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PODCAST

Script Apart with Al Horner

A podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies and TV shows. 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. Hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

tv & film film interviews

All Episodes

42:35

The Monkey with Osgood Perkins

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/02/24

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...

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50:15

September 5 with Tim Fehlbaum and Moritz Binder

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/02/18

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 t...

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46:57

Anora with Sean Baker

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/02/15

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 fi...

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66:22

Companion with Drew Hancock

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/02/10

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 understandab...

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50:59

The Wild Robot with Chris Sanders

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/02/06

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 weat...

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35:29

A Real Pain with Jesse Eisenberg

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/02/04

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...

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73:36

Before Sunrise with Kim Krizan

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/01/31

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 ...

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44:20

Storytelling Tips from The Shining with Coco’s Lee...

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/01/30

Today on Script Apart, a sneak peek at something new. We’re going to be running exclusive episodes this year for our Patreon supporters, in which – breaking away from the usual Script Apart format – Al Horner and a guest focus in on the screenwriting tips and tricks to be learned from a film that both adore. Today, Lee Unkrich – director of Toy Story 3, Coco and other towering achievements in animation – returns to the show, to talk about what screenwriters might take and apply to their own w...

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40:56

Sideways with Alexander Payne

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/01/29

Life is full of sweet highs and terrible merlots on today’s Script Apart as Alexander Payne – director of movies like Election, The Holdovers, Nebraska and About Schmidt – joins us to raise a glass to an indie drama that has aged like a fine wine. The brilliant Sideways was released in 2004 and soon earned four Academy Award nominations, taking home Best Adapted Screenplay. It won six Independent Spirit Awards, was picked up for Japanese remake and instigated a huge tourism boom in the Califo...

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56:21

The Apprentice with Ali Abbasi

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/01/14

It’s early January, a new year is here – and so too is a new chapter in American politics. Later this month, Donald Trump will enter the White House for a second term and right at this moment, people across the US and western world are wondering what the next four years may look like. Today on Script Apart, the filmmaker behind one of Hollywood’s first real attempts to grapple with the enormity of Trump and the implications of his political rise and fall and rise again, joins us to add his tw...

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72:57

Babygirl with Halina Reijn

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/01/12

Pour yourself a tall glass of milk (or better yet, have an admirer send you one) and prepare for a conversation about an erotic thriller blowing up the internet right now. Halina Reijn is the Dutch writer-director responsible for 2022’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, who’s followed up that razor-sharp murder-mystery pastiche with another film that infuses an old genre with modern politics. In Babygirl, Nicole Kidman’s tech CEO Romy begins an affair with an intern – Samuel, played by Harris Dickin...

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46:26

Nickel Boys with RaMell Ross

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/01/05

Talk about setting a high bar. Nickel Boys – the new film from RaMell Ross – is a drama that may be one of the first releases of the 2025, but will almost certainly still be reverberating come the end of it. Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by The Underground Railroad author Colson Whitehead, it tells the story of a reform school for primarily Black young offenders, where violence and cruelty are carried out and covered up in a rapidly changing America. The Nickel Academy as it’s k...

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69:02

The Wire with David Simon

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/01/03

We’re starting 2025 way down in the hole, with a look back on one of the undisputed great TV series of our time. Our guest today is a storyteller responsible for shows like Treme, Generation Kill, The Deuce, The Plot Against America and We Own This City, but best known of course for The Wire – a show that began at a crime scene, with blood splattered across granite, police lights painting the pavement red, white and blue. It was here that audiences first met Detective McNulty, played by Domin...

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93:22

Challengers and Queer with Justin Kuritzkes

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2024/12/23

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

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54:27

Conclave with Peter Straughan

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2024/12/21

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

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63:55

Hit Man with Richard Linklater

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2024/12/18

Richard Linklater is a hit man, but not in the assassin sense of the word. No, the hits he trades in are of the movie variety – stylish cult classics that vary in genre and form, but always manage to ignite something powerful in viewers. It’s been that way for three and a half decades now: among his hits, dating back to 1990, are Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, Boyhood, School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly, Slacker, Waking Life, Everybody Wants Some, Fast Food ...

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36:36

Dune: Part Two with Denis Villeneuve

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2024/12/16

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

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45:44

Nightbitch with Marielle Heller

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2024/12/13

Motherhood is a doggone nightmare in the new film from Marielle Heller. This week, the writer director of movies like The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood returns to cinemas with one of the more surreal-sounding offerings of the year – Nightbitch, a drama in which Amy Adams plays a parent by day and a dog by night. If you weren’t already familiar with the 2021 Rachel Yoder novel on which it’s based, you’d be forgiven for thinking that t...

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54:39

The Boys with Eric Kripke

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2024/12/11

Never meet your heroes. At least, not these ones – the dysfunctional megalomaniacs that murder innocents and seed division in Prime Video’s The Boys, a show as satirically sharp as it is gore-splattered and gross. Created by our guest today, Eric Kripke, the comic book adaptation debuted in 2019 and has since become one of the most captivatingly timely stories in our pop culture landscape, commenting not just on our current era of superhero saturation but on American society at large. Across ...

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49:36

Michael Schur (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks &...

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2024/12/05

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

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164 results

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