Script Apart with Al Horner

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 Wh...

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...

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 sam...

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-dwelli...

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 s...

“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 esca...

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...

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 t...

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 cor...

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...

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 th...

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 Evely...

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 provok...

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 Goo...

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 m...

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...

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 astoni...

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...

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&...

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, ensla...

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 im...

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 len...

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...

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 mov...

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 extraterrest...