Script Apart with Al Horner

Today on the show – a conversation about Bugonia, with the film’s writer, Will Tracy. Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the upcoming Academy Awards, the Yorgos Lanthimos-directed film is an black comedy thriller about a pharmaceutical CEO, Michelle, played by Emma Stone, who’s kidnapped by a conspiracy theorist, Ted, played by Jesse Plemmons. Ted is convinced that Michelle is not of this planet. He’s insistent that she’s an ...

Pandora beckons once more, guys. Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa are back on the show today, spilling secrets from their screenplay for the recent third film in the Avatar franchise, Fire & Ash. The husband-wife duo came on the show around the release of Avatar: The Way of Water a couple of years back, and it’s always a good time chatting with them – I love the unapologetic earnestness of their storytelling and the habit they have...

Today on the show, our short run of episodes about Oscar 2026 awards contenders continues with a story about grief and growth amid the final flickers of the old West. Train Dreams – adapted from a novella by Dennis Johnson by my guests today, Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley – takes viewers back to Idaho, 1917. The Spokane International Railroad is under construction and quiet tree logger Robert Granier, played by Joel Edgerton, is on...

It’s officially that time of year again: Oscar season! We’re now just a few weeks away from the 98th Academy Awards and to celebrate, over the coming days and weeks we’ll be posting conversations about movies in the mix for all sorts of major awards at this year’s ceremony (not just the writing categories). We have of course ticked off a few of the front runners already on the show in recent months - scroll back in your podcast fe...

The Plague is writer-director Charlie Pollinger’s unflinching portrait of childhood bullying in which the titular contagion is a skin rash that may or may not be real. Set in 2003, at an all-boys summer camp, it follows Ben – played by Everett Blunck – as he enters a group with a clear social hierarchy. At the top is Jake, a smirking bully played by Kayo Martin. Very much at the bottom is an eczema-ridden outcast named Eli, played ...

In Rental Family, the new Tokyo-set drama starring Brendan Fraser, writer-director Hikari poses the question: “Can fantasies and fictions ever fill the gaps left in our lives by the people we miss; the things that we long for?” It’s a question the filmmaker – real name Mitsuyo Miyazaki – sets up and then resists answering in any declarative way. Instead, the film – about a washed-up American actor named Phillip who begins playing r...

To record an episode about Hamnet, the new film from Chloe Zhao, or not to record an episode about Hamnet? That was the question – and a question I answered in a heartbeat when Chloe’s team reached out late last year about chatting with the Nomadland writer-director. The historical drama, starring Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescal, takes viewers inside the anguish of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes Hathaway, after the death of ...

The thing about machines is that we expect them to keep chugging on – to never break or falter. In the late 1990s, a mixed martial artist named Mark Kerr found himself struggling to shoulder the weight of that expectation. Mark was a winner – a muscular behemoth beloved by fans of a rising new fighting league, called Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC for short. His fans across the world knew little of his agonising behind-the-...

Today on Script Apart – Harris Dickinson: star of films like Babygirl and Triangle of Sadness, John Lennon in the upcoming Beatles biopics from Sam Mendes, and now, a formidable presence on the other side of the camera too. Urchin, the new drama written and directed by Harris, is a feature debut that “I cannot escape and I cannot forget,” to quote the Atomic Kitten song that plays in a pivotal scene.

It’s a story that hit close...

Today on Script Apart – all aboard a conversation about The Lost Bus, with a writer who’s glued me to my screen time and time again over the last few years. Brad Ingelsby is the creator of Mare Of Eastown starring Kate Winslet from back in the pandemic. He also created this year’s stunning Task – an HBO drama with Mark Ruffalo about an FBI agent investigating a string of violent robberies in rural Delaware County, which is a recurr...

Aristocratic chaos agent Hedda Gabler isn’t a character. She’s a Rorschach test, and has been for over a century now. Since first appearing in 1891 as the puzzling eponymous protagonist of a play by Henrick Ibsen, audiences have stared into at this recently married woman, driven by domestic suffocation into acts of destruction, and found different meanings, reflective of who they are, reflective of their politics and personal strug...

There’s a mystery afoot on today’s episode of Script Apart – and that mystery is how you write a film like Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out movie from my guest today, Rian Johnson. How do you craft a whodunit that’s simultaneously gripping, hilarious and loaded with weighty reflections on religion’s use as a weapon of fear in our current political climate? In the words of Benoit Blanc, it “makes no damn sense” to me, “Compels m...

Today on the show – Edgar Wright is back! The Running Man is his new Stephen King adaptation, co-written with Michael Bacall, and on this week’s show, the three of us run for our lives through the reality TV dystopia of that movie, and its creation.

The film is a new take on the 1982 novel of the same name, and imagines an America in a state of national calamity. The economy is in ruins. Violence is on the rise. Corporations rul...

Today on Script Apart, we’re off to see the wizards – the wonderful storytelling wizards, that is, behind the first ever musical we’ve covered on the show. In the early ‘00s, New York-born-and-raised playwright Winnie Holzman was, like the rest of the city, still reeling from the September 11 attacks that claimed 2977 lives. It wasn’t just the attacks themselves that haunted her – it was the division they wrought too. Racial minori...

The history books will tell you that World War II ended on September 2, 1945. The filmmaker James Vanderbilt, however, will tell there was still one last battle left to fight as the conflict officially drew to a close. It was a battle to be fought not in the trenches but in a court room, with the eyes of the world watching and the stakes were impossibly high. The Nazi party of Germany had been stopped, with the surviving members of...

How well do you know Ryan Coogler? A couple of years ago, the Oakland-born filmmaker began “to reckon with the fact that the audience doesn’t truly know me at all.” Which might sound strange at first. At that point in his career, the writer-director was all but a household name. His 2013 debut Fruitvale Station had earned him the keys to the Rocky franchise, resulting in 2015’s acclaimed Creed. His next step was to helm a superhero...

The Festival of Hungry Ghosts is upon us – and today on Script Apart, we’re betting it all on black. Ballad Of A Small Player is the casino-set new drama from director Edward Berger and writer Rowan Joffe, adapted from the novel of the same name by author Lawrence Osborne. It follows Colin Farrell as a character who introduces himself as Lord Boyle – an aristocratic charmer, who we soon come to learn is seriously, existentially adr...

Today, Shane Black is back, returning to Script Apart four years since his last appearance on the show! His new film Play Dirty is a heist movie that in some ways he’s been waiting his whole life to make. Fans of his will know that Shane often centres stories around flawed male characters who are informed by the pulpy novels he grew up reading. After decades creating his own spins on the literary tough guys in those books – such as...

Aziz Ansari is a comedian who seems to always have been intrigued by the idea of status, and the stranglehold it can put people in. You might not immediately think of it when you think of his work, but the 42-year-old seems drawn to dreamers and strivers and people who yearn to transcend their station in life, finding comedy and drama in the gap between what they have and what they covet.

In Parks & Recreation, the hit sitco...