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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

49:47

The Smashing Machine with Benny Safdie

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/12/21

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-scenes struggle to keep up that facade, to keep entering the ring

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49:55

Urchin with Harris Dickinson

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/12/18

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 to home for me, quite literally. Harris lives kinda down the street from

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51:05

The Lost Bus with Brad Ingelsby

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/12/17

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 recurring backdrop to his storytelling – and the Apple TV+ thriller Echo

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45:49

Hedda with Nia DaCosta

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/12/16

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 struggles. Is she a beacon of feminist freedom, lashing out at the

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43:40

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery with Rian Johnson

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/12/15

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 me, though.”Which is why it was such a treat to ask the man himself

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55:16

The Running Man with Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/12/09

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 rule everything. And authoritarian brutality has become primetime

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54:56

Wicked: For Good with Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/12/02

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 minorities – America’s Muslim population, specifically – were scapegoated

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40:29

Nuremberg with James Vanderbilt

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/11/19

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 their high command arrested. But it wasn’t enough to simply shoot

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38:43

Sinners with Ryan Coogler

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/11/17

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 movie that transcended the genre. That film, 2018’s Black Panther,

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1:07:33

Ballad of a Small Player with Rowan Joffé and Edward...

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/11/14

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 adrift amid the slot machines and baccarat tables of Macau’s gambling

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1:10:07

Play Dirty with Shane Black

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/10/30

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 Riggs in Lethal Weapon and Harry Lockhart in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang –

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53:08

Good Fortune with Aziz Ansari

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/10/17

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 sitcom that made him a household name, Aziz played Tom Haverford, a small-town

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44:29

The Life of Chuck with Mike Flanagan

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/10/15

Put down your briefcase and put on your dancing shoes, everybody, because today on Script Apart – a podcast about the first-draft secrets of great movies and TV shows – Mike Flanagan is back, tap-dancing through the end times with me in celebration of The Life Of Chuck. As I put it in my feature for Empire Magazine earlier this year, when I covered the movie’s theatrical release, the phrase “feel-good” isn’t often associated with the apocalypse. Nor, to be honest, with Mike’s work in general, as one

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52:27

All Of You with Brett Goldstein and William Bridges

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/10/01

If a technology existed that matched you with your soul mate – the one true person you’re destined to be with – would you take it? Would it lead you to your happily-ever-after? Or is love too vast and complicated a thing to be pared down to a science like that? These are the questions posed by All Of You, a new romantic drama by our guests today, William Bridges and Brett Goldstein. William is a writer-director you may well know from his contributions to the shows like Black Mirror and Stranger

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52:30

Alien: Earth with Noah Hawley

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/09/26

In space, no one can hear you scream. On Earth, however, around 9pm for the last seven or eight Tuesdays, you may well hear some shrieks of terror, emanating from nearby apartment windows – all thanks to one of the boldest and blood-soaked sci-fi shows to grace the small screen in recent memory. Alien: Earth is the new show from our guest today, Noah Hawley and it’s a masterclass in philosophical sci-fi. You probably don’t need to be told of the cultural significance of the Alien franchise, which

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1:29:34

Sorry, Baby with Eva Victor

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/09/20

Sorry Baby is a movie that makes no apologies. No apologies for how moved you’ll be by its depiction of a character (and her cat) working through their trauma in a wintry Massachusetts town. No apologies how for much you’ll laugh in a film that for all extents and purposes is a tale of sexual assault. And no apologies for how ambitious it is – playing with time and playing with chronology. Which is why we’re excited to welcome onto the show this week, the one and only Eva Victor, the film’s writer,

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59:28

Adolescence with Jack Thorne

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/09/15

Where do we go and what happens next after the dust at long last settles on an experience that sent tremors through a community? That’s the question pondered in the final moments of Adolescence, the recent smash hit Netflix drama, which last night swept the 2025 Emmys. It’s also, in part, the question at the heart of our conversation today with the show’s co-writer – BAFTA-winning screenwriter and playwright Jack Thorne, who joins Al not just to discuss the show’s creation, but to wade through the

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1:00:36

Say Nothing with Joshua Zetumer

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/08/27

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

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1:16:25

Dying For Sex with Kim Rosenstock

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/08/26

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

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1:05:18

Andor with Dan Gilroy

Script Apart with Al Horner ·

2025/08/25

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

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174 results

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