Script Apart with Al Horner

Film history is full of troublesome hotels, isn’t it? A few of them we've even covered on this very show, from the haunted Overlook in The Shining to the labyrinthine, unsettling Airbnb in Barbarian – the kinds of places that make you vow to never complain about a Premier Inn again. This week, revered writer-director Kitty Green releases a thriller that adds to that long list with the sublime The Royal Hotel – an at times unbearably tense exploration of gender and toxic masculinity, set in rural Australian. On today’s episode of Script Apart, Kitty stops by for a spoiler breakdown of the movie, in which two young women in need of money check into a dilapidated pub in a remote mining town. What happens next, as the line is blurred between drunken boys-will-be-boys and truly dangerous behaviour, is impossible to tear your eyes away from, beautifully written and impeccably directed.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Kitty tells us about her own family connections to the mining town pub culture depicted in the film, which was co-written with Oscar Redding. We unpack what’s going on in the heads of the film’s two leads, Hannah and Liv, as they encounter some of the community’s many microaggressions towards them. She also breaks down the film’s connections to her last movie, The Assistant, and what the two dramas combined express about the epidemic of male violence towards women. 

Please be sure to check out the film before listening as this episode has more spoilers than you can shake a taxidermied snake at.

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, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. But when it comes to Bottoms – the new queer high school comedy from Emma Seligman, in which two teen lesbians start their own Fincher-esque Fight Club in an attempt to get closer to cheerleaders – well, there's really no helping it. 

On today's episode of Script Apart, the acclaimed filmmaker breaks down an early version of the smash hit new movie that began with our heroes, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (The Bear star Ayo Edebiri) “masturbating at a militaristic boot camp for horny girls.” In this version of the film,  a steroid epidemic that "causes people to hate women" was wreaking havoc at Rockbridge Falls High, with it up to PJ and Josie to save the day.

Listen to our spoiler conversation with Emma to discover the thematic connections between Bottoms and her groundbreaking debut Shiva Baby,  the inspiration behind fragile football star Jeff, her process of writing the script with Sennott and much, much more.

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 MUBI, ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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This week, we're delighted to be reunited with the talented Jeff Rowe, who first appeared on the show in 2021, breaking down his and Mike Rianda’s hilarious The Mitchells vs the Machines. On today’s episode, the animation auteur returns to talk all things Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The heroes in a half shell returned earlier this year in Mutant Mayhem, which Jeff directed from a script he co-wrote with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The film packed laughter,  action and emotion unlike any Turtles film before it – a result of the trio approaching the story as a coming-of-age tale, inspired by films like Ladybird and Stand By Me.

The story behind how Turtles was written is almost as radical as the movie itself. Jeff, Seth and Evan worked hard on one version of the film only to realise fairly far into production that the story was “fundamentally broken.” So, they got together and across a whirlwind, high-pressure 48 hours, wrote an entirely new story for this Turtles reboot.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Jeff and I discuss that discarded version of the film in which the iconic villain Shredder was a “Vince Vaughn type” wreaking havoc on New York. There’s thorough analysis of all the key scenes in the film, and Jeff opens about his difficult family life growing up and how it fed into the story he wanted to tell here, about the beauty of found families.

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, Stowe Story Labs and WeScreenplay.

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This episode is part of our Storyteller Sessions event – a weekend of career-spanning conversations with game-changing storytellers, raising money for the Entertainment Community Fund. If you enjoy this episode or any of the episodes still to come across this weekend, please do consider donating via the link below:

Donate to our fundraiser here!

Gillian Flynn is an author, screenwriter and showrunner who delights in writing what she calls “bad women” – fascinatingly flawed female characters who she grants the freedom to kill, lie, harm and harass in a way that sometimes ruffles feathers. Take her 2012 novel Gone Girl, for example, which she later adapted into a smash hit movie with David Fincher. That murder-mystery tale of a marriage steeped in deceit captivated the world and sparked near-endless conversation about the poison and/or empowerment of its main character, Amy Dunne.

That novel and movie – released within two years of each other – didn't just make Flynn a literary darling. It also catapulted her to the summit of film and TV. In 2018, she co-wrote the brilliant Widows with Steve McQueen, and adapted her first novel, Sharp Objects, into a gloriously slow-burning limited series starring Amy Adams. Since then, she’s won cult acclaim for her streaming adaptation of Utopia, the British Channel 4 series.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, we ask Gillian how she pens her captivating characters and the social importance of allowing women to run riot on-screen and in her novels, the way that male anti-heroes are frequently permitted to do. She reflects on the accusations of misogyny that her work attracted from some female writers in the aftermath of Gone Girl’s release and reveals an alternative ending to that story that would have taken the tale of Nick and Amy Dunne in an entirely different direction.

Again, this conversation is in aid of the Entertainment Community Fund, who do extraordinary work lifting up storytellers of all descriptions and have been a vital support for entertainment industry workers affected by this summer’s strike action. If you enjoy this episode, please do consider clicking the link in the show notes and donating any amount you can to this great cause.

It was a huge privilege to share this conversation with Lilly who we can’t thank enough for her openness and insights. Again, this conversation is in aid of the Entertainment Community Fund, who do extraordinary work lifting up storytellers of all descriptions and have been a vital support for entertainment industry workers affected by this summer’s strikes. If you enjoy this episode, please do consider donating via the link below:

Donate to our fundraiser here!

Support the show

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is part of our Storyteller Sessions event – a weekend of career-spanning conversations with game-changing storytellers, raising money for the Entertainment Community Fund. If you enjoy this episode or any of the episodes still to come across this weekend, please do consider donating via the link below:

Donate to our fundraiser here!

On today’s episode – a conversation about writing with the incredible Lilly Wachowski. Or at least, we were meant to speak about writing. The plan was to talk about Lilly's creative practice. About the queer-coded stories of collective resistance and love in the face of dystopia that she’s told across a glittering three-decade career. One of those stories in particular – The Matrix trilogy, co-written and directed with her sister Lana Wachowski – was the looking glass through which Al stepped into a new way of seeing both cinema and the world when he was eleven-years-old, so you can imagine his excitement to discuss her relationship with the page.

That is not what went down. Yes, there's plenty in our conversation about how Lilly approaches writing. About why she prioritises telling stories not about individualist heroes, but about communities coming together to defy power. About how writing film and TV right now a release valve for the filmmaker, helping her channel her “trans rage” at a system that tramples over marginalised groups. You’ll also hear her discuss why she believes great stories can offer an escape path for audiences out of that system. 

But that’s not all we talked about. Across a hugely moving two-hours, Lilly explains how, when she looks back on her and Lana’s early movies today, she sees clearly the “scratchings on the wall as they were clawing their way out the closet.” She speaks beautifully about her experience transitioning and about how she found her way back to herself after a period of burnout and about the amazing women around her growing up that she credits with shaping her.  

Listen out for candid discussion about the “impossible bar” that The Matrix set for her and Lana, and Lilly’s thoughts on A.I in 2023, as someone who co-created one of our culture’s defining works about that technology. You'll also hear about the joy of her experience on Work In Progress,  and why the next chapter of her career is going to be all about “throwing my trans body against the mono culture that Hollywood is gravitating towards.” 

It was a huge privilege to share this conversation with Lilly who we can’t thank enough for her openness and insights. Again, this conversation is in aid of the Entertainment Community Fund, who do extraordinary work lifting up storytellers of all descriptions and have been a vital support for entertainment industry workers affected by this summer’s strikes. If you enjoy this episode, please do consider donating via the link below.

Donate to our fundraiser here!

Support the show

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Welcome to the Script Apart Storyteller Sessions – three days of career-spanning conversations with truly game-changing storytellers, talking about their relationship with the page. 100% of proceeds are going to the Entertainment Community Fund, a brilliant charity doing hugely important work – so if you enjoy this episode or any of the episodes across this weekend, please do consider hitting the link below and donating to that wonderful cause:

Donate to our fundraiser here!

Today, we’re kicking off with what is basically the Catalina Wine Mixer of podcast interviews. Our guest today is a filmmaker responsible for some of the great comedies of our time, and someone whose storytelling has undergone a fascinating transformation as the world has slipped into climate emergency, economic emergency and political disrepair. Somehow, in a time with dwindling things to laugh about, this writer-director has found a way to engage with those crises in ludicrously entertaining ways. He's the filmmaker behind Anchorman, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, The Other Guys, The Big Short, Vice and Don’t Look Up – it's Adam McKay!

Adam got his break on Saturday Night Live, becoming the show’s head writer in 1996. His collaborations on SNL with another emerging comic, Will Ferrell, immediately caught the eye and simply could not be contained to the small screen for long. By the early ‘00s, the pair had turned their anarchic chemistry into a wave of outrageously quotable comedies that fast found themselves woven into our shared pop culture landscape. “It escalated quickly,” as Ron Burgundy might say.

Then came a change of pace. In 2015, after his father lost his home as part of a devastating economic downturn, Adam released The Big Short – a white collar crime comedy about the 2007 financial crash. It won him and his co-writer Charles Randolph the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards, and signalled a sea change not just in the content of Adam’s movies going forward, but also in the cinematic language he was using to tell his stories. His films since then – and to a lesser degree, titles he’s worked on as a producer, such as the smash hit Succession –  have doubled down on that new storytelling style, full of frantic edits and experimental flourishes.

Adam’s monumental success has come in the face of a couple of challenging moments medically across his life. In 2000, he was diagnosed with a condition known as essential tremor, and in 2017, he suffered a heart attack on the set of Vice. In the conversation you’re about to hear, we discuss how that heart attack sharpened his resolve to make 2021’s bracing Don’t Look Up. We get into why Step Brothers is a film that “tells you all you need to know about America” – a nation in which “consumer culture has turned us into children,” Adam insists. You’ll hear why he decided to abandon the three-act structure of his old films in part as a response to the rise of Donald Trump and what he’s learned about to fix the world from his recent string of movies grappling with its many problems.

The Entertainment Community Fund do extraordinary work lifting up storytellers of all descriptions, and have been a vital support for entertainment industry workers affected by this summer’s strike action. So if you enjoy this episode, please do consider donating below.

Donate to our fundraiser here!

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This week on Script Apart, the writers behind Pixar’s latest heartwarming spectacle take us down to Element City where the tree people are green and the Vivisteria Flowers are pretty. Yes, today we’re joined by Kat Likkel and John Hoberg, the husband-and-wife duo whose script for Elemental – co-written with Brenda Hsueh and director Pete Sohn – has been enchanting audiences all summer.

The film a hugely affecting tale whose premise, on first glance, looked to have a certain shared DNA with past Pixar hits. One popular internet theory suggests that the studio’s best-known films all ask variations of the same question: “What if X abstract concept – toys, cars, monsters, rats – had feelings?” Elemental, though, is more than a movie about elements with emotions. It’s a family drama about parental expectation. It’s an immigrant tale, about the struggle to assimilate into a new society while keeping your own culture alive. It’s a romantic comedy – When Harry Met Sally with fire and water. And it’s also a disaster movie that takes side-swipes at how structural racism leads to minority communities being put in harm’s way.

In this week’s episode, Kat and John join us to discuss an early draft of the movie, in which Elemental was shaping up to be Pixar’s answer to Chinatown. The finished film follows fire element Ember as she fights to save her father’s shop from closure, with the help of Wade, a water element working as a city inspector. Along the way, they uncover a leak in the city's canals emanating from a problem with a nearby dam, neglected by authorities. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, however, John and Kat explain how Wade’s mother was initially intended to be the film’s shock antagonist, orchestrating an evil cover-up. We talk about how Ember was originally written with much more of a Disney princess vibe before being retooled as an older, more streetwise character. And we uncover the meaning and power of “the bow” – a motif in the movie that ends up becoming one of Elemental’s final, most emotionally devastating shots. Get fired up – this is a fun and fascinating deep dive into one of the year’s best animations.

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 MUBI, ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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Think of your worst experience with online dating – the most excruciating Hinge disaster or Tinder catastrophe. However bad you might think that ordeal was, it’s nothing on the tale told in the extraordinary recent indie I Love My Dad. Part cringe comedy, part family drama and part horror movie for the MySpace generation, the film followed a screw-up father who’s desperate to reconnect with the child he pushed away. Blocked on social media, this father – Chuck, played by Patton Oswalt – resorts to posing online as a beautiful young waitress whose friend request his estranged son will surely accept. The scheme is soon complicated, however, when the teenager begins to fall for this stranger in his DMs, growing determined to meet her in person.

That premise – a teenager cat-fished by his own father – might sound like the logline for a zany, high-concept Hollywood romp, but what’s so special about I Love My Dad is how grounded it is in the loneliness of being a certain age and desperate for connection. The lure of the internet, the versions of ourselves we present online and the sometimes unhealthy fantasies that permits – these questions are all explored in the film by the film’s outrageously talented writer, director and star, James Morosini, who it was a delight to chat with for this week’s episode.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, James explains how I Love My Dad has such an air of emotional truth to it because, well, “this actually happened” to quote the film itself. There are ways in which James’ story deviates from the one in the film but yes – his father really did cat-fish him in real-life, in events that inspired his screenplay. We discuss Age, Sex, Location – the title of James’ first draft of the film – and why an early ending in which Chuck has a heart attack and Franklin gets together with the real-life Becca had to go. It’s a fascinating conversation about the inherent performance of social media – how we’re all cat-fishing one another to less explicit degrees – and why running towards our most embarrassing moments and most vulnerable parts of ourselves, rather than running away, makes for great storytelling.

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 MUBI, ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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Judd Apatow needs little in the way of introduction. He’s a filmmaker synonymous with an entire era of American comedy – that mid-’00s explosion of zeitgeist-grabbing movies about incapable men, grappling with the realisation that it’s about time they grew up. There’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which Apatow wrote and directed. There’s also the cult classic music biopic satire Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which he co-wrote with Jake Kasdan. The Cable Guy, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Step Brothers, meanwhile, are just some of the projects he’s served on as a producer.

A remarkable run of movies since the beginning of the 2010s have seen his comic signature evolve into something more tender. Films like Funny People, This Is 40 and The King of Staten Island are all funny, sure – but there’s an introspection to his work nowadays that has been fascinating to behold. 

On this week’s episode, Judd revisits one of his best-loved movies: 2007’s Knocked Up. But it’s not his first draft we delve into. Instead, as a window into his creative process, we uncover emails that the filmmaker sent to himself in the run-up to writing the movie, full of lengthy streams of consciousness about what the comedy could be – and why a stoner played by Seth Rogen having a baby with a high-flying media personality played with poise by Katherine Heigl would be hilarious.

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, MUBI, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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Our guests this week are Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao – writers of Joy Ride, 2023’s rowdiest comedy. The film tells the incredibly explicit tale of four friends on a wild journey of self-discovery following a business trip gone awry. Each character has a different relationship with their Asian heritage, which they’re forced to confront in hilarious and moving ways as a series of chaotic events sees them travel across the continent. Cherry and Teresa, who met in the writers’ room on Family Guy, didn’t fill their script with hilarity and depravity, though there’s plenty of that. Their script packed an emotional punch too, reminding audiences that “home” is maybe best defined as the place in which we love and are loved in return.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Teresa and Cherry tell us all about the parts of themselves they brought to the page in Joy Ride. We discuss the genesis of its wildest jokes, how they wrote the movie’s hilarious K-pop scene and the “Asian good girl” trope they wanted to take a flamethrower to across the course of 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.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, MUBI and WeScreenplay.

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Susannah is a talent who, over an impressive three decade career, has gone from writing on the ‘90s teen TV drama Party of Five and conquering animation with Pocahontas to penning dramas like 28 Days, romcoms like In Her Shoes and science-fiction with The 5th Wave. She’s also a force to be reckoned with behind the camera: having made her directorial debut in 2006 with the comedy drama Catch and Release, Susannah wrote and directed episodes of the recent searing Netflix series Unbelievable, which took a scalpel to the problem of rape culture in America.

Erin Brockovich, though, remains one of her best-loved works. Her witty script for the Julia Roberts-starring, Steven Soderbergh-directed legal drama earned her an Oscar nomination on release in 2000, and it’s both a testament to her writing and an indictment about our society’s lack of progress that the film still feels so relevant today. The film told the true-life tale of a single mother who fought and won a landmark legal case against the Pacific Gas & Electric Company over contaminated water supplied to residents in the town of Hinkley, California. In order to secure justice for the hundreds of people made sick by PG&E’s malfeasance, the real-life Erin had to navigate misogyny, classism and the demands of parenthood. Susannah’s script captured all of that with poignancy and punch.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Susannah tells us all about grabbing burgers with the real-life Erin Brockovich, the importance of David vs Goliath stories like this, the balance of fact versus fiction in the film – and the one line that had to change at Erin’s request.

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, MUBI, Magic Mind and WeScreenplay.

Go to magicmind.com/scriptapart to get up to 50% off your subscription for the next 10 days with the code: SCRIPT20.

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The world is changing and truth is vanishing in our very special episode today, accomplishing a mission we’ve been hoping to make happen since the very inception of the show. Yes, this week’s guest is a true maestro of modern blockbuster filmmaking – a writer-director who won a Best Screenplay Oscar before his 30th birthday for the timeless neo-noir, The Usual Suspects. Since then, he’s leaned into action cinema of most breathtaking spectacle, without ever losing sight of the stripped-down dramatic principles that made The Usual Suspects such a gripping introduction to his work. 

He’s one half of a director-star symbiosis arguably up there with Ford and Wayne, Scorsese and DeNiro, Scorsese and DiCaprio and Spielberg and Hanks. And this summer, he and his close collaborator, Tom Cruise are back with a terrifyingly relevant spy thriller sequel that needs to be seen to be believed. Yes, this week on Script Apart – it’s the phenomenal Christopher McQuarrie.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One lights the fuse on a number of fascinating questions. Questions like: how do you take a series that’s already threatened the world with nuclear bombs and all sorts of other threats, and raise the stakes even further, seven films into this franchise? Christopher’s answer was to take the anxiety around artificial intelligence that’s been such a fixture of our recent news cycle and fashion those fears into a espionage adventure pulsing with paranoia. What’s all the more impressive about this is how long-delayed Dead Reckoning Part One was by the Covid-19 pandemic – meaning McQ predicted this. In the conversation you’re about to hear, the filmmaker is really articulate about the real-life threat, its overlap with his movie and how he anticipated it,  far in advance. 

You’ll also hear how Christopher constructed the story and crucially, the emotional arc of this latest Mission movie – the journey Ethan Hunt, played by Cruise, needed to go on this time around, to make all the film’s stunts and spectacle mean something to those in the audience. Get ready to discover the rationale behind that shocking death, and how the film’s astonishing climax – a train sequence that acts as a literal cliffhanger – came together on the page and the rationale behind that shocking death at the end of the film’s second act.

One thing you won’t hear much about, unlike in most episodes of Script Apart, is the film’s first draft. And there’s good reason for that – there wasn’t one. What you’re about to hear is a tale about how writing a Mission: Impossible movie isn’t all too different from what it must feel like for Ethan, surviving one of these films. There’s a lot of improvising out of tight spots – the screenwriting equivalent of Tom riding a speeding motorbike off a Norwegian cliff top into a base jump and landing on a moving train.

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, MUBI, Magic Mind and WeScreenplay.

Go to magicmind.com/scriptapart to get up to 50% off your subscription for the next 10 days with the code: SCRIPT20.

To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.

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Pack your bags, everyone. Today on Script Apart, we’re making an emotional Return To Seoul guided by Davy Chou – the writer-director behind one of 2023’s most alluring slow-burn dramas. Davy is a Franco-Cambodian writer-director whose own dual cultural heritages helped inform Return To Seoul, a film that poignantly probes questions of identity and displacement. It follows first-time actor Park Ji-min as Freddie – a young woman wandering through the home country of her biological parents in search of answers and in search of herself. Part inspired by the real-life experiences of artist Laure Badufle, with whom Davy co-wrote the screenplay, it’s a delicate, raw character study that will both move you immeasurably and made you want to visit Seoul right this very second.

There really is so much beautiful nuance to this story. In real life, we human beings are messy and contradictory. Return To Seoul basks in that complexity, forging characters out of it who are flawed, who let themselves down, who push people away when they ought to let others in. Around Freddie are a supporting cast of characters who are all similarly entangled in their own messy wants, desires, hopes and regrets. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Davy shares with me how he crafted these characters and this story. We talk about the clever ways the film accents the cultural disparities between Freddie and the parents who once abandoned her. We get into what the film seeks to say about transnational identity. And we break down the meaning of the film’s enigmatic ending – so be sure to check out the film, available on MUBI now, before listening 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.

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

Go to magicmind.com/scriptapart to get up to 50% off your subscription for the next 10 days with the code: SCRIPT20.

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“Lately, I’m getting the feeling I came in at the end. That the best is over.” 24 years ago, a man stepped into a therapist’s office and with those few words, transformed television forever. That man was, of course, Tony Soprano – a great big brooding bull of a mob boss, whose violence as the head of a New Jersey crime family hid a subtle sweeter side to his personality. 

The Sopranos balanced scenes of his brutality with glimpses at his capacity for more humane behaviour, and it was these duelling elements that powered the show, created by our very special guest today, the one and only David Chase. Tony was a doting father with a twinkle in his eye. The kind of guy who would wade into a swimming pool in his dressing gown to play with a family of ducks, when he wasn’t wading through a sea of cocaine and criminals at the Bada Bing. He was complicated, and with that complexity, the series took a hit out on basically everything TV execs thought they knew about the kind of protagonist that viewers would root for on the small screen. Walter White, Don Draper, Bill Hader’s Barry – Tony Soprano walked so other morally dubious men could run rampant through our TV landscape for decades to come.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, which was recorded before the writers strike, David tells us about his memories of devising The Sopranos’ iconic characters. We talk about what David and members of his writing team – a staff that includes past Script Apart guest Terry Winter – took from the 1990s political ether and poured into the show’s storylines. And crucially, we also discuss how the question that drives The Sopranos isn’t which family will come out on top in any of the show’s vicious mob disputes. It isn’t whether Tony will be caught by the cops or if he’ll make it out alive, either. It’s whether it’s possible for a man with so much blood on his hands to better himself. The turf war for Tony Soprano's soul. 

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, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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Life found a way – Script Apart is back! Season four begins with an episode 65 million years in the making, about a movie lauded as one of the greatest blockbusters of all time. Yes, today on the show, we're venturing into Jurassic Park, with the film’s brilliant screenwriter, David Koepp, as our guide.

The film follows palaeontologists Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ellie Sadler (Laura Dern) as they're invited alongside mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to an island populated by living, breathing dinosaurs. These creatures have been cloned from DNA found in mosquitos by eccentric billionaire John Hammond, who insists this soon-to-open tourist attraction is perfectly safe. Famous last words. Our heroes soon find themselves pursued by prehistoric threats.

At least, that’s how the finished film goes down. Did you know in the first draft of the screenplay, there was no Ian Malcolm at all? In the conversation you’re about to hear, David explains how the film originally had a different ending – in which Alan Grant starts blasting raptors with a shotgun – and different characters. We get into why Jurassic Park is essentially the ancient Greek myth Prometheus (with added pterodactyls), how David and Steven Spielberg modelled John Hammond on Walt Disney, and why the story is a fable about capitalism. After all, it’s not the dinosaurs that doom the island to carnage – it’s the greed of human characters, trying to make a buck.

David is a storyteller who we're always overjoyed to chat with (you may remember listening to our conversation with the writer/director on Script Apart roughly a year ago, discussing another great movie of his, the original Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible). Elsewhere in his filmography are collaborations with David Fincher (Panic Room), Sam Raimi (2002’s Spider-Man), Steven Sodeberg (Kimi) and Brian de Palma (Carlito’s Way). His other collaborations with Spielberg include The Lost World, War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. His latest novel Aurora is out this week on paperback, and a fantastic page-turner – be sure to pick up a copy.

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, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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This week on Script Apart, the return of Mike Flanagan! The response to our last episode speaking to the horror auteur, one of this generation’s true titans of the genre, was so emphatic, we couldn’t wait to invite Mike back on the show to get lost in the Overlook-esque hedge maze of 2019's Doctor Sleep, his near-miraculous sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep. We use the word “miraculous” because it really is astonishing what the Ewan McGregor-starring chiller managed to achieve, marrying the legacies of two notoriously different visions of The Shining. 

Stephen King wrote The Shining in 1977. When Stanley Kubrick made drastic changes to King's source text in his adaptation of the story three years later, it led to contempt between these two masters of their craft. Fans have been divided ever since over which version is the more powerful – King’s novel, which had a different ending and a sunnier message about the capacity for love to triumph over evil, or Kubrick’s ruthless cinematic journey into male madness; the bloody end game of toxic masculinity, as embodied by Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrence. When Mike was presented with the chance to adapt King’s 2013 literary sequel to The Shining, which continued the canon his story, ignoring Kubrick’s changes, the Haunting of Hill House filmmaker decided to attempt the impossible. His Doctor Sleep was to knit together the visual language of Kubrick’s Shining with the storytelling that King favoured,  honouring both iterations. 

The story of how he pulled it off, and the seismic personal changes it sparked in Mike’s own life, is a tale as fascinating as the film itself. Which is saying something. Doctor Sleep is a fevered festival of telekinetic children, travelling vampiric bohemians and the courage it takes to beat addiction. And though the film didn’t perform well at the box office, it’s since found a passionate community of devoted fans who rightly consider it a masterpiece. Listen out at the end for some mind-blowing information on the sequels and spin-offs that its disappointing commercial performance sadly stopped from going ahead – and a note of optimism that we may see some of Doctor Sleep’s characters again, featuring in Mike’s upcoming adaptation of King’s incredible The Dark Tower.

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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Unlike Margot Robbie in the hedonistic tour-de-force Babylon, we at Script Apart have never fought a rattlesnake. We have, however, now had the pleasure of chatting with one of our favourite filmmakers working today, Damien Chazelle. The Whiplash writer-director’s latest epic is a fevered telling of how 1920s Hollywood reacted as the industry transitioned from silent film to sound, shining a spotlight on the drug-addled dreamers chewed up and spat out by Tinseltown as it underwent that seismic change. It’s a story that puts the “sin” in Singing In The Rain, following an ensemble cast of characters as they experience both the divinity and destruction of the American moviemaking machine, with Margot Robbie astonishing as the doomed Nellie LaRoy – a character loosely based on real-life actress Clara Bow.

If all that sounds drastically unlike Damien’s previous work, well, that’s intentional – the La La Land filmmaker wanted to make a movie at the other end of the storytelling spectrum to that acclaimed 2016 musical when approaching Babylon. “If La La Land was a love letter to Hollywood, then Babylon is written with a poison pen,” he told Al when they last spoke before the film’s release. Catching up now for a spoiler breakdown of the movie and its incredible screenplay, the pair discuss how early iterations of the film centered on Brad Pitt’s character Jack Conrad, the eye-opening real-life stories of 1920s Hollywood debauchery that Damien pulled from, and where next for the filmmaker now that he’s conquered his boldest, most ambitious project to date.

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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Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are a duo who don’t wait for permission and refuse to let small budgets reign in their storytelling ambitions. Since announcing themselves as a fierce new force in independent filmmaking a decade ago with the meta-horror Resolution, the pair have released a further four films, each one a staggeringly original triumph of imagination over budgetary restraints. Spring was a low-cost Lovecraftian tale set on a gorgeous stretch of Italian coast that corkscrewed between romance and brutal body-horror. The Endless was a time-loop sci-fi head-scratcher involving a UFO cult that proved similarly spell-binding made on a similar shoestring. By 2019’s Synchronic, about a designer drug that allows users to step through time, they had A-list actors like Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan queuing up to work with them, and superhero studios keen to collaborate (they’ve since helmed episodes of Marvel’s Moon Knight and Loki). Together, they're storytellers capable of building epic worlds without requiring epic resources.

While Benson and Moorhead have enjoyed their recent excursions into the MCU, unsettling paranormal puzzles made on a dime are where they say their hearts truly lie. Which is why, when the pandemic struck and the world was thrown into lockdown, they began planning a supernatural mystery they could shoot in Benson’s apartment, star in themselves (the duo often act in their own movies) and craft almost entirely themselves. Something In The Dirt – their most compelling film to date – tells the tale of neighbours John and Levi, drawn into an unlikely friendship by unexplainable phenomenons in their apartment block. They decide to document this activity in search of fame and fortune – but can each party trust the other, as revelations about their secretive lives follow them down a rabbit hole into the unknown?

We met with Benson and Moorhead in person last summer, before Something In The Dirt’s release, while they were filming Loki season two. They told us about their writing habits and helped us decode one of the most jigsaw-like cult dramas in decades – a must-watch for fans of David Robert Mitchell’s Under The Silver Lake and films like it. This is a spoiler conversation so be sure to catch the film before tuning in – it’s available on Hulu for our listeners in America, and video on demand if you’re tuning in from the UK.

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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Mike Flanagan is one of the defining horror storytellers of the last decade. He’s a trusted custodian of tales by some of the greatest horror authors of all time, with Stephen King, Shirley Jackson and Edgar Allan Poe just some of the names he’s adapted into acclaimed shows and movies. His credits as a writer, director and showrunner include The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep. No work is more personal to the filmmaker, however, than 2021’s astonishing vampire drama Midnight Mass. 

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Mike delves into his show’s creation, going back in time over a decade to a version of Midnight Mass he intended to write as a novel. The story of its evolution into one of the most moving meditations on religion in memory (not to mention one of Netflix’s most acclaimed ever series) is the story of a series of huge life changes for the 44-year-old, as his relationship to alcohol, faith, family and other facets of his life began to alter.

The show starred Zach Gilford as Riley, a recovering addict returning to his small isolated hometown of Crockett Island after serving four years in prison for killing someone in a drunk-driving incident. There he reunites with an old flame, named Erin Greene, played by Kate Siegel, Mike’s partner and frequent collaborator. Erin is pregnant, but that pregnancy takes an unexpected turn following the arrival of an enigmatic young priest on the island, who unleashes upon members of the local church-going community a series of seemingly impossible miracles. What follows is an unholy, blood-soaked baptism, as the line between what’s miraculous and what’s monstrous becomes dangerously blurred.

Discover why Mike’s love for Midnight Mass is so great, he still has the angel-slash-vampire’s prosthetic wings in his garage. Find out all about abandoned plans for a second season of the show, in which Riley was to be revived as the show’s antagonist. And learn why there’s a musicality to monologues that makes them a joy to write (with some tips on how to write your own).

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 acclaimed writer-director Todd Field, whose new drama Tar recently picked up a number of BAFTA and Oscar nominations, and understandably so. It’s an up-close portrait of a prodigious but problematic classical pianist named Lydia Tar, played by Cate Blanchett, whose achievements as the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic are blighted by a history of sexual misconduct now threatening to unravel her life and mental health. Lydia’s abuses of power in this tense, sensory drama have seen the film become a lightning rod for conversations about so-called “cancel culture.” But as you’ll discover in this episode, Tar began life long before that term had been coined.

There are deeply human questions of power, corrosion and culpability within this story that dovetail in interesting ways with our current climate – but are bigger than that buzzword and the volatile conversation around it. In the conversation you're about to hear, Todd breaks down key themes, scenes and characters in fascinating detail. Is Lydia really being haunted? What was the early incarnation like that before the project was rooted in the high stakes world of classical music, when the character was set to be the head of a media conglomerate? And when the film ends with a reference to a video game named Monster Hunter, how accurate is it to interpret that this has been a narrative about a cancel culture fall from grace – the titular monster, finally hunted?

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, we’re joined by Samuel D. Hunter – playwright-turned-screenwriter of moving new drama, The Whale. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, the film tells the tale of Charlie (Brendan Fraser) – a reclusive former teacher who developed destructive eating habits following a devastating past tragedy. With seemingly days to live, Charlie desperately attempts to reconnect with a daughter who resents him, and is sinking into a cynicism that Charlie finds heartbreaking.

It’s a film that, you may have heard, has stoked a wide range of reactions, which Sam and I get into in detail. We talk about its provoking title, which he explains was designed to prod at people’s prejudices before taking on a completely different context in the story. We discuss the challenges and opportunities presented to Sam when it came to adapting his stage play into a screenplay – and what the scarcity of media telling the tales of plus-size protagonists does for the fabric of our society.

This is a spoiler-filled conversation so please be sure to watch The Whale before listening 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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It’s thirty years to the day since a grouchy weatherman named Phil Connors found himself reliving the same day over and over again in Groundhog Day – a comedy that’s timeless in more ways than one. On today’s episode, we're joined by the film’s writer, Danny Rubin, as we delve into his initial screenplay for the iconic time-loop farce, which became one of the most beloved comedies of its generation.

Danny wrote the film as a spec script in the early ‘90s. It soon landed in the hands of Harold Ramis of Ghostbusters and Caddyshack fame, and the pair began to develop the screenplay together. From there, Groundhog Day went through a number of changes as the pair decided to lean into the comedic potential of the premise – and lean away from some of the more "indie" and experimental elements of Danny’s original vision for the movie. Their hard work paid off – Groundhog Day was met with rave reviews on release and won a BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay. It became one of 1993's highest grossing movies and its influence has only grown from there: today, the story lives on not just in the form of the acclaimed stage musical that Danny wrote – there’s also the small matter of films and TV shows like Edge of Tomorrow, Palm Springs and Russian Doll, all of which took Groundhog Day's time-loop concept and ran with it in new directions.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Danny tells us how surreal it's been witnessing “Groundhog Day” become ingrained as an idiom in the English language. We hear about the vampire fiction that served as the movie’s surprising inspiration and talk about why weatherman”was the perfect profession for Phil and his detached, icy personality. Listen out also for details on Danny's original ending for the movie – a twist that found the character Rita beginning her own time loop on February 3rd.

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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Tony Kushner is the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Angels in America and the long-time writing partner of a certain Steven Spielberg. His latest collaboration with the director, co-written with the Close Encounters filmmaker, sees Steven pulling the curtain back on his fascinating childhood, delving back to a time in which his blossoming love for filmmaking began to entwine with seismic changes in his family life. It was no surprise to see the drama collect a Best Picture nod at this week's Academy Award nominations – it's a peerless portrayal of a family shattering in real time that acknowledges both the joy of storytelling and the havoc it can wreak to us and those around us.

Tony co-wrote the film with Steven having worked closely with him since 2005 – their previous collaborations include Munich, Lincoln and West Side Story. This project was different, though, with Tony required to act almost as a therapist to his friend as part of the writing process. For fifteen years, he’d been trying to convince Steven to tell the story of his adolescence. As you’ll hear in this episode, it was only after a blazing row between them on the set of West Side Story that Steven, as an olive branch to Tony, agreed to finally begin work on it. When it came to writing, Tony had to coax intimate details from Steven in a series of Zoom conversations, pressing his friend to delve deep into his recollection of those years – even the painful parts. In fact, especially the painful parts.

In the spoiler-filled conversation you’re about to hear, we unpack his and Steven’s screenplay for the film in its entirety, discussing why The Fabelmans is more than a love letter to cinema as it’s been billed in some places (to Sammy, filmmaking is as much a curse as a gift, unravelling his family). We also touch on his own past experience of writing from a place of autobiography with his musical Caroline or Change, and talk about the film’s intriguing sequence with Sammy’s school bully. Oh and if you think Al was going to chat to Tony and not ask him about the brilliant end sequence involving David Lynch as John Ford, you have another thing coming – that’s one of our favourite final scenes of any film in recent memory, so of course we dig into that.
 
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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Buckle up, listeners – we’re heading to Pandora. Avatar: The Way of Water is the long-awaited sequel to one of the biggest movies of all time, and our guests today are two of its talented co-writers. You might know Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver as the screenwriters behind the brilliant Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy and 2015’s Jurassic World. If you’re familiar with those movies, you’ll know exactly why legendary director James Cameron chose the pair as collaborators for this sequel to his 2009 sci-fi fantasia – both of those franchises snuck sideswipes at man’s exploitation of the natural world into their exciting set-pieces and blockbuster action.

The Way of Water is a much more complex movie than the first Avatar, with a lot more moving parts, some of which are seeds for movies to come (this is the first in a number of sequels that Amanda and Rick have also worked on, in production now). The film picks up with our heroes from the first movie, Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), fighting another battle fourteen years after the Battle of the Hallelujah Mountains – parenthood. The pair have had a family and now have an even more pronounced reason to protect their land from the colonisers from Earth, seeking to make Pandora man’s new home, having wrecked their own.

Rick and Amanda – who have been married since 1989 and collaborating since 1992’s The Hand That Rocks The Cradle – told us all about how the Way of Water’s screenplay came together. We get into exactly how they, Cameron and fellow co-writer Josh Friedman brought back the villainous Colonel Quaritch, the Mowgli-esque origins of new character Spider, and the environmental truths about our own climate change-stricken world that the film takes aim at. There’s also a thorough breakdown of that death in the film’s final act, and Al at various points attempts to speak Na’vi. Badly, naturally.

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, we have with us the extraordinary Charlotte Wells – writer-director of one of the most affecting feature debuts in recent memory. Aftersun is a meditative drama about a father and daughter on a resort holiday in Turkey, told through the eyes and camcorder footage of 11-year-old Sophie, played by Frankie Corio. She shares a sweet relationship with her father Callum, played by Paul Mescal. Across their holiday, however, she’s able to steal glimpses of him wrestling with problems beyond her comprehension, – problems he attempts to hide from the world. It’s a story about memory, parenthood and the heartbreak of growing up and realising that your parents are people, too, with their own burdens to carry. Inevitably, it’s being described as an awards season frontrunner, and one of the best movies of 2022.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Charlotte tells me how the film began as an exploration of her relationship with her own dad, who she sadly lost aged sixteen. There’s a certain overlap between her life and the events of the movie that we unpack in this chat, as well as some big differences between her early drafts of Aftersun versus the final film. Initially, the film was set to feature an adult version of Sophie wandering through scenes following her childhood self, like a sun-soaked Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. There was also a romantic relationship at the holiday resort for Callum that got jettisoned, and much more melodrama, a more pronounced plot.

We talk why she stripped away those elements to drill deeper into the father-daughter tensions at the heart of the film, what it is about the pressures and repetitions of a family holiday that make for such an interesting backdrop to the film, and what exactly is happening in the film’s astonishing emotional climax: a dance sequence set to Queen’s Under Pressure, whose lyrics take on a poignant new meaning in the context of Callum and Sophie’s relationship. It’s a spoiler conversation, so be sure to watch the film on Mubi 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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Is White Noise a disaster movie, a family drama, a drugged-out conspiracy thriller or a satirical comedy? The truth is it’s all of the above, and for its writer-director Noah Baumbach, something else altogether – a dystopian delight that represents the biggest left turn of his career so far. Since bursting into the spotlight two decades ago, the New Yorker – famous for movies like Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding and Marriage Story – has become renowned for creating intimate snapshots of American family life. Whether working on his own or collaborating with the likes of his partner Greta Gerwig or Wes Anderson, his movies are typically small in scale but big in emotional depth, delving deep into the interpersonal lives of characters you can’t help but fall in love with. 

At least, that’s what used to define a Baumbach movie. White Noise is the sound of an auteur stepping boldly out of his comfort zone. It’s an apocalyptic  adaptation of a novel that till now was thought to be unfilmable (Don DeLilo’s revered post-modern classic was full of dense prose, lyrical absurdity and satirical sharp-shooting at American hysteria; not the easiest thing to translate to screen). A lot of the film takes place in a supermarket that’s both a community hub and a cathedral to American consumerism. And a large chunk of the movie involves grand CGI depictions of a toxic cloud engulfing a community who descend into panic and lawlessness. All things far removed from the grounded domesticity of Noah’s normal storytelling.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Noah talks about why the time was right for such a departure. We discuss the film’s Covid-19 and Trump-era commentary, and his love for hiding in the opening scene of movies an encapsulation of the thematic content to come. You’ll also find out why he made one major change to the novel involving the character Babette, and why White Noise isn’t a cautionary tale – we as a society are already living in the disorientated, misinformation-filled world of this story, he explains. The future is now – both for America, and for Noah Baumbach.

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 – something new! For a while, we've wondered how to cover great screenplays by writers who are not able to come on the show or are sadly no longer with us. Which led us to the idea of Script Club – a book club, but for screenplays. We'll be inviting great storytellers onto the show in the coming months to discuss scripts they adore by screenwriters who are not able to come on the show themselves. Kicking off this intermittent series of bonus episodes is an icon of modern animation – Lee Unkrich, director of films like Toy Story 3 and Coco.

Lee was an integral creative force at Pixar for over 25 years before stepping down in 2019 following the incredible success of Coco two years earlier. That film told the tale of a 12-year-old boy named Miguel who is accidentally transported to the Land of the Dead. Lee's favourite movie, a film that he's poured a decade of his life into quite literally writing the book on, is similarly inhabited by ghosts and apparitions from the great beyond, in a very different way. Since he was a teenager, Lee has been obsessed with The Shining – Stanley Kubrick's seminal horror, co-written with novelist Diane Johnson. It's an obsession that recently culminated in a genuinely epic three volume book for publishing house Taschen, full of brand new interviews with all sorts of creatives who worked on the movie, as well as unseen photos from the film's creation.

During his research, Lee – who was granted unheralded access to the Kubrick archives – read draft after draft of the film, gaining an astonishing insight into Kubrick's writing process. On the episode, recorded in early December in London's Picturehouse Central, he recounts some of the biggest changes across those different iterations of the Shining screenplay – including a subplot involving a scrapbook that would drastically change the feel of the film, and a more blood-soaked ending that saw practically every character meeting a grisly end. Yes, even poor little Danny.

Lee also weighs in on the film's unique place in our film culture as this subject of constant speculation and theorising about its hidden meanings, sharing some of his own interpretations of the script, and breaks down key scenes and characters. This was a fun experiment to record. If you like it, and want to see us record more in this bonus format, let us know! We'd love to hear your feedback.

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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Terence Winter didn’t just write The Wolf of Wall Street – he almost was The Wolf of Wall Street. The 62-year-old creator of Boardwalk Empire – also renowned for penning some of some of the most beloved ever episodes of The Sopranos – was a stone’s throw away from the film’s subject, Jordan Belfort, on the day of the infamous “Black Monday” stock market crash of 1987. They moved in some of the same circles, and Terence – by his own admission – had a certain “conman, bullshit artist” streak to his behaviour as a young man. He sometimes wonders what might have happened had they met in real-life; the degree to which he might have been seduced into a life of selling penny stocks in the hedonistic world of high finance.

Instead, Terence moved to Hollywood in 1991, intent on writing screenplays. What happened next would help define the future of television. The Brooklyn-raised writer, after a brief stint writing for sitcoms, became a man synonymous with American criminality and the humans beings behind the most monstrous behaviour imaginable. He wrote 22 episodes of The Sopranos, including the famous Pine Barrens episode. After that, he stepped out on his own with the Prohibition-era drama Boardwalk Empire, which ran for five brilliant seasons.

This month, Terence added a new show to his list of accomplishments: Tulsa King, co-created with Yellowstone’s Taylor Sheridan. Starring Sly Stallone as a mobster rebuilding his life and criminal empire following a lengthy stay in prison, it hits some familiar beats for fans of Terence’s work, while also gravitating into exciting new territory. In the conversation you’re about to hear, Terence breaks down his script for The Wolf of Wall Street and gives a spoiler-free guide to how he crafted Tulsa King – delving deep into his unique storytelling philosophies and writing habits.
 
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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Don’t go down to the basement. Rule number one of surviving a horror movie, right? One of the many miracles of Barbarian – the debut feature from writer-director Zach Cregger that became one of the year’s biggest hits – was how it took one of the most tried and tested tropes of the genre and managed to weave something so surprising and unpredictable out it. The film – much like the basement-dwelling creature at the heart of the movie – roared out of the shadows following a low budget production in Bulgaria to become a box office-topping behemoth admired by everyone from Stephen King and Jordan Peele. Driving its success was good old fashioned word-of-mouth, as moviegoers implored their friends to rush to the cinema to experience a story that needs to be seen to be believed; whose twists it’s near-impossible to be braced for.

It might not surprise you to learn that such an unusual film was written in an unusual way. As you’ll discover in this episode, the movie began as one scene. A woman, Tess, checks into an Airbnb, only to discover there’s someone else already inside. There, she must decode a situation fraught with potential danger. Is the man she’s marooned in the apartment with a friend or a threat? Cregger wrote the scene unsure where it was leading until eventually, his subconscious took over. The rest of the movie, as you’ll hear, spilled out of him intuitively as he asked himself: what’s the most surprising thing that could happen now?

If you haven’t seen the film, pause this episode until you’ve experienced Barbarian for yourself. If you’re up to speed, listen on for fascinating revelations about how Cregger’s own experience of an alcoholic father quietly informed the script, why it was important to leave no ambiguity around the true nature of Justin Long’s character AJ and what the film expresses about toxic masculinity, as well as his original ending for 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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What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right? Well, not this week on Script Apart. Today we're joined by the wonderful Ted Griffin, the screenwriter behind a heist extravaganza that, for fans of dazzling set pieces, A-lister chemistry and Brad Pitt inexplicably eating snacks in every scene, was truly like hitting the jackpot. 

Ocean’s Eleven – based loosely on the 1960 Rat Pack vehicle of the same name – starred George Clooney,  Julia Roberts, Matt Damon and just about every other adored actor of that era, all operating with charisma and star wattage dialled up to the max. It told the story of Danny Ocean – a fresh-outta-prison conman, played by Clooney, who’s plotting a robbery like no other. His plan is to raid the vaults of the three biggest casinos in Vegas. $150m is on the line, as well as something far more important to Danny – the affections of Tess, his ex-wife, played by Roberts. 

The film was directed by the great Steven Sodebergh, who – alongside Ted – pulled off the kind of lucrative score Danny Ocean would be proud of. The movie grossed $450m worldwide, launching a franchise and wowing critics to this day. In the conversation you’re about to hear, Ted tells me how he approached its charming, clockwork-intricate screenplay. We talk about capturing the seedy, neon-splashed soul of Vegas on the page. He reveals why it was important to find an emotional heartbeat of the film, that meant it wasn’t just money motivating Danny. And you’ll also hear some wild stories from a rollercoaster six weeks on set, as the biggest stars on the planet at that time descended on Vegas en masse to bring this story to life.

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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“28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds. That is when the world will end.” In October 2001, a six-foot demonic rabbit named Frank materialised in front of a teenage Jake Gyllenhaal to issue that grave warning, setting in motion the plot of one of one of the great Halloween movies of all time. Donnie Darko was a time-twisting sci-fi curio about an emotionally troubled teen who after narrowly escaping a bizarre accident involving a falling jet plane engine, begins to experience strange visions. The result was an emotional, unknowable gem still inviting scrutiny and analysis today.

The film initially struggled to find an audience in the aftermath of 9/11, then gradually became a legit cult obsession. 21 years later, fans across the world continue to attempt to unravel its mysteries. But the thing about Donnie Darko is the more you attempt to unravel it, the more it ends up unravelling you – that’s the level of emotion and existential that writer-director Richard Kelly was operating at when he wrote the film, aged just 24.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, we break down in detail the mysteries and meanings of all the most intriguing motifs and moments in Donnie Darko. Discover the origins of the unsettling rabbit Frank, who shares an unlikely connection with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Hear how Y2K concerns and election time anxiety influenced the film’s atmosphere. And find out why the true evil in Donnie Darko is the puritanical streak that ran rampant in suburban America in the film’s 1980s setting and still sadly exists today. 

You should probably also listen out for some intriguing details at the end about a bigger, even more ambitious sequel that Richard has been in contact with Jake Gyllenhaal about developing. Donnie’s story may not be over 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.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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Where to begin describing today’s guest and his lengthy list of accomplishments? Eric Roth is the Academy Award-winning writer responsible for films like Forrest Gump,  The Insider, Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and 2018’s A Star Is Born. At 77-years-old, Eric is as potent a storytelling force as ever: last year, he delivered a sci-fi epic so huge, you’d have had to have buried your head pretty deep in the sand of a distant sand planet named Arrakis to have missed it. 

Dune, co-written with director Denis Villeneuve and previous Script Apart guest Jon Spaihts, achieved the impossible. It translated one of the densest, most complex and widely beloved science-fiction novels of all-time into a thrilling blockbuster spectacle that somehow remained true to its source material. Timothée Chalamet starred as Paul Atreides, young prince of the noble House Atreides, as an intergalactic battle erupts over control of the deadly, inhospitable desert planet. 

Author Frank Herbert wrote the book as a warning about society's tendencies to “give over every decision-making capacity” to a charismatic leader. Eric, Jon and Denis did a terrific job threading that insight into a “chosen one” story that challenges and interrogates that narrative template. For many, the film felt like the moment that theatrical cinema felt “back” after the closures of the pandemic. In a captivating conversation recorded earlier this year, Eric told us all about how the film’s towering sense of scale was achieved, how the opening he originally envisioned for the movie would have bankrupted the entire production and what keeps him hungry after all these years. Next on the docket for Eric is a collaboration with Martin Scorsese, penning the upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon. There’s no slowing down for this veritable titan of the screenwriting universe.

This episode contains spoilers for Dune.

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, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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Greetings, Script Apart listeners. Your mission today, should you choose to accept it – listen to the one and only David Koepp regale us with fascinating stories and insights from an astonishing three-decade career in Hollywood. Having written movies totalling over $9bn at the box office, David is a giant of the screenwriting world. Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Carlito’s Way, Panic Room and War of the Worlds are just a few of the iconic films that David has penned over the years, making the decision of which movie of his to cover today a tricky one. We threw the question over to him to decide, and his pick of the bunch was 1996’s masterful Mission: Impossible – a Tom Cruise espionage epic that spawned five blockbuster sequels, with two more now on the way.

David’s Mission: Impossible was markedly different to the most recent instalments in the series. His adaptation of the 1960s TV series was a lean, patient spy slow-burn that had action and excitement, but thrived on tension and paranoia. It followed Ethan Hunt, a secret agent framed for the murder of his friends and colleagues following a botched mission in Prague. It’s full of the sort of storytelling smarts that is commonplace in David’s work, evident in everything from his 1989 debut Apartment Zero to last year’s collaboration with Steven Soderbergh, the Covid thriller KIMI. 

In this wide-ranging conversation, David tells me about the chaos that submerged Mission: Impossible at multiple points in its development, the explosive prison break scene that was cut from his screenplay for budgetary reasons, the artful exposition that’s a regular feature in his storytelling (seriously, study the Mr. DNA sequence in Jurassic Park if you don’t believe me) and how he approaches screenwriting versus his work as a novelist. Last month, he released Aurora, his second novel, about a solar flare that knocks the Earth’s electrical grid out and sends society into disarray. It’s soon to be made into a movie, with Katheryn Bigelow.

This episode will not self-destruct in five seconds – but you should still hurry to listen to it, because you don’t want to miss David’s incredible stories and advice for emerging writers. This was a one fun. 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.

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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Script Apart listeners, fortify your minds – this week, we’re joined by Michael Waldron, the screenwriting sorcerer supreme behind Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Directed by Sam Raimi, this latest Marvel blockbuster is superhero storytelling with the handbrake off. A cosmic adventure packed with inter-dimensional chases,  one-eyed squid monsters and motivational talks from zombie corpses, this 28th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe well and truly lived up to the “madness” of its title.

The film follows surgeon-turned-superhero Stephen Strange as he attempts to protect a young hero, America Chavez, with the power to open portals between locations in the multiverse. It’s a journey that sends the wizard on a horror movie-descent into darkness and violence, as familiar characters from the MCU make shocking lurches into villainy.

Wrestling all of that into some kind of coherent story would be challenging for any writer. Luckily, Michael was pretty well-prepared for such a task, despite having been roped into the project at the last minute following the departures of original writers Scott Derickson and C. Robert Cargill. Michael had prior experience bringing complex sci-fi concepts to life with a lightness of touch, having written for the hit animated series Rick and Morty. He was also on the Black List a few years ago for a genius spec script called The Worst Guy Of All Time, And The Girl Who Came To Kill Him. That screenplay contained a lot of the unrelenting momentum and time-hopping shenanigans that we see in Strange 2. It also helped, of course, that he was the head writer on Loki, the Marvel series that introduced the multiverse concept in the first place.

Michael told us how the darkness of the Covid-19 pandemic helped him craft that second act surprise. We also discuss how hard it was to balance the terror and tragedy of a certain witchy character in this movie, and address the meaning of the question “are you happy?” that Doctor Strange is faced with again and again in Michael's screenplay. Even superheroes, it seems, experience dissatisfaction and feelings of “what now? Is that it?” The film is out today on Disney+ so be sure to watch it before you dive into this spoiler special.

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, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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This week on the show – an animated tale that puts the “panda” in “pandemonium.” Julia Cho is the co-writer of Pixar’s incredible Turning Red. The film follows a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl called Mei, who transforms into a giant red panda whenever she experiences strong emotion. What at first seems like a curse quickly becomes an opportunity for Mei and her friends, who are able to secretly raise money for tickets to see their favourite boy band, 4*Town, live in concert. That is, if the teenager can find a way to deal with her loving but protective mother, Ming.

Being a Pixar movie, it kinda goes without saying that Turning Red is packed with laughter, emotion, spectacle and sublime animation. But Julia and director/co-writer Domee Shi’s film broke new ground too, not just for Pixar but for Hollywood at large. It took a subject matter seldom addressed in mainstream movies – female puberty – and approached it with a cultural specificity that was utterly joyous to watch.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Julia about the difficulties and opportunities for change presented in the writing process on Turning Red. We talk about why the question “what if?” is such a vital storytelling tool, the significance of the film’s early 2000s backdrop, and why Julia and Domee refused to hide behind metaphor when it came to talking about periods in the movie. 

This is a very spoiler-filled conversation covering every plot point in the film all the way up to its exciting ending so if you’re yet to watch Turning Red, it’s probably best to do so before listening on. 

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, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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Today on the show, we’re overjoyed to be joined by the talented Hossein Amini, writer of 2011's cult smash thriller Drive. Based on the 2004 James Sallis novel of the same name, and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive told the story of a stuntman by day and getaway driver by night, whose dual lives collide after he strikes up a friendship with his neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan). From there, Hossein’s screenplay submerged audiences in a dangerous, hyper-stylised LA criminal underworld, strapping viewers into the passenger seat next to a captivatingly unknowable protagonist, simply named the Driver (Ryan Gosling).

If you’ve read the novel, you’ll know that Hossein had quite a task taking the lyrical, very interior prose and plot of the book, and turning it into a movie. Luckily, the Iranian-born storyteller is a bit of a master when it comes to adaptation: from 1997’s The Wings of the Dove to his 2014 directorial debut The Two Faces of January, Hossein relishes the task of taking a story from page to screen, adding a subtle sprinkle of his personality and past to the recipe along the way.

Across an engrossing chat, Hossein explains why Drive is in fact a fairy tale. We talk about what the film expresses about our culture of violence, why an early draft of the film featured the death of Irene, and how his storytelling habits were shaped by a childhood in the shadow of his parent’s divorce and the Iranian revolution. We also get into the meaning of The Driver’s Scorpion jacket, how the film’s iconic elevator sequence came to be, and the writer’s dark, gritty vision for the upcoming Obi Wan Kenobi TV series that he worked on briefly before stepping away from the project.

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, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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It’s not often you encounter a movie as staggeringly original as Everything Everywhere All at Once. The latest film from our guests this week, writer-director duo the Daniels, is surreal, hilarious, heartbreaking  and full of mind-blowing action – occasionally involving characters with hot dogs for fingers. We mentioned it’s original, right?

The film follows Chinese-American laundromat owner Evelyn, played by Michelle Yeoh, whose business, marriage and relationship with her daughter are simultaneously crumbling. As if that wasn’t enough chaos for the character, one day she’s thrown by the revelation that she’s not the only Evelyn that exists. It's revealed that an infinite array of Evelyns exist, occupying different parallel universes. One is a movie star, another is a Kung-fu master, so on and so forth. What happens from that moment on, is too manic and complex to describe here. Just trust us when we say it's one of the most joyously inventive sci-fis in memory.

For this spoiler conversation, we met up with Daniels in person – that’s right, the first ever IRL Script Apart! – to talk about their wildly different original opening to the movie, and early plans to use a narrator, quite possibly to be voiced by Susan Surandon. We go  deep into the meaning of the “Everything Bagel” at the heart of this movie, the scientific theory that fed into the film's plot and the conditions under which they'd consider making a Marvel movie.

Do be sure to watch Everything Everywhere All At Once before listening in – this is a spoiler conversation covering all of the film's major plot points in detail. Don't let us ruin it for you. 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, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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A decade before his recent Oscar nomination for his work on Denis Villeneuve's Dune,  Jon Spaihts co-wrote Prometheus – a bold prequel to the Alien franchise that celebrates its tenth anniversary this month.  It was a philosophical sci-fi horror odyssey like no other, that upended expectations and made the New Yorker one of Hollywood's go-to names for science fiction drama that both provokes and thrills.

You might know Jon as the man who co-wrote the first Doctor Strange movie along Scott Derrickson and past Script Apart guest C. Robert Cargill. He’s also shepherded his own sci-fi worlds to the screen, such as Passengers – a Jennifer Lawrence-starring romance among the stars that hit cinemas in 2016. Prometheus was his introduction to the world, however. He’d written a couple of impressive spec scripts that got him into rooms with high-powered Hollywood directors. Ridley Scott was one of them. As you’ll discover in this episode, the idea of an Alien prequel was kind of sprung on him. In an instant, he blurted out an idea for an epic that took the franchise and its mythology in a bold new direction, switching up the series’ visceral frights for grand existential contemplation and freaky robots. 

In this fascinating conversation, Jon delves into about his original draft for the film, titled Alien: Engineers. It followed roughly the same beats as Prometheus but with a few notable exceptions. For starters, Engineers made the bold move of suggesting that Jesus Christ was an alien, and therefore related to the Xenomorph of the first movie. It also had a different ending that set up a planned trilogy of movies with these characters, which Jon explains in detail.  You might also want to listen out for Jon’s pitch for a Star Wars series – one of the few sci-fi sandboxes he’s not had a chance to play in yet…

This is a spoiler-filled conversation – in space, no can you hear you scream that we ruined the plot for you. 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, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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We're back – and this season, we're covering TV shows as well as movies! Joining us today to kick off Script Apart season three in style is none other than Michael Schur – co-creator of shows like Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Rutherford Falls, and  a key creative force on The Office during its early seasons. 

Michael's most personal work, however, is undoubtedly The Good Place: a hilarious, philosophical probing of what it means to be a good person that ran for four seasons between 2016 and 2020. It starred Kristen Bell as Eleanor, a self-described “Arizona trash bag” with an insatiable crush on the wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin, who dies and finds herself in an afterlife that may not be all that it seems.

It’s the kind of show that could only have been created with the freedom afforded by Michael's  earlier small-screen successes – you hardly notice it while you’re watching because its jokes are so sharp and its plot so pacy, but The Good Place really did say “fork you” to a tonne of TV conventions. 

In this in-depth exploration of The Good Place's creation, we dig into into the screenwriter's vision for the show, how he crafted the jaw-dropping twist in its season one finale, why his original pilot screenplay doomed The Beatles to the Bad Place (sorry if you’re listening, Paul and Ringo) and what recently compelled Mike to write How To Be Perfect, a New York Times best-selling book that built on the themes of The Good Place. It’s a riveting and revealing chat with plenty of laughs along the way, as you might expect of someone with Mike’s resume. 

This is a spoiler-filled conversation that touches on plot points from all four seasons of The Good Place, so be sure to have watched the show before tuning in – we don't want to be sent to the Bad Place for ruining the series for you.

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, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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Great Scott, it’s the end of season two so we're going out with a 88mph, 1.21 gigawatt bang. Joining us before we make like a tree and get out of here, as Biff Tannen might say, is none other than Bob Gale –writer of the iconic Back To The Future. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, this 1985 time travel adventure needs no introduction – but trust us when we say it was almost a very, very different movie. In this special season finale, Bob delves into his radically different first draft of the film: one that included a time-travelling fridge (that's right, no Delorean) and Marty McFly and Doc Brown running a VHS film piracy operation out of the back of a rundown cinema. They have a pet chimp and there's even a shootout with the US military. The script climaxes with our heroes driving into the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb explosion, rather than using a lightning storm to get back home, as they do in the finished film.

You'll also hear about the elements of Bob's original screenplay that Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg borrowed for Forrest Gump and Indiana Jones 4 respectively. Bob also shares what it's been like working on the musical retelling of the film that recently hit London's West End, and exactly a film this outlandish – in which a teenager goes back in time and almost gets together with his own mother – took over the world. 

As for us? Well, we'll be taking a break while we work on some of our filmmaking projects, and generally try to catch a breather. Don’t worry though – we'll be back with season three and some surprises in the near future so don't go anywhere – we are your density, to quote George McFly. 

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen.

Support for this episode comes from Screencraft and WeScreenplay.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

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As the writer of movies like Lethal Weapon, The Nice Guys, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Iron Man 3, Shane Black is a true screenwriting auteur, known for his scripts' pulse-racing action, quippy dialogue and genre-skewing surprises. At the heart of his stories are usually two odd-couple characters, who must overcome their differences to solve a problem or often a police case. And did we mention all of this is often happening against a Christmassy backdrop? 

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – Shane’s 2005 festive film noir – ticked all the above boxes, and plenty more. As Christmas movies go, it's a cult classic renowned for its sharp satire and creative meta commentary on Tinseltown past and present. Robert Downey plays Harry – a petty thief who lands a Hollywood screen test after accidentally crashing an acting audition while running from cops after a botched toy story burglary. Adrift in LA over the holiday season, a string of strange events finds him reunited with his old childhood crush, Harmony (Michelle Monoghan) and entangled in a murder mystery with a gay private investigator named Perry (Val Kilmer).

Shane wrote the movie after a nine-year layover between projects. His previous film, spy thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight, has a huge cult following now but struggled at the box office on release, sparking a period of soul-searching for the screenwriter. In the conversation you’re about to hear, Shane explains how Kiss Kiss Bang Bang revitalised his love for movie-making. We discuss what is about Christmas that he can’t stop himself coming back to as a storyteller, to what degree this movie provided a comic template for Iron Man and the MCU, and how his first draft of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a romcom with intoxicating characters but no real plot. That is, until he planted a murder at the centre of it…

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen.

Subscribe to our new spin-off show How I Write here.

Support for this episode comes from Screencraft and WeScreenplay.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

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Today’s guest is none other than Tom Schulman, the Oscar-winning writer of timeless school drama Dead Poets Society. Released in 1989, Tom’s affecting and uplifting story of seven classmates who take a stand against the uniformity of the elite boarding school they attend is a valentine to never letting the world smoulder that flame in you that makes life worth living. Best remembered for an astonishing turn by Robin Williams as the kids’ teacher, John Keating, the movie walked away with Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards and Best Film at the BAFTAs, and remains an ingrained part of our pop culture three decades later: the boys’ emotive calls of “oh captain, my captain” and Keating’s advice to “carpe diem – seize the day” deeply embedded in our collective consciousness today.

Writing the film involved deep soul-searching from Tom, whose life story overlaps with the characters in his screenplay. He went to an elite boarding school and was inspired by an iconoclastic teacher. Speaking from his home in Los Angeles, he told us about an abandoned sub-plot in which Keating has cancer in his first draft, about the improvisational magic that Robin Williams brought to the role, and what he thinks the movie’s legacy is today. No need to stand on your desk at home to listen along – a sofa will do just fine.

This episode is sponsored by ScreenCraft and WeScreenplay.

Subscribe to our new spin-off show How I Write by clicking here.

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

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Surfing into the Script Apart hot seat this week is W. Peter Iliff – writer of the astonishing Point Break. Peter was waiting tables in restaurants around LA when he began work on this dazzling adrenaline-hit of a movie, about a FBI cop who goes undercover with a bank-robbing surfer gang. The idea came to him while hanging out with the filmmaker Rick King who helped him flesh out the story, before Peter turned it into the blueprint for one of the great movies of the 1990s. The resulting film, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, was both an electrifying action thriller and something that transcended the genre entirely, with plenty to say about America, adventure and the bonds forged between men. 

In this fascinating conversation, Peter explores the connection between his own struggles with alcohol and the film’s life-on-the-edge characters, always chasing their next buzz. He also details how the film's most stunning sequences came together on the page, and how the iconic climatic fight between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze’s characters drew inspiration from samurai movies. You may also want to listen out for a tantalising breakdown of a Point Break TV show that Peter’s currently writing. You’ve met Johnny Utah. Now get ready to meet Joanny Utah, in a climate change-inspired sequel series that Peter’s been hard at work on.

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen.

Subscribe to our new spin-off show How I Write here.

Support for this episode comes from Screencraft and WeScreenplay.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

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Today we’re joined by none other than Edgar Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns. Krysty you’ll remember from our recent episode on the fantastic 1917. Edgar, meanwhile, is one of British cinema’s best-loved blockbuster auteurs – the writer-director behind movies like Baby Driver, Scott Pilgrim and of course, his Three Colours Cornetto trilogy with Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End). We could spend the next few minutes giving you our glowing appraisal of the pair’s latest film, Last Night In Soho, but Stephen King probably said it best when he tweeted:  "This one is special. Time travel with a twist.” As reviews go for your first real horror movie, Krysty and Edgar couldn’t ask for much better than that.

Yes, Last Night In Soho is a horror movie. But it’s also a time-travel movie, an ode to ‘60s Soho and a brutal dismantling of British pining for “the good old glory days” that politicians and cultural commentators love to invoke. It follows Eloise, an aspiring fashion designer played by Thomasin McKenzie, who moves to London for uni and forms a seductive, supernatural connection to a girl in ‘60s Soho – Sandy, played by Anya Taylor-Joy. Full of intrigue and surprises, the film packs all the directorial flair and storytelling invention we’ve come to expect from Edgar, and all the powerful characterisation and dramatic tension that are becoming Krysty's calling cards

We spoke to the pair to hear how Edgar pulled on his mother’s own experience of supernatural phenomenon to help craft the story, how Krysty approached the infuriatingly relevant issue of exploited women in the script and the subtle condemnation of Brexit that this movie may or may not have simmering under its surface. The pair asked to not delve too deep into the movie’s ending as they want to allow people to form their own conclusions for now, but otherwise this is a spoiler-filled conversation, so be sure to check out the movie before tuning in.

Oh and one last thing – stay tuned to the end of the episode for an exclusive sneak peek at a brand-new podcast from the Script Apart team! How I Write is a show in which great screenwriters reveal their step-by-step creative process, from outline to the finish line on incredible TV shows and movies.

** Click here to subscribe to our new show How I Write! **

Support for this episode comes from Screencraft and WeScreenplay.

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. The show is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 51 pages of interviews with great screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

Support the show

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe are the creative minds behind one of the most riotously funny and inventive movies of this year. In The Mitchells Vs The Machines, two terrible things happen to young filmmaker Katie Mitchell. First, her dad decides to surprise her by taking the entire family on a cross-country road trip on the eve of her going to college. And second, the tech apocalypse strikes, enslaving pretty much all mankind. It’s neck and neck as to which one is worse for Katie, voiced by Abbi Jacobson. Together, it’s up to the Mitchells to stop the robot uprising and save the world.

Featuring groundbreaking animation, hilarious movie references and Olivia Colman as an evil Alexa, The Mitchells vs The Machines had it all. But, as you’ll discover in today’s episode, the film almost went in a very different direction. Originally titled Control Alt Escape, their first draft found the Mitchells on a mission with the President of the United States. It had a drastically different ending and a reduced role for two of the movie’s standout characters: glitching robots Eric and Deborahbot 5000. In the conversation you’re about to hear, we dig into all of those changes, as well as the film’s graceful LGBTQ+ representation, its chances of a sequel and yes, that scene with the demonic Furby.

This is a spoiler conversation, so be sure to watch The Mitchells Vs The Machines on Netflix before listening.

Support for this episode comes from Screencraft, Caveday and Coverfly.

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. The show is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 51 pages of interviews with great screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

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Today’s episode was an emotional one to record. Earlier this year, celebrated author and screenwriter Diana Ossana lost her long-term collaborator, and the man she won an impressive haul of Oscars, BAFTAs and Golden Globes with – Larry McMurtry. She and Larry enjoyed a creative partnership that spanned multiple decades and many acclaimed projects prior to his death in March 2021. None were more important or culturally impactful, however, than the incredible Brokeback Mountain. Their screenplay for Ang Lee’s 2005 drama drastically moved the needle in terms of same-sex representation in mainstream cinema. 

Adapted from a short story by Annie Proulx, and starring Jake Gyllehaal opposite the late, great Heath Ledger, the film was broadly acclaimed for its astonishing performances and alternating moments of life-affirming passion and impossible-to-stomach heartache. It was derided by some in Hollywood as “the gay cowboy movie” upon release. But the sheer storytelling power and emotional weight of this tale of two sheep farmers – who fall for each other in a 1960s America where men are meant to be macho – saw Diana and Larry get the last laugh. Today, the film is regarded as one of the defining love stories in modern movie history.

We spoke to Diana about the tricky process of building out Annie’s short story into a fully realised film. We discuss all the ways the screenplay evolved from its original outline, how the film was almost directed by Pedro Almodovar, and why it was so important to Diana and Larry that their script attended to the emotions of the wives and girlfriends caught up in the debris of Ennis and Jack’s infatuation for each other. Diana was also kind enough to share a number of incredibly touching stories about her close connection to Heath Ledger, who reminded her of her own son, who had tragically passed away. As we mentioned – this was an emotional one to record. 

Support for this episode comes from Screencraft, Caveday and Coverfly.

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. The show is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 51 pages of interviews with great screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

Support the show

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today we’re joined by the multi-talented Riz Ahmed. Riz is not only an award-winning actor known for roles in films like Four Lions, Nightcrawler, Sound of Metal and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – he’s also a gifted musician, and a prominent voice for change in the film industry, frequently advocating for a more diverse range of stories and storytellers. Last year, he added screenwriter to his lengthy list of talents with the mesmerising Mogul Mowgli – a dark drama about a British-Pakistani rapper who suffers the sudden onset of a debilitating autoimmune disease. Zed – played by Ahmed – is a talented MC hungry for fame but growing disconnected from his roots, when illness sends him spiralling into a string of dangerous hallucinations, stalked every step of the way by a mysterious masked figure with links to Pakistan’s past.

Co-written by director Bassam Tariq, the film won huge critical acclaim for its intimacy, imagination and ambition, innovatively weaving in songs from an accompanying concept album that Riz released roughly in tandem with Mogul Mowgli. In this episode, he tells us about his relationship with writing and the parts of his own life he brought to the screen in this deeply personal movie. We also talk about the film’s prescient echoes of the Covid-19 pandemic and why “our scars can be a road map to our creativity” as Riz so beautifully puts it. Do make sure you’ve seen Mogul Mowgli before listening in, as this is a spoiler-filled conversation exploring all of the movie’s major plot points. Once you have, come back and brace yourself for a fascinating insight into what for my money is one of the best movies of the past 12 months.

Support for this episode comes from Screencraft, Caveday and WeScreenplay.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 51 pages of interviews with great screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

Support the show

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we’re joined by Krysty Wilson-Cairns, co-writer of one of the year’s most hotly anticipated thrillers: Edgar Wright’s Last Night In Soho. Audiences are in for a seriously gripping white-knuckle ride if that movie turns out to be anything like Krysty’s first-produced feature film, the incredible 1917. Co-written with director Sam Mendes, 1917 followed two British soldiers as they embarked on a nail-biting mission across No Man’s Land in the first World War. With communication lines down, the lives of 1,600 men rest on this duo delivering a message to a stubborn battalion captain that his soldiers are about to walk into an ambush. 

On release, the film garnered more attention for how it told its story, rather than the story itself. 1917 used long, intricately-choreographed takes to give the impression of a story told across just two uninterrupted shots. It was heralded as an unrelenting real-time glimpse into the horrors of war unlike anything before it. But the movie’s technical accomplishments would have felt empty were there not an emotive plot powering it forward. In the conversation you’re about to hear, Krysty pulls the curtain back on every element of that plot, detailing the painstaking research that went into forming the film’s characters. We also talk about discarded plans for a mustard gas attack sequence, why a certain central character simply had to die, and why we as a society continue to tell World War I stories a century on.

Support for today's episode comes from Screencraft, WeScreenplay and Caveday.

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

Support the show

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today on the show, we’re joined by screenwriter and novelist C. Robert Cargill. In 2012, Cargill and frequent collaborator Scott Derrickson put a chill down the spines of audiences with a supernatural horror that was low in budget but sky-high in imagination. Sinister saw Ethan Hawke star as Ellison Oswalt, a washed-up true crime writer who goes to extreme lengths to reignite his career. After moving his wife and kids into the small-town home of a recently murdered family, whose gruesome killing remains unsolved, he discovers in the attic a box. In it are a collection of unsettling home videos that hint at a demonic conspiracy at play. As Ellison closes in on the truth, a terrifying entity closes in on him. 

The film put Cargill and Derickson on a path towards bigger projects – a Marvel movie, 2016’s trippy Doctor Strange soon followed. It’s easy to see why they were suddenly in demand. Sinister is a brutally effective masterclass in horror filmmaking that shows the power of a screenwriting philosophy Cargill swears by. The key to telling an engaging horror tale is to write a gripping grounded drama that’s then gatecrashed by a supernatural other, he explains in this episode, also delving into the origins of the film’s Bablyonian deity antagonist, Bagul the eater of Children, and all the ways Sinister evolved en route to the big screen. For example, did you know Sinister was originally titled Super 8 and presented Bagul as a “fucked up Willy Wonka” as Cargill puts it?

Support for today's episode comes from Screencraft, WeScreenplay and Caveday.

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

Support the show

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our guest this week is James V. Hart, whose screenwriting talents have seen him enlisted to pen scripts for everyone from Steven Spielberg to Francis Ford Coppola. There's one movie in his extensive filmography that he looks back on with particular pride and emotion, however. Contact – the Robert Zemeckis-directed story of a scientist played by Jodie Foster, who discovers proof of extraterrestrial life – was a novel before James adapted it into one of the most celebrated sci-fi dramas of all time. The book was written by renowned astronomer Carl Sagan – a close personal friend of James'. Carl sadly didn't live to see the film's completion, passing away after a long illness just months before Contact's release.

James looks back on the movie today as a tribute to his friend and the astronomer's brilliant partner, author Ann Druyan, both of whom he worked with closely while adapting Contact. It was a tricky screenplay to get right. As you'll discover in this episode, the book was a dense meditation on what would happen if contact were made with life from another planet – the ripples it would send through politics, through religion, and everything in between. It was a book rooted, as anyone who knows Carl's work might expect, in scientific fact. Translating the novel into a piece of blockbuster entertainment without losing any of the book's authority and spirit of scientific discovery, in a time dominated by the explosions and spectacle of alien movies like Independence Day, was a daunting task.

This is the story of how James pulled it off. Over an engrossing sixty minutes, we reflect on the movies that Contact helped inspire, a version of the script that included the Pope as a major character, and why James is not satisfied with the film's ending. Truly, they should have sent a poet to interview James. Instead, you guys have Al. Sorry about that.

Support for this episode comes from MUBI, Screencraft and Launchpad.

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

Support the show

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.