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Get ready for another in our Emmy Awards nominees mini-series. Today, Joshua Zetumer, showrunner of Say Nothing, joins us to break down his riveting adaptation of the book of the same name by Patrick Radden Keefe, which hit screens last year. Say Nothing offered a stunningly well-realised recreation of a tinderbox time on the streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Spanning three decades, it followed two real-life sisters – Dolours and Marian Price – whose involvement in the 1973 bombing of London’s Old Bailey as soldiers in the provisional Irish Republican Army saw them sentenced to life imprisonment. In jail, the pair went on a hunger strike that became national news.
In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Josh tells me about approaching the story as an outsider, having grown up some five thousand miles away. We get into the show’s portrayal of divisive real-life figures who are alleged to have committed terrible acts of violence, the hurt from which still resonates today. And you’ll also hear about the theme of destructive silence that runs through this show - though for obvious reasons, Josh declines to say much about the shocking end to the series, which is currently the subject of a controversial court case.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
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Today on Script Apart, the next in our run of conversations with nominees for this year’s Emmy Awards. Dying For Sex – created by Liz Meriwether and my guest today, Kim Rosenstock – is an adaptation of the popular Wondry podcast series of the same name about one Molly Kochan – a writer diagnosed with terminal cancer, who documents her sexual reawakening in the aftermath of that diagnosis.
Played in the show by Michelle Williams, Molly leaves her husband and embarks on an odyssey of eroticism that forces her to confront a childhood trauma that has stalked her her entire adult life. Did I mention this is, at least in part, a comedy? At least, I laughed constantly throughout this series, which is tender and terrifically funny in equal measure, and well deserving of its Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series and Outstanding Writing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.
In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Kim breaks down all the key scenes and characters from the show, getting into how, ironically, this is deep down a story about healing. We contemplate what it is about death that as a society we can’t help but turn away from – and why we stand to benefit from staring it straight in the eye with our pop culture, rather than flinching away from the abyss it can resemble. You’ll hear about why the show invented the neighbour character played by Rob Delaney in the series, as an act almost of wish fulfilment, giving Molly the chance to fall in love that she was denied in real life – and how working on this series affected Kim herself.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
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A long time ago in a galaxy not so far away, writer-director Dan Gilroy became captivated by the machinations of power; how throughout history, authoritarian figures have seduced electorates, seized control of nations and eroded important pillars of democracy – leading resistance fighters to push back across punishing decades of struggle. It’s a tale as old as time in our history books – but not necessarily in our movies and TV shows, which haven’t always shown just how bruising and thankless rebellion actually is.
That is, until Andor – the acclaimed Star Wars TV show created by Dan’s brother Tony Gilroy, which Dan is one of the key writers on. The 66-year-old was recently nominated for an Emmy for his work on the recent second season of the show, which concluded the gripping story of Cassian Andor – a complex hero first introduced in 2016’s Rogue One. The show’s electrifying portrait of a band of spies operating in the shadows to try and overthrow the Empire was sophisticated and in the eyes of many viewers, incredibly timely, too.
Today on Script Apart, Dan joins Al to dig into what Andor was really all about. The warnings he hoped his episodes would provide, about how fascism functions. The truth about who Cassian was, played by Diego Luna. The truth about who Imperial bureaucrat Syril was, played by Kyle Soller. Why if the show extended further, we may well have seen Emperor Palpatine. Excitingly, you’ll also hear in detail about an episode of Andor that Dan wrote but never made the screen – an episode he says would have been like Ridley Scott’s Alien, with fan-favourite robot K2SO playing a Xenamorph-like role. And of course, because 2014’s Nightcrawler, which Dan wrote and directed, is one of the great undersung thrillers of all time, there’s a sprinkling of chat about that film too.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
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Welcome to Eddington – population: all of us. The new film from writer-director Ari Aster transports audiences to a town on the brink of combustion that, in a way, we’ve all been residents of for five years now. Look out your window right now and there may not be a New Mexico mountain range hugging the horizon like in the Eddington of Aster’s movie. But chances are you’ve absolutely felt it in the air – the same dread, the same fury, the same entropy and exhaustion that pollutes that dustbowl town.
May 2020 – when Eddington takes place – was a time of neighbours split into culture war factions, with a steady hum of social media misinformation fueling their paranoid obsessions. We were already tipping towards that new age of civic hostility before the pandemic, mask mandates and the death of George Floyd, the auteur will tell you. But that year saw us cross a precipice that we’ve yet to turn back towards. Maybe we’re unable to.
Which is what makes Eddington – Ari’s fourth film, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone – feel so vital and yes, so scary. The filmmaker’s first two features, Hereditary and Midsommar, saw him heralded as the new king of horror. It took his first film set in the real world – his first movie with nothing supernatural or occult-themed about it – to deliver arguably his most terrifying scares. His previous films, 2023’s Beau Is Afraid included, were nightmares his audiences were allowed to wake up from. Can you really say the same, stepping out of the cinema after seeing Eddington?
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
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All aboard the Cat Bus for a moving conversation about one of the greatest animations of all time – and the emotional madness of trying to bring that tale to the stage in London’s West End. If you’re in London at the moment, you need to see the current theatrical adaptation of My Neighbour Totoro currently showing in the West End. Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company with puppet designs by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, this magical re-telling of the iconic Studio Ghibli animation was written by our guest today, Tom Morton-Smith – a storyteller whose past work includes Oppenheimer (not the Christopher Nolan movie, but an acclaimed stage drama) and Ravens, a Cold War thriller set at the 1972 World Chess Championship.
Taking on Totoro was an undertaking as big and daunting as the titular forest spirit himself. Set in post-war Japan, Hayao Miyazaki’s story told the tale of a father and his two daughters who move to the edge of an enchanted forest, to be closer to the hospital where the girls’ mother is undergoing medical care. As uncertainty gathers, strange creatures reveal themselves to little Satsuki and Mei – leading them on an adventure of wonder and awe. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Tom details how he translated that wonder and awe to the stage. He’s also open about his persoal experience, writing the play amid huge change in his family life. The grief and loss – or potential for loss – that sits in the background of the Totoro story is something Tom was moving through himself as he sat down to pen this adaptation.
We break down the tale’s themes of environmentalism and the kindness we owe to each other. We also get into the darkness of Ghibli that is often erased or reduced in how the west talks about films like this one. Finally, we talk about “ma” – the Japanese word for “emptiness” – that Miyazaki fills Totoro with, and why it might just be the secret to the joy of this film, now more than ever, in a frantic, digital world.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
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In 2023, Megan – a sassy robot, designed to be your daughter’s best friend – danced and dismembered her way to internet infamy. The title character of director Gerard Johnstone and writer Akela Cooper’s Blumhouse horror-comedy was an evil doll in the tradition of Chucky from Child’s Play, but at the same time, distinct in her modernity. As I asked in my review for Empire Magazine at the time: “Has Chucky ever interrupted a stabbing spree to sing Sia’s pop smash ‘Titanium’? Has Billy the Puppet ever broken into a TikTok-style dance before another Saw franchise victim met their violent demise?” The answer was no, and a moment in meme culture was born. There were SNL skits about Megan, starring Aubrey Plaza. The film took $181m at the box office against a paltry $12m budget. It seemed inevitable a sequel would follow – and two years later, that sequel is here.
Written by Gerard, my guest today, from a story he conceived with Cooper, the film is bigger in every possible regard. It lays on the explosions and spectacle thicker and faster than before, throwing car chases and robot-on-robot fist fights into the mix this time around. It’s higher in stakes: the fate of the world is on the line here, as a new rogue A.I threat, Amelia, emerges. And it’s also more expansive in the conversation this Frankensteinian fable wants to have about parenthood, as well as the genie-out-of-the-bottle effect of artificial intelligence.
But did you know in the first draft of this sequel, Joe Rogan and Snoop Dogg had brief parts written for them? Or that at one point in the script, Cady – played by Violet McGraw – has to fend off her sweet, old grandad in a fight scene in a diner, because he’s being controlled by a neuro-chip? Or that the story initially involved Amelia firing missiles into the Middle East, sparking a new conflict in the region – a plot line removed for obvious reasons?
In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Gerard walks me through his fascinating and extremely funny sequel. We get into all the important plot points in spoiler detail – and talk about the pressure of following up a film with the kind of immense digital footprint that the first one had.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
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Today on Script Apart, we’re taking a long, hard look in the mirror – Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series Black Mirror, to be more precise, with the beloved British writer joining Al for a spoiler-filled breakdown of the show’s brilliant latest season. Yes, this week we’re delving into a show that reflects back at us our darkest fears about the unrelenting march of technology on modern life. Across thirty three acclaimed episodes and one interactive special, Black Mirror has wondered what parts of the human experience might soon be transformed – or worse yet, disfigured – by advances in artificial intelligence. The answer is “a great many parts.” The resulting stories are always gripping.
When Charlie conceived the show in 2011, those advances must have felt still quite abstract – a possibility on the horizon. In today’s time of Chat GPT, little is abstract anymore about the topics and technologies spotlighted in Black Mirror. The internet is constantly ablaze with observations about the collapsing gap between our reality and the reality of the show. Because what may begin as a flight of fantasy in Charlie’s hands has a distressing habit of becoming real years later.
Yes, we’re living in a Black Mirror episode, to quote a common online refrain, and in the spoiler chat you're about to hear, Charlie and Al get into that. You’ll hear how the show has changed across its time on screen, responding to the fact that tech companies are no longer faceless corporations like they were when the show began; they’re now the extension of celebrity CEOs, with cult-like legions of disciples. You’ll get Charlie’s take on Al’s suspicion that episodes like ‘Hotel Reverie’ appear to indicate that something has softened in the writer since he began this journey with Black Mirror. And you’ll hear some truly mind-bending descriptions of the original ideas behind some of the series’ best-loved episodes, including one that was intended to be a Bond movie-esque adventure, one that was originally planned to be a musical and of course, the moving San Junipero.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
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As the Talking Heads once nearly sang: “And may find yourself beamed up into a spacecraft. And you may find yourself pretending to be the leader of Earth. And you may find yourself hanging out with weird and wonderful beings from outer-space, going up against intergalactic warlords and maybe learning a thing or two about belonging along the way.” Yes, it’s an Elio special on today’s Script Apart, as we venture across the cosmos with the Pixar film’s co-directors, Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian.
Elio tells the story of a child who longs to be abducted by aliens. Still reeling from the loss of his parents and struggling to adjust to living with his well-meaing aunt, the character embarks on an adventure that changes how he sees life back on Earth. It was written by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones, from a story by Madeline, Domee and Adrian Molina.
Domee you may know as the director of Turning Red, which we covered on this show in 2022. Madeline, meanwhile, is the director behind Burrough, a beautiful Pixar short film from a couple of years ago (this is her first feature). In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, we discuss initial drafts of this story in which Olga was Elio’s mother, rather than his aunt. I ask about how the film grapples with loneliness; the process of creating the magical worlds that Pixar movies so often invite filmgoers into, whether that’s Monstropolis or Coco’s Land of the Dead; and of course, the meaning of that Carl Sagan speech asking “Are we alone?” that close the film.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
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The last time acclaimed writer-director Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Civil War, Annihilation) appeared on Script Apart, he told Al about his desire to quit directing temporarily and focus on writing – you know, like in the early days of his career. Well, it doesn’t get much more like those early days than returning to the blood-soaked quarantined Britain he imagined two decades ago, with a director who he shared an incredibly fruitful partnership with around the turn of the century.
28 Years Later, which hit cinemas on Friday, sees Alex team up once more with Danny Boyle – the filmmaker with whom he made The Beach and Sunshine, as well as a 2002 zombie horror that redefined the genre. This sequel, however, is no retread of the film that sent a shiver through Britain’s spine. It’s a deeply contemplative meditation on Britain, death and how history is remembered and misremembered. The film stars Alfie Williams as Spike, a boy living in a protected tidal island community off the coast of Northumberland, who leads his mother, played by Jodie Comer, on a dangerous quest onto the mainland in search of a doctor to cure a mysterious ailment. What follows is not what many fans expected, in all the best ways.
What you’re about to hear is a spoiler-filled conversation delving deep into the influence of Brexit on the film. We dissect that ending and its allusions to a disgraced figure from British pop culture history. Also explored: the origins of the Alpha zombies, the inspiration behind Ralph Fiennes’ Kelson character, and Alex’s original draft of a 28 Years Later movie, which saw Chinese special forces infiltrate Britain in search of the lab where the rage virus began. Enjoy the episode and stay away from those infected, people.
Support for this episode comes from Final Draft.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. This episode was recorded and mixed by Daniel Gregory.
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Havoc is the new film from Welsh writer-director Gareth Evans, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. Starring Tom Hardy as a jaded cop at the heart of a conspiracy in an unnamed, crime-ridden American city's underbelly, it packs some of the most frenetic action scenes of the year so far – but then again, what did you expect? Gareth is the filmmaker behind 2011's The Raid, 2014’s The Raid 2 and the TV show Gangs of London – each of which is renowned for its dizzying fight choreography.
In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Gareth tells me about his love for characters who have something to atone for. We get into an early, more commercial draft of the film in which Walker wasn’t the estranged father he is in the finished film, and break down how he constructed the movie’s jaw-dropping club fight sequence. Plus, hear how his own experience of parenthood fed into the writing of Havoc. That last bit is surprisingly tender for a film in which a character gets harpooned in the head.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
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Did you think Script Apart was going to let the 30th anniversary of one of the most iconic teen films ever just pass us by? In the words of Cher Horowitz – “as if.” On today’s episode, we’re joined by Amy Heckerling, the writer-director who, three decades ago this summer, gave Jane Austen’s Emma a Beverly Hills makeover to remember. You may also know her for Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Look Who’s Talking and Vamps, but Clueless is the film that she’s best-known for – a Nineties treasure trove of high school hilarity that’s still beloved today. So much so that a musical adaptation, also written by Amy, just opened in London’s West End.
In the conversation you’re about to hear, Amy tells Al about the spirit of kindness that runs through the movie. We get into the TV pilot for Clueless – then titled No Worries – that was turned down across Hollywood, and discuss what was going on in Amy’s life at the time of writing Clueless. The story of the film is one of a sunny optimist named Cher who’s ready to take on the world. For Amy, though, that was hardly the case as she wrote the hit comedy. “I was feeling very depressed, which is how most stories start,” she teased in an interview in 2016. In this episode, she tells us why.
Support for this episode comes from Final Draft.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
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Today on Script Apart – one of cinema’s great monster movies. The terrifying creature at this movie’s core, though, didn’t have trailing tentacles, bloodshot eyes or reptilian skin. Instead of sharp teeth, it wore a sharp suit – Valentino pinstripe, perfectly pressed. This monster owned a gleaming Rolex, lived in an elegant condo and smiled politely through slap-up dinners with his fellow Wall Street sleazes. At night, he stalked the streets of New York, maiming sex workers and murdering the homeless, to a soundtrack of Huey Lewis and the News. And twenty-five years on, he’s arguably more fearsome than ever in his relevance to our own world.
Yes, joining Al Horner for a metaphorical reservation at Dorsia this week is author, actress and screenwriter Guinevere Turner, who co-wrote American Psycho. Guinevere teamed up with someone who would become a long-time collaborator, director Mary Harron, to adapt Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial novel about a deranged investment banker named Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale).
In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Guinevere tells me about the parts of herself she perhaps threaded into her and Mary's version of the story, either consciously or subconsciously – as revealed in her 2023 memoir, When The World Didn’t End, she grew up in a cult that promised followers they’d be whisked off in a spaceship to Venus, and there’s cult-like framing of money and materialism in American Psycho that perhaps was no accident. We get into her and Mary’s treatment of Patrick as an “alien who’s crash-landed to Earth,” learning to fit in through the pop culture he engages in. You’ll also hear about Bret Easton Ellis’s version of the film that ended with Patrick Bateman singing a musical tribute to New York, and what Guinevere’s take is on the upcoming remake, reported to be directed by Luca Guadagnino.
For more from Guinevere, whose other work includes The L Word, Go Fish, The Notorious Bettie Page and 2018’s Charlie Says, pick up When The World Didn’t End, which is a great read – and head to our Patreon page! We’re running an exclusive series on our Patreon called One Writing Tip, in which great writers share one piece of advice they swear by that they think all emerging writers should know. And for more from us at Script Apart, hit subscribe if you haven’t already.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
Support for this episode comes from Final Draft.
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Praise Kier, it’s a Severance Script Apart special! In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Dan Erickson – the dystopian workplace drama’s creator and showrunner – spills all the secrets that Lumon Industries will allow, about the season two finale that aired last week, and our real-world relationships with work, corporations and personal pain that the show offers a meditation on.
The series, starring Adam Scott, Britt Lower, John Tuturro and Zach Cherry, debuted on Apple TV+ in 2022 at the exact right time: post-pandemic, a new Zoom-aided groundswell of people found themselves now “working from home” in a way that might be better described as “living at work.” Studies showed Brits and Americans were working longer than hours than ever and tethered to their desks in this round the clock way that made Severance’s story – of characters trapped in an endless hellscape of never-ending work – hit in this deeply relatable way. All work and no play… you know the rest.
It was a three year wait for season two, but the payoff was worth it. This latest batch of episodes delved deeper into the lives and psyches of Mark S, Helly R and their “Outies” – the versions of themselves who have no recollection of their job once they leave; it’s like they’re never there. And in doing so, new questions and philosophical dilemmas were thrown at us in the audience about personhood under capitalism, who deserves what rights and what constitutes a soul.
Listen out for Dan’s revelations about his drastically different original pilot for the show, and his breakdown of every twist and turn in this final episode including that ambiguous line of Helly’s – “I’m her.” We also get into the hardship from Dan’s life that he’s glad he didn’t sever from: a period of depression in which he learned there’s “power in clawing your way out of a dark place.” It made him the writer he is today – the writer responsible for Severance.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
Support for this episode comes from Final Draft.
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How do you follow a film like Longlegs, the chilling riff on serial killer thrillers that became one of the cult smashes of 2024? The answer, if you’re acclaimed writer-director Osgood Perkins, is to first swap out the pressure-cooker dread of that breakout hit. Next, add a cursed toy monkey. Then, harvest the wildest, darkest parts of your imagination for some of the most gruesome demises ever seen on screen. And finally, package all of the above into an existentialist comedy about embracing death. The result is The Monkey – a Stephen King adaptation inspired by the literary icon’s 1980 short story of the same name, but very much a work of Oz’s own invention.
From the moment a flamethrower-wielding Adam Scott opens the film with a maniacal cameo, screaming as he scorches everything in his path, it’s clear the movie is operating on a different tonal plane to Longlegs. But make no mistake, The Monkey is just as personal to Oz as that film and others before it, like The Blackcoat's Daughter and 2016’s I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Perhaps, in fact, even more so. As Oz explains in this moving spoiler conversation, the film is a meditation on death because death is something he’s experienced up close in the most unimaginably tragic circumstances; on September 12 1992, his father, Psycho actor Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS-related pneumonia at his home in Los Angeles. Almost exactly nine years later, his mother, the actress and photographer Berry Berenson, was aboard American Airlines Flight 11 when it was hijacked by terrorists and flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, on September 11, 2001.
The Monkey, he says, features Theo James playing two roles as twin brothers Hal and Bill, because “that’s my life,” as he puts it. He and his own brother Elvis Perkins, an acclaimed musician, became “buried in the rubble of the tragedy” of their mother’s death on 9/11 and emerged with “differences more apparent than ever.” In the conversation you’re about to hear, Oz tells us the extent to which the movie helped reconcile some of the feelings towards his brother. Al asks him about the ending of the film, which involves a plane crash – a very emotionally-loaded image, given his tragic family history. And he shares why accepting death is the only true way to find peace.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.
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It was supposed to be “the cheerful Games.” That was the motto of the 1972 Munich Olympics, which was meant to usher in a peaceful new era on the world stage after the horrors in Germany just three decades earlier. Instead, on September 5th 1972, just after 4am. eight men in tracksuits jumped the fence at Munich's Olympic Village, armed with rifles and grenades. These men belonged to Black September — a group associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization – and their plan was to take the Israeli Olympic team hostage and hold them at gunpoint until 328 prisoners detained by Israel were released. The standoff ended in confusion and bloodshed. All eleven hostages died, as did a policeman and five members of the Black September group. This, despite media reports – broadcast to 900m people around the world – that the prisoners had been rescued.
Today on Script Apart, we talk with the writer-director, Tim Fehlbaum, and co-writer, Moritz Binder, of a newly Oscar-nominated drama that contemplates what the Munich massacre might tell us about media complicity in acts of terrorism. The pair wrote this film with writer Alex David focused not on depicting the overall events of that terrible day – Steven Spielberg covered that with 2005's Munich, written by past Script Apart guests Eric Roth and Tony Kushner. Instead, Tim and Mortiz’s angle on the story is through the American sports broadcasters who suddenly find themselves tasked with covering the situation live as it unfolds – a world first.
Never before had an event like this played out on television as it happened. Today, we’re very much used to consuming terrible atrocities as they happen on our digital devices. But in 1972, such a thing was unheard of. September 5 – which stars a great ensemble cast – puts the ethical questions involved with live-streaming terror under the microscope. It’s a period piece that resonates with disturbing power today not least because, since the film was finished, a harrowing new chapter in the history of violence between Israel and Palestine has been written. Maybe, the film seems to wonder, when you have a form of media that rewards being first and being loudest instead of being accurate, any type of live coverage is doomed to inflame and exploit rather than inform.
This episode, as ever, contains spoilers.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.
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Our guest today is a Palme d’Or-winning writer-director whose films centre characters “chasing the American dream but who don’t have easy access to that dream.” You might know Sean Baker from exhilaratingly raw dramas like Tangerine, Red Rocket and The Florida Project – each a compassionate and captivating dispatch from life on society’s margins, and each lavished with critical acclaim. His latest movie, Anora, has seen new levels of recognition for the 53-year-old, though. Next month, the film – about this tale of a sex worker named Ani, played by Mikey Madison, who falls for the son of a Russian oligarch – will compete for four awards including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the 97th Academy Awards, with internet discussion about the movie, its characters and their motives refusing to dissipate.
In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Sean tells Al about how his own experience of heroin addiction in his twenties has influenced his storytelling. We talk about why this film is not a Cinderella story but a tale about shattered dreams, discuss a hopeful epilogue to the movie that Sean wrote but has so far refused to share with the world about what happens to Ani next, and break down the film’s devastating ending. A huge thanks to Sean for being a fantastic guest.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.
To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.
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How will romance adapt to the age of A.I that lies ahead? What bleak (and beautiful) impulses might the technology bring out in us? And have you ever seen a Black Mirror episode inside a Coens Brothers thriller, inside a Barbarian-esque horror? These are the questions posed by Companion, the new movie by writer-director Drew Hancock. Today on the show, we talk devotion, dating and androids with Drew, whose directorial debut kept its cards close when it came to its marketing – and understandably so, because there are some really fun twists and turns in this script that are best experienced fresh. (Stop reading if you haven’t yet seen Companion and want to experience fresh, as recommended).
Companion is about a young woman named Iris, played by Sophie Thatcher. Iris arrives at a weekend away with her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) to glares of suspicion from his friends, who she’s meeting for the first time. As an audience, we experience her hurt at these friends’ strange microaggressions – and at Josh’s dismissive behaviour, callously, abruptly commanding her to “go to sleep” immediately after sex. Then – a murder. A murder and a reveal. Arguably the most humane character amongst this assortment of friends, is not human at all, but a machine. From there, a crime thriller unfolds with a large stash of cash at its blackly comic centre. It’s bold, original and manages to find new things to say about the intersection between technology and relationships. I had a blast watching it – and Drew from the sounds of things, had a blast writing it.
On this episode of Script Apart, you’ll hear about the current real-world advances in technology like Iris that informed his vision of where we might be fifteen years or so into the future. We get into the hints at how A.I companions like Iris have altered the world beyond what we see in the film – and some early ideas for the movie that were completely different to what ended up on screen. And we break down every detail of the film’s emotionally satisfying ending.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.
To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.
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The climate crisis is here and over the last few years, a question has loomed: how will Hollywood respond? Can blockbuster movies be a tool for mobilising audiences into action as global temperatures rise, fires rage and climate denialism continues to spread? Maybe in decades to come, The Wild Robot – a film by my guest today, Chris Sanders – will be looked back upon alongside Pixar's Wall-E as one of the first indicators of mainstream moviemaking’s processing of and pushback against the weather emergencies coming our way. The film – a stunning, Miyazaki-inspired animation about a robot washed ashore on a nature-abundant island, in an America devastated by unspecified ecological disasters – acknowledges what awaits if carbon emissions aren’t curbed head on, instead of alluding to it, like in other blockbusters.
It’s a deeply moving tale that features the voice talents of Lupita Nyong'o as Roz – an android who learns to love through foster care. After an accident, she becomes the guardian of an infant goose named Brightbill, voiced by Kit Connor. Brightbill has to learn how to fly in time to migrate to warmer climes, before the brutal winter turns the island into a scarcely survivable tundra of sorts. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Chris reveals what the phrases “kindness is a survival skill” and “exceed your programming” – two mantras that informed the film’s creation – mean to him. We get into the truth behind Universal Dynamics, the shadowy company that created Roz. And you’ll also hear a deeply moving story about Chris’s mother and the regret he’s carried with him about their relationship, that influenced one of the key lines in the movie.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.
To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.
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Jesse Eisenberg owes it all to an internet pop-up ad. A few years ago, while at an impasse with a screenplay about two friends on a trip to Mongolia, the writer-director and star of movies like The Social Network read an ad for “Auschwitz tours - with lunch.” And that jarring phrase unleashed an avalanche of ideas about, as he puts it, “the irony of wanting to connect to your ancestors’ pain but at the same time not being willing to experience any pain yourself: stay at the Radisson, eat your continental breakfast, have your croissant in the morning and your coffee in the van going to a concentration camp.”
Skip forward to 2025, and the film unlocked in his imagination by that ad – A Real Pain – is an awards season frontrunner, nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor at this year’s Oscars. Its story of two cousins – David, played by Jesse, and Kieran Culkin as Benji – on a Holocaust “trauma trip” through Poland is a moving meditation on the shame it’s easy to feel in today’s world for feeling unsatisfied with life, when we think about the greater hardships our ancestors may have suffered. it’s devastating and deliriously funny in equal measure, not to mention bold in how it refuses an Eat Pray Love narrative of having international travel solve these characters’ problems back home. In A Real Pain, Culkin’s erratic livewire Benji ends up exactly back where he started – but we as an audience are changed.
In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Jesse tells me about how the film worsened rather than resolved his complicated feelings around what pain he’s entitled to feel. We get into that devastating final shot at the end of the film and why it is we feel the urge to connect to our pasts, with services like Ancestry and 23andMe. Listen out also for the parts of Jesse’s life he folded into the script – such as his use of medication and medication to tackle OCD and depression – and how Jesse reflects on the unanswerable question of, how much grief to allocate to the terrible situation in the world right now, before we cease functioning. It’s a fascinating chat about a fascinating film.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.
To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thirty years ago, a film hit multiplexes that helped redefine love onscreen for moviegoers. So much so, in fact, that the history of the modern romantic drama might arguably be best separated into two distinct eras: before Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater’s enchanting cult smash stroll through moonlit Vienna, and after. Today on Script Apart, Richard’s co-writer Kim Krazin reflects on three decades of hearing from strangers about how this simple tale – in which two strangers on a train make a spontaneous decision to get off and wander the streets till dawn together – touched them deeply.
The film starred Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as Jesse and Celine – one an American tourist, recovering from a botched trip to Madrid to see his now-ex girlfriend, the other a French student, heading back to Paris to continue her studies after visiting her grandmother. Kim and Richard had worked together before prior to Before Sunrise. Kim appeared as an actor in 1990’s Slacker and 1993’s Dazed and Confused. This time, however, they were co-writers, sequestered together for an intense eleven-day writing sprint, hard at work on a boy-meets-girl story with a difference.
Before Sunrise was to be naturalistic. There would be no melodrama – no conflict for the sake of it. Just conversation, as two people brought together by chance, who live a world apart, forge a connection against the ultimate ticking clock: at sunrise, Jesse has a plane to catch. As their attraction deepens, we’re left to wonder: will they see each other again after their expires, when dawn arrives? As it happens, they would; two sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, later followed, the first of which Kim has a “story by” credit on. But in 1995, as the credits rolled, audiences were famously left in the dark. The film’s brilliant cliffhanger ending – in which the couple decide not to exchange any contact information and instead meet at the same Vienna train station in six months’ time – was being written and rewritten right up until 3am on the last night of filming.
You may have heard about how Linklater was inspired by a woman who he met in a Philadelphia toy shop and ended up wandering around the city with, talking deep into the night (this woman, tragically, died in a motorcycle accident before the film’s release). What you might not be aware of is Kim’s chance encounter at a Bob Dylan concert in London, one day on a train trip through England, that gave her some of the emotional kindling for Jesse and Celine’s tale. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, you’ll discover what parts of the movie wouldn’t fly today because of the modern technology that connects us brilliantly, but also robs us of the “romance of chance,” pervading every frame in Before Sunrise. We get into early plans to set the film not in Vienna but in Texas, and everything unlocked by the decision to set the movie abroad. And finally we get into whether or not Jesse in the film invents the concept of social media a good decade or so ahead of time. Hear us out on that one.
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.
To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.
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