Script Apart with Al Horner

Gerard Johnstone, director of M3GAN and its sequel, dives into the blend of horror and humor that makes these films unique. He discusses the evolution of M3GAN from a killer doll to a larger-than-life spectacle, tackling themes like AI's implications on parenting and warfare. Johnstone elaborates on the emotional storytelling made relevant by today's tech anxieties, sharing personal anecdotes that shaped character arcs. Plus, hear about the challenges of sequel filmmaking and the amusing prospect of transforming iconic films with a comedic twist!

Join Charlie Brooker, the mastermind behind the chilling anthology series Black Mirror, as he unpacks the show’s evolution and its eerie relevance to today’s tech landscape. He discusses the creative journey behind iconic episodes, like the heartfelt 'San Junipero', showcasing a shift from horror to poignant narratives. Charlie also reflects on how audience feedback has influenced storytelling and the show's commentary on the dark side of technology, making us question if we're already living in a Black Mirror episode.

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.To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Acclaimed writer-director Alex Garland, known for hits like Ex Machina and Annihilation, discusses his latest film, 28 Years Later, alongside longtime collaborator Danny Boyle. The conversation dives into the film's deeper themes of memory, survival, and the impact of societal shifts such as Brexit. Garland reflects on the evolution of his characters, from the haunting alphas to the unique mythology surrounding them. He also explores the emotional weight of mortality in storytelling, creating a thought-provoking sequel that pushes horror into new territory.

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.To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.Support the show Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.Support the show Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.Support the show Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.