fled in the opposite direction, towards this anarchic scream of a story. And you’ll also discover the truth behind some of the movie’s more ambiguous, unresolved questions: such as, are the women that Adams character befriends also secretly dogs?

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Never meet your heroes. At least, not these ones – the dysfunctional megalomaniacs that murder innocents and seed division in Prime Video’s The Boys, a show as satirically sharp as it is gore-splattered and gross. Created by our guest today, Eric Kripke, the comic book adaptation debuted in 2019 and has since become one of the most captivatingly timely stories in our pop culture landscape, commenting not just on our current era of superhero saturation but on American society at large. Across four seasons, it’s become a funhouse reflection of the way DC and Marvel movies are content machines with often jingoistic messages at their core. It’s mirrored the nation’s split into two furiously opposed political camps: Homelanders versus Starlighters in the case of the show; MAGA versus liberals in real-life. And along the way, it’s done things never seen on TV before. Octopus beastiality. Super-powered sheep. A guy called "Herogasm" whose name kinda says it all. The list goes on.

All of which begs the question: with The Boys’ final season approaching and America currently reeling from another dramatic election, how will the tale of Billy Butcher, Hughie Campbell and co end? It’s a question Eric, previously best known for creating the long-running series Supernatural, has been wrestling with himself. In the wide-ranging conversation you’re about to hear, he’s honest about the difficulty of “landing the plane” when it comes to beloved TV dramas. And as fans of The Boys know all too well, planes don’t often land in this show, so much as they have a habit of exploding in the sky in a fury of laser vision. 

We talk about the psychology of superheroes – why they continue to appeal, what fantasy they offer audiences in a post-9/11 world. We talk about the story choices in season four, and how they came to be, such as Homelander’s rise to near-presidential power. And you’ll hear whether season five of this show that’s dovetailed through the years with real-life events in American politics, will respond to the fact that Donald Trump has just entered the Oval Office again.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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The second in our series of ScreenCraft Summit throwback interviews, running on the Script Apart feed in anticipation of December's summit – it's Mike Schur! The lauded creator of The Good Place made his first appearance on Script Apart in 2022 and, a few weeks later, spoke with Al again in front of hundreds of emerging writers to break down his wider writing process on shows like The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Saturday Night Live and Parks & Recreation.

This was a wonderful conversation to be a part of – Mike is as hilarious in person as you'd expect of such a magnificent comic resume, and his insights are remarkable. Strap in for some brilliant observations on the elasticity of time in great sitcoms, the importance of punching up rather than down when writing jokes and what it is that keeps him turning up in front of a blank page time and time again – his relationship with the craft of writing itself. Enjoy, and don't forget to sign up for this December's ScreenCraft Summit by visiting ScreenCraft.org today.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Sofia Coppola. Is anymore introduction really necessary? As writer-directors go, her influence (and place in one of American cinema's greatest dynasties) can't be overstated. The filmmaker is one of the best-known and most-loved working today, renowned for the lilting feel and femininity of films like Lost In Translation, The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, On The Rocks and most recently, Priscilla.

In 2022, Al spoke to Sofia about her writing process, for the ScreenCraft Summit – a weekend of interviews with great storytellers, designed to inspire emerging writers. With the latest Summit just weeks away, featuring a host of amazing guests, we thought it'd be a great time to post Al and Sofia's conversation from that event – a freewheeling chat about hotels, the intimacy with which we get to know her characters, her love of using photo books as mood boards for her movies – and why she still experiences self-doubt, even today.

Sign up for this December's ScreenCraft Summit by clicking here.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Here's a question: is the “spirit of the Blitz” that’s become one of the pillars of British self-identity actually a myth? The idea of ordinary people coming together in a moment of collective resilience during WWII is invoked regularly in UK politics and beyond. There might be more to that story than meets the eye, though, according to Blitz – the astonishing new historical drama from revered British artist Steve McQueen. The film forefronts the experiences of people of colour and other marginalised communities during the notorious London bombings – people who were excluded from that togetherness, often with violent force. Instead of the “stiff upper lip” that Britain has since proudly woven into its self image, Blitz teases a more feral reality, full of community, yes, but also opportunistic criminals robbing the dead and sex on the tube tracks of Stepney Green underground station. 

In this spoiler conversation, Steve breaks down what’s fact and what’s fiction when it comes to this mythologised part of British history – and how he turned it into a cinematic experience unlike any other in modern memory. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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On today’s episode – a crime thriller? A musical? A coming-out drama? Emilia Pérez, the new film from famed French auteur Jacques Audiard, is all of the above and somehow none of these things at all. It really is hard to understate the disorientating excess and madness of this somewhat opinion-splitting new Netflix awards contender, which is tipped for Oscar glory after picking up the jury prize at Cannes earlier this year. Jacques is, of course, the writer-director of works like A Prophet, Rust and Bone, See How They Fall, The Beat That My Heart Skipped and The Sisters Brothers, a masterful western from 2018. But Emilia Pérez is like none of those films. It’s a film that sees Jacques – who, at seventy-two years young, could be making victory-lap movies at this stage in his career – swinging for the fences. 

The movie follows Rita, a criminal defence lawyer played by Zoe Saldaña, who is kidnapped and brought before someone terrifying – Manitas Del Monte, one of Mexico’s most feared cartel bosses, played by Karla Sofía Gascón. Manitas has something to ask of Rita. This crime lord – responsible for such brutal bloodshed, in a country blighted by thousands of cartel-related missing persons – wishes to fake their death and transition gender. And to do so, they need Rita’s help. Reborn as Emilia Perez, this character embarks on a new life that she finds, over the course of the movie, had to untangle from what came before.

Al caught up with Jacques a few days after the film’s release on Netflix to break down the script, with a little help from his translator, Nicholas Elliott. Get ready to learn about the version of Emilia Pérez in which the character of Rita was a man, and in which a romance blossomed between the lawyer and the eponymous former crime lord. You’ll hear about why Jacques is so drawn to characters attempting to reinvent themselves in his work, and there’s also a breakdown of the story’s dramatic climax – an ending that asks complicated questions of the audience, questions with no easy answers.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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On Election Day in America, with the nation at the polls, Al spoke with a man uniquely placed to comment on the fractures underpinning the battle for the nation. Chuck Palahniuk, you see, is the author of 21 novels, but probably best known for his first - 1996’s Fight Club, later adapted by David Fincher into one of the defining films of its era. Since then, the story has had this unexpected cultural half life, going on to become an unlikely part of the rhetoric of modern politics. The term "snowflake," popular with young men within the right-wing MAGA movement, is derived from Chuck's novel. But the connections don’t end there between Chuck’s work and an America ablaze with male rage, as cultural commentators frequently put it. Across his career since that culture-shifting story, the author’s work has continued to contemplate the "real" America – not what the country wants to be, but the sometimes uncomfortable reality of what it could become. In books like his 2018 novel Adjustment Day – about a version of America splintered off into different enclaves sorted by political ideology – hints lie at perhaps how we got here. His latest novel, Shock Induction, released earlier this year, feels just as loaded with insights about our time.

On this today's show – a conversation to mark the 20th anniversary of Fincher’s Fight Club, with the man from whose imagination Tyler Durden first sprung. Chuck didn't write the movie adaptation of Fight Club – that honour fell to screenwriter Jim Uhls. Instead, Chuck was able to witness from afar the oddity of this story he’d written – about a white-collared insomniac who forms an underground bare knuckle fighting ring with an enigmatic soap salesman – becoming itself commodified and turned into merchandise, despite its warnings against consumerism. He got to witness the film intersect in a strange way with 9/11 and an immediate shift in the culture afterwards, away from subversion. And he was left with the question, what will Chuck Palahniuk do next? The answer was a bibliography full of more grime, dirt, depravity and yes, mayhem.

This show is typically an interview series reserved for screenwriters, but when Al was reading Chuck's brilliant latest novel, Shock Induction, released earlier this year, he was overrun with questions for the Portland-based author. Questions like: what is it that's so necessary about the grotesquery of his stories, in an increasingly sanitised culture of storytelling? Where exactly did the anti-corporatism of his work come from? How did he devise that twist in Fight Club that continues to reverberate to this day? And of course, what's the latest on rumours of a Fight Club rock opera that he was once said to be devising with Fincher?

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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In 1978, a Texan-born man went on national TV, competing in and ultimately winning an episode of the popular American game show The Dating Game. This man was, according to host Jim Lange, a "successful photographer" who you might find "skydiving or motorcycling." Left out of that description – unknown to Lange, the show's producers and millions watching at home – was a terrifying secret: that Rodney Alcala was a rapist and murderer, who would eventually be sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2021, leaving behind a terrible legacy of unthinkable violence – conclusively linked to eight murders, with the true number of his victims thought to be closer to 130.

This week on Script Apart, Al is joined by Ian McDonald – the screenwriter behind Woman Of The Hour, an Anna Kendrick-directed thriller telling the tale of Alcala's Dating Game appearance. Other storytellers might have approached this real-life story determined to answer one question: what possessed a man meant to be lying low, evading the law, to parade himself in front of the nation, for all to see? Ian, though, had a different question that he wanted to get to the bottom of. Never mind the motivations of this cowardly abuser. How was his killing spree enabled by a broader culture of misogyny, prevalent in the media?

To answer that question, the film centres not on Alcala, but on Cheryl Bradshaw, a real-life contestant on that episode of The Dating Game, played by Kendrick. In the spoiler conversation you're about to hear, you'll discover why that is, what the meaning of the film's evocative title is, and what it is about society that seems to reward misogynists – then and now, more than ever.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Today on Script Apart – religion, Radiohead and ratcheting terror, in the basement of a man who has spent way too long on the "Monopoly" Wikipedia. Four years after their first appearance on Script Apart, breaking down their franchise-launching script for A Quiet Place, writer-director duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are with us once again, to unpick their theology-themed new horror movie, Heretic.

The film tells the tale of two Mormon missionaries, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes, played by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, who find themselves trapped in the home of a man supposedly curious about joining their church. Quickly, they realise that this eccentric Englishman’s true curiosities lie in death, resurrection and the etymology of religion itself. If pulse-quickening tension is your religion when it comes to horror, your prayers have been answered – Heretic is masterful in the way it mounts its shocks en route to a terrifying conclusion.

In this spoiler conversation, Bryan and Scott had plenty to say about their personal journeys with religion – the good that it contributes to the world, as well as the worrying ways that it’s often leveraged by malicious opportunists in our political spheres, as a means of grabbing power. You’ll hear about the evolution of Mr. Read, Hugh Grant’s absurdly unsettling antagonist – and there’s also mention of a “spiritual sequel” to Heretic that they’re working on right now. Apologies to Taco Bell. We don’t talk about Taco Bell.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Love hurts in the dizzyingly unpredictable Strange Darling – a thriller that upends expectations at every turn, courtesy of our guest this week, Las Vegan-born writer-director JT Mollner. JT grew up surrounded by immersive storytelling – his father ran a haunted house in Vegas that he helped conceptualise every Halloween as a child. That adolescence came in handy when crafting this tale of a serial killer on the final days of a bloody rampage through rural America: Strange Darling, though not a horror, feels decidedly like a sprint through a madhouse in all its gruesome shocks and Tarantino-esque play with chronology.

On this spoiler-filled episode of Script Apart, the filmmaker breaks down the film and its corkscrewing structure. We get into how the film uses chronology as a storytelling weapon, what JT is willing (and unwilling) to reveal about the visions inspiring the killer's rampage, and the idea of the movie as a romantic drama – one that just so happens to be full of murder.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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This week on the show – Azazel Jacobs is here! Azazel is writer-director of the new Netflix drama His Three Daughters, one of the most deeply moving films of the year so far, and a stunning addition to a filmography already brimming with intriguing tonal blurs and beautiful realised characters. You might know Azazel for acclaimed works like The GoodTimesKid, Momma's Man, Terri, The Lovers and French Exit. This film, though, cuts closer to the bone for the filmmaker (and audiences) than ever before, telling the tale of a tense, tender family reunion – one taking place within a heavy cloud of preemptive grief.

Elizabeth Olsen, Carrie Coon and Natasha Lyonne play estranged siblings Christina, Katie and Rachel in the film, summoned to their childhood home as their father enters his final days. In the quiet wait, ghosts from their childhoods reemerge and threaten to pull them further apart. In the emotional spoiler conversation you're about to hear, Azazel and Al break down why it is the painful wait for a loved one to pass away is rarely acknowledged in media – and delve into who these characters were for the filmmaker, who describes emerging from the making of this film a changed man.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Great Scott, it’s been 35 years since the second instalment in one of the most beloved trilogies of all time – Back To The Future Part II, directed by the great Robert Zemeckis and co-written by our guest today, Bob Gale! Bob first guested on Script Apart in 2021, breaking down his first draft of 1985’s iconic debut outing for Marty McFly and eccentric scientist Doc Brown. You may remember that episode detailing how Bob’s original vision for that film was quite wildly different – Doc Brown had a pet chimp and the movie featured a huge nuclear explosion. Part II similarly went through multiple iterations, with the film initially expected to include a third act set in the 1960s. Instead, Bob landed on a story full of darkness that broke from the optimism of the first film to depict a dark future – one that in many ways, we’ve actually come to inherit. 

In the conversation you’re about to hear, you’ll discover what drew Bob to that darkness, the secret to Back To The Future’s longevity and which of Part II’s predictions he’s surprised have come to pass in real life. Thanks to Bob for being a brilliant guest once again. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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For a film built around a song titled Remember Me, Pixar's Coco sure has proven absolutely unforgettable in the seven years since its release. Directed by past Script Apart guest Lee Unkrich, the animation told the story of Miguel – a young boy voiced by Anthony Gonzalez who is accidentally transported to the Land of the Dead, where he seeks the help of his deceased musician great-great-grandfather to return him to his family and reverse their ban on music. It’s quite simply one of the richest and boldest family movies of all time, confronting ideas around death, legacy and remembrance in a way that moved the needle culturally in this way that only Pixar can. Much like how Inside Out gave parents a framework for talking to their kids about emotions, Coco is renowned today as a text that helps facilitate conversations with children about what it means when someone passes away.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, co-writer Matthew Aldrich drops by to break down the film in detail. We discuss the musical version of the film that was in development before he joined the project. We get into how the film’s villain, Ernesto Del La Cruz, represents the folly of chasing the wrong sort of remembrance: a remembrance of celebrity and fame, rather than family. And you’ll hear about what makes Remember Me such a beautiful part of Coco – the genesis of that astounding piece of music, that lands like a gut punch when we hear it for the final time in act three.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley are the co-writers (and in Greg's case, director) of Sing Sing – a prison drama that tips on its head the entire prison drama genre. This is a film that forefronts humanity and tenderness instead of the violent and savagery that often powers movies set in jail. There are prison dramas we all adore but how many times have we seen a vision of prison that depicts those places as violent pits where society’s most dangerous animals stew in their savagery?

In Sing Sing – about a group of convicts who stage a play at the Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison near New York – our characters, many of whom are played by real-life graduates of the Rehabilitation Through The Arts programme seen in the movie, are depicted with a rare sensitivity. Whatever their pasts, as this group of would-be thespians build towards the staging of a comedy titled Breakin' The Mummy's Code they’re human to viewers in a way cinema rarely affords. It’s besides the point to say that the film is already being tipped for Oscar glory – this film and the performances of Colman Domingo and newcomer Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin in particular, is a phenomenal achievement in itself without awards validation. Don't miss this in-depth conversation about how it came together on the page.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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"His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them." So wrote Patricia Highsmith in her seminal literary thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955. You might also characterise the work of our guest today, the talented Mr. Steven Zaillian, this way. The worlds and characters of his films and TV shows are imagined in such rich detail and complexity that you can absolutely imagine him believing them to be real as he crafts them on the page. In fact, that level of detail and depth has been his calling card for over thirty decades in Hollywood now. From 1990’s Awakenings and 1993’s Schindler’s List, which won Steven an Oscar, all the way to films like Gangs of New York, American Gangster, Moneyball, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Irishman, there’s a thrillingly convincing quality about whatever story he’s telling – oftentimes, his characters are people you can imagine pulling up a barstool next to you and telling you a tale you’ll never forget.

This month, he’s up for an Emmy for his work with Ripley – a Netflix adaptation of Highsmith’s novel, that Steven acted as showrunner for, writing and directing every episode. The series is a hypnotising ten hours in the company of a conman, Tom Ripley, who’s hired by a wealthy businessman to convince his son to return home from a life of leisure abroad on the Italian coast. But the more Tom – played here by Andrew Scott – ensconces himself in the lives of Dickie Greenleaf, played by Johnny Flynn, and Dakota Fanning as his partner, Marge Sherwood, the more his lies and his lust for what Dickie has mutates into something murderous.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Steven tells us about the relevance of fraudster stories in a time of Trump and other public deceivers. We get into the writing tricks and tips that make you root for the morally thorny characters he often writes. And the rationale behind every change from both the novel and the Matt Damon-starring 1999 adaptation of Ripley is uncovered too, as we delve into the slightly different ending to this version of the tale and the meaning of Italian artist Caravaggio’s presence throughout this story. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Unless you’ve spent the last year locked in a radiation-proof vault deep below the surface of the Earth, you’ll have no doubt heard about Fallout – a TV video game adaptation unlike any other. Created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and our guest today, former Portlandia writer Graham Wagner, the show brought to life the blue suits, barbarism and bizarre humour of one of the biggest game franchises of the century so far, transporting viewers to a nuclear-scored Wasteland hundreds of years in the future. The surprises of this Prime Video series, produced by Westworld creators Jonathan “Jonah” Nolan and Lisa Joy, just kept coming across the eight episodes comprising its first season, with each revelation a powerful observation about the greedy workings of corporations to whom nothing’s more important than their profits – not even human survival.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Today on Script Apart – a film about a man trapped in an air-conditioned purgatory, full of fast food joints, luggage carousels and people in transit, while he himself remains frustratingly locked in place. 2004’s The Terminal is the Steven Spielberg-directed tale of Viktor, played by Tom Hanks: a kind-hearted soul marooned at an American airport owing to a unique diplomatic situation that broke out his fictional home country, Krahkozia, while he was flying to the US. The film was written by our guest today, Sacha Gervasi, who you might also know from movies like the music documentary Anvil and the Peter Dinklage-starring My Dinner With Herve, as well as the 2012 Alfred Hitchcock biopic with Anthony Hopkins.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Sacha and I get into what The Terminal taps into that gave it such universal appeal on release, twenty years later and also notably during the pandemic, when people were confined to their own purgatories in lockdown. You’ll discover the darker tone of the original draft of the movie, written for Sam Mendes to direct before a reshuffle behind the scenes. And you’ll discover what the film sought to express about the arbitrary nature of borders, as well as the truth behind the real-life inspiration for the film: Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who lived in Charles De Gaulle airport for eighteen difficult years.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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This week on Script Apart – a sit-down on a proverbial park bench to pick through the box of chocolates that is Forrest Gump, with the legendary screenwriter behind the classic drama, Eric Roth! Marking the film's 30th anniversary, Roth regales us with secrets from the Gump's creation, breaking down why he elected not to make Forrest a NASA astronaut (unlike in the book on which it's based) and what makes the character so enduringly endearing.

You'll also discover how the relationship between Forrest and Jenny was informed by Eric's own love for his wife, what the feather at the beginning of the film represents, and what happened to the ill-fated sequel that Roth wrote – only to abandon in the days after 9/11.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Two sisters on opposite sides of the Force; one terrible trauma that sent them on those divergent paths... Set one hundred years before the Skywalker Saga that would define a galaxy, The Acolyte – Disney's newest Star Wars TV show – explores uncharted territory for the franchise in more ways than one. Not only have fans  never seen this era in Star Wars lore explored on-screen before; it's also a departure in just explicitly it explores the idea that the Jedi as an institution might be corruptible and flawed. For 47 years, since George Lucas' game-changing A New Hope, the Jedi have been held up as a noble band of guardians. This new series, from Russian Doll creator Leslye Headland, asks the question: what if there's more to that nobility than we've come to understand?

In a spoiler-filled interview, recorded days after the show's finale, Leslye breaks down its major surprises, key scenes and crucial characters – explaining how Fight Club, Frozen and Kill Bill played a significant part in its conception...

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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A Quiet Place: Day One is an alien invasion tale well and truly worth shouting about. Written and directed by our guest this week, Milwaukee-born filmmaker Michael Sarnoski, it’s a rare example of sequel that prioritises its characters and their connections instead of chasing bigger, more bombastic explosions. Where most franchise follow-ups get bogged down in expanding the mythology and upping spectacle of previous instalments, this one is focused on telling a devastatingly simple story. Sam, a cancer patient by Lupita Nyong'o, realising her world is ending, crosses New York in search of one last slice from her favourite pizzeria. 

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Sarnoski tells Al about what inspired such an intimate approach to tackling a Quiet Place sequel. We get into the scene in Central Park that unfortunately had to be scrapped and the subtle joke involving Sam’s cat’s name that acts as a clue to the structure/inspiration behind the movie. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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The Bikeriders is another triumph for Little Rock-born filmmaker Jeff Nichols. Inspired by and named after a 1968 photographic study of Chicago bikers by Danny Lyon, the film charts the rise and fall of not just a motorcycle gang but also an era in American history. It stars Austin Butler as young rebel Benny, Jodie Comer as his long-suffering partner Kathy, Mike Faist as Lyon and Tom Hardy as gang founder Johnny – and that’s just scratching the surface of a brilliant ensemble cast.

At first glance, the drama seems like a departure for Jeff, known for movies like sci-fi adventure Midnight Special and apocalyptic drama Take Shelter. Peer a little closer at his screenplay, however and you soon start to see familiar Nichols-isms. For starters, there’s a “rurality” to Jeff’s work too, with so many of his stories unfolding down down dusty dirt trails, in parts of America that Hollywood doesn’t often turn its cameras towards. Then there’s the themes of masculinity, finality and devotion that simmer beneath the surface of all his movies, and rear their heads again here.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, we get into those recurring threads across his work, the post-Vietnam context for the film’s final act, the influence of Scorsese’s Goodfellas on the first act’s structure and the modern male malaise that this film comments on. Be sure to watch the film before tuning in.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Brian Duffield is one of the most original writer-directors in genre cinema right now – a spec script maestro whose films are homages to the popcorn thrill rides he grew up on, without being nostalgic replays of those ‘90s classics. Instead, his movie’s always offer something new. Take Spontaneous, for example – his brilliant coming-of-age directorial debut romcom, set in a high school in which students are spontaneously combusting. Or even more pertinently, one of last year's most thrilling horrors: No One Will Save You, Brian's tale of a young woman with a chequered past, whose solitary life is interrupted by an alien invasion. The film plays out almost entirely without dialogue.

We had the pleasure of chatting with Brian about who Brynn was to him, the idea of this story being about alienation in more ways than one, and exactly what is happening as the film reaches its ending – a moment that had the internet rife with theories as to exactly what goes down as Brynn’s fight to survive takes on a dreamy, seemingly utopian turn.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Drew Pearce is the writer of movies like Iron Man 3, Hobbs and Shaw and 2018’s Hotel Artemis – the Scottish-born storyteller’s directorial debut. This week, he’s back in cinemas with The Fall Guy – a car-flipping, boat-exploding, bullet-dodging, unicorn-hallucinating love letter to practical filmmaking that’s pure adrenaline and charisma. The David Leitch-directed film – loosely adapted from the 1980s TV show of the same name – stars Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers, a Hollywood stuntman whose career isn’t the only thing derailed when he suffers a terrible accident on the set of an action movie. His fledgling romance with emerging director Jody Moreno, played by Emily Blunt, also hits the rocks – that is, until an opportunity arises to perhaps win her back. The star of Jody’s new sci-fi blockbuster, Metalstorm, has gone missing. If Colt can use his stuntman skills to track down the Hollywood A-list actor he used to double, he decides that Jody might give him another try.

In the spoiler conversation with Drew that you’re about to hear, you’ll discover how the film began life as a more straight-action, Mission: Impossible-inspired stunt bonanza. You’ll also hear how there was a moment where The Fall Guy was going to be a “jukebox musical” devoted to the band Kiss. We talk about how the movie fits into a lineage of films about filmmaking that runs from Singing In The Rain to Babylon; what the movie is designed to express about the replacement of practical filmmaking techniques with VFX tools; and how a near-death experience years ago, in which Drew technically died for a minute or two, gives him a different appreciation of moments like this one, on the brink of releasing one of summer 2024’s most joyful, exciting blockbusters.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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“You’re remembered for the rules you break.” So says Ben Affleck in Air, the 2023 sports marketing drama that took its own advice. Written by our guest today, Alex Convery, Air shouldn’t have been the captivating cinematic slam-dunk it turned out to be. At least, not on paper. A drama about the creation of the Nike Air Jordan trainer? That sounds like a film that’s gonna play out largely in grey, air conditioned boardrooms. It sounds like a film that’s gonna have limited suspense, because we all know that Air Jordan became this huge sports brand. It also sounds perhaps like it could be a nakedly capitalistic celebration of a product – Hollywood scraping the barrel in a time of endless IP and emphasis on “brand recognition."

But Air turned out to be a film about Nike. At least, not entirely. It’s a drama about our connection to “things” and the intelligent people that foster those connections – who recognise how, for better or worse, in a capitalist world, products like an Air Jordan trainer can become these symbols of the lives we want to lead and the people we aspire to be. Directed by Affleck from Alex’s spec script, it starred Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro and Viola Davis as Deloris Jordan, mother to Michael Jordan – the greatest basketball player of all time. Alex had the idea for the movie after watching Netflix documentary series The Last Dance and – well, we'll leave the rest for him to explain.

It was a total pleasure chatting with Alex about what Air says about 1980s America, and about stories that use an un-obvious perspective to frame their subject – Jordan through the eyes of a marketing exec, like Jesus through the eyes of the devil in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. We also get into how Air fits into a new Hollywood trend of movies based on products: Barbie, Blackberry, Tetris and so on. Alex had great insights on it all.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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 If you went down to the woods in July 1999, you were in for a big surprise. The Blair Witch Project – our movie this week, one of the most notorious horror films in modern movie history – was a phenomenon that no one saw coming. Its reverberations are still being felt today, not just in horror but in movie-making at large. Is tale of a group of indie filmmakers out in the wilderness, making a documentary about a mythical witch, is credited with birthing the found footage genre – a huge staple of blockbuster filmmaking for decades to come. But maybe more importantly, the film announced to emerging storytellers that, in a new era of digital video and the internet, anyone could be a filmmaker, able to make and market a film to audiences. All you needed was imagination. 

The Blair Witch Project was written and directed by Daniel Myrick and our guest today, Eduardo Sánchez – two friends fresh out of film school. In the conversation you’re about to hear, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the movie, Ed looks back at the film’s conception. We get into what psychological tricks found footage as a format plays on the audience’s brain to heighten their sense of terror. And you’ll discover how deep mythology of the Blair Witch goes – a mythology that, as you’ll hear towards the end of our chat, isn’t finished scaring audiences yet.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Today on Script Apart – another in our "Stage Apart" series about great plays! Our guest this week is a storyteller beloved across stage and screen, whose 2009 play Jerusalem is frequently referred to as the best play of the century so far. His acclaimed theatre productions includes 1995’s Mojo, 2012’s The River and 2019’s The Ferryman – but movie fans might know him better for films like Edge of Tomorrow, Ford v Ferrari, the James Bond movie Spectre and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. 

Yes, Jez Butterworth is here, discussing his triumphant return to London’s West End with The Hills of California, directed by Sam Mendes. The play tells the tale of a group of sisters reuniting in the faded seaside town they grew up in, aspiring towards musical stardom. Decades after the death of that particular dream, they’re left to reckon with what their lives became versus what they once imagined for themselves – with one painful secret no longer able to be confined to the past. It’s an incredibly moving and at times, hilarious meditation on regret, Britishness and the vultures that circle showbiz – inspired in part by Jez’s run-ins with disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, who the playwright once punched in the face.

In the spoiler-free conversation you’re about to hear, he tells us why he continues to gravitate towards  “death of a dream” stories. We also discuss how the experience of tragically losing his beloved sister informed the play, and have a beautifully vulnerable discussion about a period of Jez’s life in which his mental health was suffering – and how that intersected with his experience of working on Edge of Tomorrow. We hope you enjoy.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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This week on Script Apart – a storyteller who began penning films like 28 Days Later and The Beach, before stepping behind the camera as the writer-director of stories that go to fascinating philosophical places, asking borderline unanswerable questions about humanity along the way.  Alex Garland's fourth time in the director's chair, Civil War, is his most explosive film yet – a film that riffs on America's intensely fractious present by imagining a future in which the country has torn itself in two.

The tale of a group of photojournalists – led by Kirsten Dunst’s Lee – travelling towards Washington as the country unravels is a tour de force on par with Ex Machina, Annihilation and other movies in Alex’s impressive filmography. But how does the movie connect (or decline to connect) to our current political landscape and what are the storytelling philosophies that continue to make Garland one of the most interesting filmmakers operating today? Find out by tuning in.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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This week on Script Apart, we’re broadcasting from the Upside Down. Yes, grab your Eggos and Metallica CDs for a special, spoiler-free conversation all about Stranger Things: The First Shadow – the first theatre production that we’ve covered on the show, as part of a new strand of episodes called "Stage Apart."

The First Shadow is a show that, as reviews have underlined, accomplishes things not thought possible in a play till now; as a spectacle, it's breathtaking in the way it conjures all manner of demogorgon-related chaos, live in front of you. But also staggering is what the show achieves as a piece of storytelling. Which is why this week, we’re delighted to be joined by the wonderful Kate Trefry – writer of a great many of the show’s best episodes, and writer of The First Shadow.

Working from a story created by Jack Thorne and show creators The Duffer Brothers, Kate penned The First Shadow as a prequel, pulling the curtain back on how and why the Upside Down came to Hawkins in the first place. Set in 1959, it introduces us to younger versions of fan favourite characters like Hopper, Joyce and Bob Newby, as a mystery unfolds in their sleepy hometown; beloved household pets are turning up not just dead but grotesquely disfigured. This spate of killing coincides not just with the production of a play at Hawkins High School that Joyce is directing, but also with the arrival of new kid Henry Creel – a kid that, those up to date with the latest season of Stranger Things will know, has a dark future he’s about to inherit.

Stranger Things is one of the biggest TV shows of the last decade by pretty much any metric and in the conversation you’re about to hear, we talk to Kate about why that is. We get into how the tale of Eleven, Hopper and co has become almost a new American myth – and discuss what The First Shadow does to extend and complicate that fable. Without giving anything away, we discuss how The First Shadow ties the horrors of the Upside Down to 1950s racism and America’ involvement in World War II. You’ll also hear about the supposed “real-life” incidents – including a horrifying alleged event called The Philadelphia Experiment – that intersect with what happens in Hawkins in the astounding The First Shadow. Listen out, also, for a tease at what season five has in store, as Stranger Things approaches its final ever episodes.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Welcome to another Script Club episode of Script Apart, in which storytellers we admire pick a film or show they love and talk about why it's special. Today, revered Folio Prize-winning author Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties, In The Dream House) breaks down the dystopian delights of Alfonso Cuarón's Children Of Men, co-written with Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby.

Based on a 1992 novel by P.D James, this 2006 action thriller forecast a Britain in the mid-2020s on the verge of collapse, governed by a party waging a cruel war on asylum seekers as a distraction from its problems. The UK may not currently be staring down a fertility crisis like the one depicted in Cuarón's film, but Children Of Men was, in other ways, eerily ahead of its time in some of its predictions.

In the spoiler conversation you're about to hear, Carmen shares what she finds so impactful about the tale, and the influence it has had on stories of her own, such as 2017's chilling Inventory.  Carmen is one of Al's favourite working writers, and someone whose work has been a north star in his own fiction, so we were delighted to have her on the show, breaking down a drama that only grows more relevant with each passing year.

** COME TO OUR FOURTH BIRTHDAY LIVE SHOW! Script Apart presents Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa with Neil and Rob Gibbons at Picturehouse Central, London – March 11th **

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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“We are what we survive.” That’s the message of Expats, the powerful new limited series from our guest this week, Lulu Wang. Lulu is a writer-director whose stories are unflinchingly intimate portraits of characters captivatingly full of contradictions. In this show, adapted from a novel by Janice Y.K. Lee, those characters are three women, different in age, class, personal circumstance and relationship to motherhood, who become linked by an unthinkable tragedy. These women’s stories combine to tell a tale of grief and privilege in a modern day Hong Kong battered by typhoon weather and simmering political dissent. And they do so movingly.

Lulu till now has been best known as the writer-director of 2019’s The Farewell, based on a radio story she wrote in 2016 for This American Life, about her own Chinese-American immigrant family. This follow-up to that breakout hit sounds like from the outset some kind of thriller: Nicole Kidman plays Margaret, an American living in Hong Kong whose youngest son disappears at a night market. Instead of a pulse-pounding pursuit, full of cops, clues and criminals like most abduction dramas, Expats instead unfolds at a meditative, mournful pace, against the backdrop of the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, celebrating the magnificent finale that dropped today, Lulu discusses about what happened to Margaret's child Gus, why the show refused to give an explanation for his disappearance and instead prioritised what it means to grieve; how grief doesn’t shrink, leaving us instead to grow around it.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Today on Script Apart, we're heading to Malia with Molly Manning Walker, writer-director of How To Have Sex. Since wowing audiences at Cannes last summer, the sun-sea-and-consent drama has proved a box office hit, been hailed as one of the strongest feature debuts by a British filmmaker in recent year and sparked long-overdue, nuanced conversations about the attitudes towards sex that young people inherit. The film  tells the tale of Tara, a sixteen-year-old played by Mia McKenna-Bruce, on a rite-of-passage summer holiday blowout with friends while she awaits school exam results. What begins as a sun-soaked adventure, full of borrowed hair straighteners, karaoke and bright-blue-coloured cocktails, soon becomes something bleaker when the girls meet a group of lads in the holiday rental apartment opposite them. Amid the thumping music and blinding lights of Malia’s club scene, a taboo-shattering expose of everything wrong with the way teenagers are encouraged to view sex unfolds – and it's absolutely heartbreaking.

Molly wrote the film while revisiting memories of going on a number of clubbing holidays herself between sixteen and eighteen, and realising what little room there was for discussion about the pressuring sexual elements of those trips and the harrowing experiences they can result in. When she was the victim of a sexual assault at age sixteen, she remembers “wanting to talk about it. But I’d walk into rooms and it would suck the air out of the room. How are people supposed to move on if no one’s allowed to talk about it?” How To Have Sex is a movie that does to talk about it – and does so movingly without ever lurching into lecturing or sentimentality.

In the spoiler-filled interview you’re about to hear, Molly break down key scenes from the film, including the heart-wrenching final exchange in the airport between Tara and Skye – what isn’t being said in that moment, and why. We talk about what she’s learned about how global the problems depicted in How To Have Sex are by the response to film beyond Britain – and how working on this film at the same time as Scrapper, Charlotte Regan’s brilliant surrealist comedy set out on a UK council estate – taught her about the necessity of female coming-of-age stories.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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American Fiction is two films at once – a farcical comedy take-down of white gatekeepers who only want one type of Black storytelling and a beautifully tender drama that underlines the richness possible when filmmakers of colour are allowed to operate outside of the boxes they’re often put in. Written and directed by Cord Jefferson, whose past writing credits include work on Succession, The Good Place and Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen TV adaptation, the film tells the tale of Monk, a frustrated academic played by Jeffrey Wright, who becomes an accidental literary sensation when a manuscript he writes as a joke, perpetuating Black stereotypes, becomes a best-seller. There’s sensitivity beneath the scathing satire of that premise, however: American Fiction is a movie that reels you in with its funny premise, then moves you to tears with its elegant portrait of a family as they search for meaning in grief and growing older.

In this spoiler conversation, Cord tells Al what struck him about Erasure, the 2001 novel by Percival Everett that American Fiction is an adaptation of. We get into the personal experiences that helped him relate powerfully to Percival’s story – and what inspired the changes from page to screen, such as the omission of a storyline involving a murder by an abortion protestor. Listen out, also, for what Cord has to say about the film’s meta ending and the symbolism behind the enigmatic image that closes the film. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Magic Mind, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

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Alienation, abandonment and dislocated shoulders: not really your usual ingredients for a tender festive heart-warmer. But then again, The Holdovers – unequivocally one of our favourite films of the last twelve months – isn’t your average Christmas movie. Directed by Alexander Payne and written by our guest today, the brilliant David Hemingson, it's a drama steeped in the pain of reaching the so-called “most wonderful time of the year” and feeling nothing but loneliness.

The film tells the story of three loners thrown together by circumstance over the  Christmas break at a New England boarding school, each disillusioned with a world that doesn't seem to want them. They have their differences. One – Paul, played by Paul Giamatti – is a miserly middle-aged academic with an odour problem. Another – Angus, played by newcomer Dominic Sessa – is a brash student of his, on the brink of being sent to military school. The third and possible heartbeat of the movie, Da'Vine Joy Randolph's Mary Lamb, is their school cook – a woman who recently lost everything. These characters find a richness in each other that's uplifting without ever feeling schmaltzy or sentimental. It's a staggeringly beautiful film.

In the spoiler conversation you're about to hear, David tells us about Uncle Earl, the real-life family member he based the character Paul on. You'll hear how his first draft involved a woman Paul used to date with porcelain fingers, after injuring her hand in a car accident. We also spend some time debating the words "not for ourselves alone are we born" – the lesson, if there is one, of The Holdovers, and a mantra we could all doing with reminding ourselves of more in our fragmented 2024.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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This week we're joined by writer-director Andrew Haigh, whose new metaphysical drama All Of Us Strangers is a bruise in movie form: all swirling blue and purple hues, symbolic of hurt and longing to heal. The film tells the tale of a quiet screenwriter named Adam, played by Andrew Scott, who lives in a lonely London tower block, divorced from the world. His only neighbour is Harry, played by Paul Mescal, who one night makes a drunken move on Adam, only to be turned down. Instead, we follow Adam as he boards a train and visits his childhood home. The unexpected reunion that follows takes the film on a dream-like turn representative of the scars he still wears as a gay man who grew up in conservative 1980s Britain. As the drama goes on, that dream quickly curdles into a nightmare.

In the spoiler conversation you're about to hear, Al speaks to Andrew about the "aloneness" rather than loneliness that powers All Of Us Strangers. We get into the construction of its devastating twists, the process of adapting the 1987 Japanese novel on which it's based, the meaning of the pop music threaded into the house and the catharsis of writing this powerhouse story – one that audiences have found themselves unable to shake for weeks after viewing.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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The acclaimed new Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro is about more than just the life and times of arguably America’s most famous composer. It’s about the idea of genius and what allowances those in the presence of gifted creatives sometimes permit, at great personal cost, to allow that artistry to flourish. Starring Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper, who also directs, the film’s another example of the supreme storytelling talents of Josh Singer – a screenwriter renowned for telling the true-life tales of people who sent ripples through our culture for decades to come. 

In the Oscar-winning Spotlight, it was a team of Boston journalists who exposed a church cover-up. In Damien Chazelle’s First Man, it was astronaut Neil Armstrong – the first man on the moon. When it comes to writing dramatically compelling, non-sensationalised biopics, you won’t find many better. In our latest episode, the 51-year-old breaks down his latest exploration of a public figure and the demons hidden beneath the surface of his fame. It’s a fascinating spoiler conversation about how and Bradley Cooper co-wrote the script, spanning the meaning of its ambiguous title and how he approached the movie’s devastating ending.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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This week, we're joined by the great Ari Aster –  one of the boldest and most enigmatic voices in American cinema right now. He’s a filmmaker that Al first met in May 2019. The New York-born writer-director’s debut horror, Hereditary, was a few months old at the time, and Ari was deep in the edit for Midsommar at the time. Al had been sent by Empire Magazine to write a profile that championed him as a new king of horror. Which made sense in the moment: Midsommar, his Wicker Man-esque follow-up to Hereditary, about a Swedish cult, promised more frights, more decapitations.

One problem, though. Ari rejected the idea of himself as a horror filmmaker. He kept emphasising to Al, in his quiet, charming way, that horror wasn’t where his heart was. At least, not exclusively. No, Ari longed to make a comedy. A comedy musical, if possible. What would a comedy musical by this filmmaker, best known for chilling audiences to the bone, look like? In 2023, we got our audience – the jaw-dropping Beau Is Afraid.

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Beau Is Afraid is indeed a comedy. Its punchline just happens to speak to the existential treadmill-to-nowhere that life can sometimes resemble. It may not have songs to qualify it as a musical, but its case is populated by icons of musical theatre, known for their stage work (Nathan Lane, Richard Kind). Following a middle aged man on an Oedipal trip through an absurdist America en route to his mother’s funeral, the movie began life as a short film in 2011. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, we get into what evolved from Ari’s initial vision for Beau, as the character made his way to the big-screen. We talk about how in early drafts, the orphans of the forest weren’t a theatre group but a cult – something Ari had to change when he realised his first two movies had dealt heavily with cults and he couldn’t go three-for-three. We also discuss the horror and hilarity of the monster in the attic and what the religious iconography of the movie represents in Beau’s journey.

It’s a riveting peek into the mind of a filmmaker out here making films unlike anyone else. We hope you enjoy.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Today on the show – a movie in which Emma Stone attempts to punch a baby, by a playwright and screenwriter whose stories never fail to pack a punch. Yes, Tony McNamara is here, talking all things Poor Things, his latest collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos. Having previously worked together on the ten-time Oscar-nominated historical comedy The Favourite in 2018, this awards-tipped odyssey is a Frankensteinian creation as beguiling and impossible to pin down as its protagonist, Bella Baxter. It’s part coming-of-age comedy, part sexual conquest and part travelogue through an eye-popping steampunk planet both like and unlike our own. You might also classify it as a father-daughter drama – except here, the father is a mad scientist whose home is a cornucopia of unholy experiments, his daughter, played by Emma Stone, just one of them.

Stone is astounding as Bella, a reanimated dead woman, whose body, dragged from the Thames, has had life breathed into it once more. The horny journey of self-discovery that the character goes on from there, adapted from a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, comments on our culture’s (male-driven) obsession with control, explains Tony in our conversation. It’s a riveting chat with a storyteller whose other screen credits include creating the TV show The Great, loosely based on Empress Catherine the Great of Russia’s rise to power in 18th century Saint Petersburg and 2021’s Cruella. Listen out for insights on the changes made to Gray’s novel, the scene that Yorgos and Tony sadly had to cut for time, the idea of sex as a liberating force for the film’s main character and what each of the new lands Bella visits are meant to bring out of her evolving character. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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On October 13, 1972, a plane carrying 45 passengers and crew – 19 of whom were young rugby players – took off from Carrasco International Airport in Uruguay heading to Santiago, Chile. The plane never reached its destination. Adverse weather conditions caused Flight 571 to crash into a mountain ridge, ripping the aircraft in two over the Andes mountains – one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Those who didn’t die immediately in the wreckage – the so-called lucky ones – faced unimaginable horror. For 72 days, these survivors, aged between 19 and 26, endured frostbite and an avalanche. They watched as, one by one, friends and teammates perished in the plummeting temperatures each night. Starving to death in this endless white abyss, the passengers of Flight 571 were forced to do the unthinkable to survive, resorting to eating the bodies of the deceased as a means of desperately clinging to life.

You probably know all this, because the story of the Miracle in the Andes as it became known is a story that’s been told many times before, in books, films, documentaries and TV shows. What happened – how 16 people not only survived, but forged their own rescue – is well-known. How it actually felt to be out there in the wilderness, though – the philosophical and spiritual conundrums the survivors faced – has never really been truly translated to screen until now.

Society Of The Snow – directed and co-written by our guest today, the great J.A. Bayona – is a drama that finds transcendence in the true-life tale of Flight 571. Yes, the film abides by the facts of what went down in that frosty mountain range across those agonising 72 days – Bayona spent hundreds of hours interviewing the survivors before penning the movie’s screenplay with his co-writers Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego. But more importantly, inspired by a great book – La Sociedad de la Nieve by Pablo Vierci – it takes a lyrical approach to the story. One bordering on the metaphysical, full of dialogues between the living and the dead.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, JA tells us what it is about tales of people forced to confront the full might of nature that he finds himself drawn to as a storyteller (his previous films include tsunami drama The Impossible and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which had similar themes nature versus man). We talk about crafting the plane crash scene on the page, the bold decision he made involving the narrator of the tale and why the film doesn’t end on a note of triumph but something more melancholy. If you haven’t seen Society Of The Snow yet, be sure to hit pause now, watch on Netflix then come back as we dive into every detail.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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In our final episode of 2023, Michael Arndt – the acclaimed writer of films like Little Miss Sunshine and Star Wars: The Force Awakens – drops by for a two-hour dissection of his script for Toy Story 3 –a Pixar sequel that went to infinity and beyond when it came to thrills, laughter and emotion.  

Directed by past Script Apart guest Lee Unkrich, the 2010 film could have repeated the formula that made past the franchise’s previous films a global phenomenon, making instant icons out of Woody, Buzz and their found-family of fellow play-things. Instead, it leapt forward in time to find Andy, the toys’ owner, all-grown up and about to head to college, heaping huge existential questions on fans’ beloved characters. If a toy is retired to an attic, never to be played with again, what is their reason to be? What does it mean to be outgrown by people you love, who no longer love you in return?

If that sounds heavy for what is ostensibly a kids’ tale, wait till we remind you that Toy Story 3 was a movie set mostly in a brutal toy internment camp that ends with our heroes about to be incinerated. That boldness is why many regard the film as being “peak Pixar” – and can you blame them? Toy Story 3 capped a remarkable run of hits for the animation studio that included Ratatouille in 2007, Wall-E in 2008 and Up in 2009. No wonder Michael and co felt emboldened to take risks on this third instalment of the franchise – risks that reaped incredible storytelling rewards.

Michael was picked by Pixar – presumably via email or a phone call, rather than a giant mechanical claw like the ones in Pizza Planet – because few storytellers do grounded emotion and dysfunctional families like he does. At the onset of his career, across three days in May 2000, he’d written a screenplay about a family on a road trip to New Mexico that became a monster hit. Little Miss Sunshine earned the Virginia-born screenwriter a Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 2006 and catapulted him onto the radar of Pixar, whose brain trust would soon begin cooking up a story for a third movie in their Toy Story franchise.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Michael breaks down the many early iterations of this movie, including an abandoned Toy Story 3 from before his time on the project, in which the toys travel to Taiwan after Buzz is shipped there following a global product recall on the toy. We get into the machinations of Lotso Huggin’ Bear, how the story is deep down one about parenthood and of course, that traumatising moment our heroes hold hands, staring down certain death.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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On today’s episode, an interview at the end of a TV show: A Murder At The End Of The World. That’s right, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij are with us, breaking down every detail of their phenomenal techno-thriller whodunnit, which reached its breathtaking conclusion last night. As we’ve come to expect from the creators of head-spinning drama The OA – which felt like the signalling of a bold new era of ambitious narrative television when it hit screens in 2016 – A Murder At The End Of The World was a triumph of both ideas and emotion. Few filmmakers today combine both as seamlessly and elegantly as Brit and Zal, whose latest show offered meditations on the following: artificial intelligence, online misogyny, the desensitisation in our culture around violence towards women, extreme wealth, climate crisis, the deification of tech company CEOs… the list goes on.

The fact that A Murder At The End Of The World can so smartly probe all those topics without ever toppling in on itself like a house of cards in an Icelandic snow storm is an incredible feat. The fact that all those big intellectual ideas never overshadow the emotion of the show – the journey we go on Emma Corin’s courageous hacker Darby Hart – is even rarer. Darby’s story, zigzagging across three different periods of her life, is the heartbeat of this tale, about a group of high-achievers and industry leaders invited to a mysterious retreat among the frozen fjords of the Fljot Valley. The aim of this gathering? To solve the challenges facing humanity, its tech billionaire host Andy Ronson explains. A slight snag in that plan emerges, though, when one by one, guests begin to be bumped off in terrifying ways. Only Darby can solve the mystery of the killer’s identity.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Zal and Brit discuss philosophies behind the show, the world war origins of the whodunit genre, the ethical way to approach violence against women on screen without perpetuating that violence in the real world, and of course, the revelations of the show’s final episode. As ever, this is a spoiler-filled interview, so if you haven’t watched A Murder At The End Of The World in full, please be sure to catch up before tuning in.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Something sinister simmers beneath the surface of suburbia in Eileen, a psychological thriller about pent-up desire, parental neglect and escaping the shackles of the life expected of us. It’s a story that first existed as a novel, launching the literary career of Boston-born author Ottessa Moshfegh in 2015. Since then, Ottessa’s career has skyrocketed: novels like Lapvona and the tremendous My Year of Rest and Relaxation have seen her lauded as one of her generation’s most exciting voices. Or as the fantastic Jia Tolentino once described her, “easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive, when being alive feels terrible.”

Through all that success, though, Eileen has followed her. The character, a secretary at a correctional facility for teenage boys in a small American town, lost in time, never quite left her side in all that time, and in the new film adaptation of her story – penned with husband and screenwriting partner Luke Goebel – it shows. The movie, directed by William Oldroyd, stars Thomasin McKenzie as Eileen and Anne Hathaway as the older woman, Rebecca, she becomes enchanted by. The closer they get, though, the closer Eileen gets to a dark truth involving one of the young inmates at the prison where she works.

On this week’s show, Ottessa and Luke take time out on a recent trip to London to break down their screenplay and take us inside the mind of the film’s Hitchcockian anti-heroine. Ottessa recounts the parts of herself she left on the page when she initially wrote the story, while Luke – a great author in his own right, whose Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours collection is a brilliant read – unravels the meanings of key scenes as he sees them. We also crucially debate whether the festive backdrop of this film – all snow and fairy lights, to the tune of constant carols –  makes this a Christmas movie. This is a spoiler conversation, as ever on Script Apart, so do be sure to check out the movie, in cinemas now, before tuning in.  

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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May December – written by our guest this week, Samy Burch – tells the serpentine tale of a TV actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) who descends upon the home of a family founded on scandal. Two decades have passed since Gracie, portrayed by Julianne Moore, and her now-husband Joe, played by Charles Melton, hit the headlines after beginning a relationship when Gracie was in her mid-thirties and Joe was just thirteen years old. Elizabeth, researching the couple ahead of a film based on their lives, joins the couple (now married with kids) and attempts to understand what makes them each tick. In the process, she discovers that debris still remains from the tabloid storm that engulfed their lives. And we, as an audience, discover that Elizabeth herself has exploitative, machiavellian tendencies of her own.

It’s a story that Samy wrote in 2019 after landing on the idea with her partner, Alex Mechanik. “What would make a 36-year-old woman start an affair with a seventh grader?” you may be wondering – in which case, you’re not alone. Gracie’s former husband echoes those exact words in the film. But May December isn’t interested in answering that – not declaratively, at least. This is a film that refuses absolutes, asking more questions than it answers. 

Does the twenty years of stability and apparent happiness that Joe and Gracie have shared together justify the wrongs of how their relationship began? Does the family life they’ve built paper over how predatory and problematic Gracie’s behaviour was, in initiating a sexual partnership with a kid whose voice must only just have broken? And what does it say about us, that as a culture, we’re so drawn to the transgressions of people like Gracie? Are we as parasitic as the prying actress who dismantles their lives, almost on a whim? These are all questions left to us to ponder after its credits roll. They’re also questions that Samy was delighted to give her take on, in my revealing conversation with the first-time screenwriter. Spoilers ahead, so be sure to watch the fantastic May December first before tuning in.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight… and if you can do all that while listening to The Smiths, even better. That’s the mantra of the eponymous assassin at the heart of The Killer, directed by David Fincher and written by our guest today  – the fantastic Andrew Kevin Walker. 

The Killer is a movie that deconstructs the hitman movie genre like Michael Fassbender’s glassy-eyed gun-for-hire deconstructing a McDonald’s sandwich on a park bench in Paris. It opens with a blaze of images that tease the explosive action typical of these films then swerves in a different direction. The result is a defiantly meditative two hours in which the violence of the movie’s revenge plot is almost incidental to the character’s meticulous ways and detached observations about the world.

It’s an absolutely riveting watch but then again, what did we expect? Unlike The Killer himself – who misses his target early on in the film, sparking the film’s descent into chaos – Andrew and Fincher rarely miss their mark whenever they work together. The pair first teamed up on 1995’s Se7en, which began life as a spec script that Andrew wrote after moving to New York from suburban Pennsylvania. Since then, Andrew’s taken passes at Fight Club and The Game for Fincher, on top of his solo adventures in Hollywood, penning films like Sleepy Hollow and 2022’s excellent Windfall.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Andy answers our questions about the subtle commentary on materialist culture woven into the film. We get into the influence of the novelist Somerset Maugham on Andy’s work and break some of the film’s most intriguing moments, including its enigmatic ending – in which a life is spared but existential questions loom.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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Can you find the wolves in this podcast? Our guest today, Eric Roth, is the Academy Award-winning writer behind films like Forrest Gump. He wrote The Insider for Michael Mann, Munich for Steven Spielberg, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for David Fincher and 2018’s A Star Is Born for Bradley Cooper, and two years ago, we had the delight of his company as we broke down his script for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune on this very show. Today, we're joined by him once more to discuss what – whisper it – may just be his crowning accomplishment.

Few films this year have left the extraordinary imprint left behind by Killers of the Flower Moon – a tale of love, murder and quite-literally-poisonous greed in 1920s America, directed by Martin Scorsese. Eric’s script for the film, which he co-wrote with the beloved auteur, was adapted from a non-fiction book by author David Grann, but with a very different approach to the story told in that tome. The book investigated a series of killings of members of the indigenous Osage Nation – deaths caused, then covered up, by white men who coveted their oil-rich land. At the heart of all this was a woman: Mollie Kyle, played in the film by Lily Gladstone, who marries a first world war veteran named Ernest Burkhart, played by Leo DiCaprio.

Ernest had a corrupt uncle, William King Hale, portrayed by Robert DeNiro, who masqueraded as an upstanding member of the community. Molly was forced to watch in horror as at least 24 family members and friends were systematically killed as a result of Hale’s scheming – unaware that her uncle-in-law was masterminding these deaths and unaware that the man she loved was helping him.

Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, however,  was subtitled “the birth of the FBI” for a reason – it focused on the white law enforcement response to the killings rather than the Osage Nation itself. As you’ll discover in this episode, Eric’s first draft of this movie adaptation followed suit – before he and Scorsese realised they had a responsibility to navigate this tale from a different perspective. It wasn’t as simple as making Molly the lead. That story, as non-indigenous filmmakers, Scorsese has implied, wasn’t theirs to tell. Instead, they set about making a film about complicity that would centre Ernest in all his cowardice and employ Molly as the movie’s moral heart.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, we break down all of the film’s key scenes, uncover some fascinating details about its first draft and break down the meaning of the movie’s astounding finale – a moment on film unlike anything else in Scorsese’s filmography. Eric, as ever, was a total pleasure to chat with: a storyteller so inspiringly in love with what he does, that at 78-years-old, there’s no sign of him slowing down. Writing screenplays is simply what he does.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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