Script Apart with Al Horner

Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe, the creative minds behind "The Mitchells Vs The Machines," discuss the film's original concept, LGBTQ+ representation, and changes made from the initial draft. They delve into the challenges of depicting technology, character naming, and crafting the narrative, sharing insights into the film's humorous and inventive journey.

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 important or culturally impactful, however, than the incredible Brokeback Mountain. Their screenplay for Ang Lee’s 2005 drama drastically moved the needle in terms of same-sex representation in mainstream cinema. Adapted from a short story by Annie Proulx, and starring Jake Gyllehaal opposite the late, great Heath Ledger, the film was broadly acclaimed for its astonishing performances and alternating moments of life-affirming passion and impossible-to-stomach heartache. It was derided by some in Hollywood as “the gay cowboy movie” upon release. But the sheer storytelling power and emotional weight of this tale of two sheep farmers – who fall for each other in a 1960s America where men are meant to be macho – saw Diana and Larry get the last laugh. Today, the film is regarded as one of the defining love stories in modern movie history.We spoke to Diana about the tricky process of building out Annie’s short story into a fully realised film. We discuss all the ways the screenplay evolved from its original outline, how the film was almost directed by Pedro Almodovar, and why it was so important to Diana and Larry that their script attended to the emotions of the wives and girlfriends caught up in the debris of Ennis and Jack’s infatuation for each other. Diana was also kind enough to share a number of incredibly touching stories about her close connection to Heath Ledger, who reminded her of her own son, who had tragically passed away. As we mentioned – this was an emotional one to record. Support for this episode comes from Screencraft, Caveday and Coverfly.Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. 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. The show is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 51 pages of interviews with great screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.Support the show Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 lengthy list of talents with the mesmerising Mogul Mowgli – a dark drama about a British-Pakistani rapper who suffers the sudden onset of a debilitating autoimmune disease. Zed – played by Ahmed – is a talented MC hungry for fame but growing disconnected from his roots, when illness sends him spiralling into a string of dangerous hallucinations, stalked every step of the way by a mysterious masked figure with links to Pakistan’s past.Co-written by director Bassam Tariq, the film won huge critical acclaim for its intimacy, imagination and ambition, innovatively weaving in songs from an accompanying concept album that Riz released roughly in tandem with Mogul Mowgli. In this episode, he tells us about his relationship with writing and the parts of his own life he brought to the screen in this deeply personal movie. We also talk about the film’s prescient echoes of the Covid-19 pandemic and why “our scars can be a road map to our creativity” as Riz so beautifully puts it. Do make sure you’ve seen Mogul Mowgli before listening in, as this is a spoiler-filled conversation exploring all of the movie’s major plot points. Once you have, come back and brace yourself for a fascinating insight into what for my money is one of the best movies of the past 12 months.Support for this episode comes from Screencraft, Caveday and WeScreenplay.Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 51 pages of interviews with great screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.Support the show Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 on a nail-biting mission across No Man’s Land in the first World War. With communication lines down, the lives of 1,600 men rest on this duo delivering a message to a stubborn battalion captain that his soldiers are about to walk into an ambush. On release, the film garnered more attention for how it told its story, rather than the story itself. 1917 used long, intricately-choreographed takes to give the impression of a story told across just two uninterrupted shots. It was heralded as an unrelenting real-time glimpse into the horrors of war unlike anything before it. But the movie’s technical accomplishments would have felt empty were there not an emotive plot powering it forward. In the conversation you’re about to hear, Krysty pulls the curtain back on every element of that plot, detailing the painstaking research that went into forming the film’s characters. We also talk about discarded plans for a mustard gas attack sequence, why a certain central character simply had to die, and why we as a society continue to tell World War I stories a century on.Support for today's episode comes from Screencraft, WeScreenplay and Caveday.Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. 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. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.Support the show Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 moving his wife and kids into the small-town home of a recently murdered family, whose gruesome killing remains unsolved, he discovers in the attic a box. In it are a collection of unsettling home videos that hint at a demonic conspiracy at play. As Ellison closes in on the truth, a terrifying entity closes in on him. The film put Cargill and Derickson on a path towards bigger projects – a Marvel movie, 2016’s trippy Doctor Strange soon followed. It’s easy to see why they were suddenly in demand. Sinister is a brutally effective masterclass in horror filmmaking that shows the power of a screenwriting philosophy Cargill swears by. The key to telling an engaging horror tale is to write a gripping grounded drama that’s then gatecrashed by a supernatural other, he explains in this episode, also delving into the origins of the film’s Bablyonian deity antagonist, Bagul the eater of Children, and all the ways Sinister evolved en route to the big screen. For example, did you know Sinister was originally titled Super 8 and presented Bagul as a “fucked up Willy Wonka” as Cargill puts it?Support for today's episode comes from Screencraft, WeScreenplay and Caveday.Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. 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. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.Support the show Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 extraterrestrial life – was a novel before James adapted it into one of the most celebrated sci-fi dramas of all time. The book was written by renowned astronomer Carl Sagan – a close personal friend of James'. Carl sadly didn't live to see the film's completion, passing away after a long illness just months before Contact's release.James looks back on the movie today as a tribute to his friend and the astronomer's brilliant partner, author Ann Druyan, both of whom he worked with closely while adapting Contact. It was a tricky screenplay to get right. As you'll discover in this episode, the book was a dense meditation on what would happen if contact were made with life from another planet – the ripples it would send through politics, through religion, and everything in between. It was a book rooted, as anyone who knows Carl's work might expect, in scientific fact. Translating the novel into a piece of blockbuster entertainment without losing any of the book's authority and spirit of scientific discovery, in a time dominated by the explosions and spectacle of alien movies like Independence Day, was a daunting task. This is the story of how James pulled it off. Over an engrossing sixty minutes, we reflect on the movies that Contact helped inspire, a version of the script that included the Pope as a major character, and why James is not satisfied with the film's ending. Truly, they should have sent a poet to interview James. Instead, you guys have Al. Sorry about that.Support for this episode comes from MUBI, Screencraft and Launchpad.Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. 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. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.Support the show Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today on the show – a deep dive into Marvel's latest superhero adventure, Black Widow with Eric Pearson! Eric is the screenwriter responsible for giving Natasha Romanoff – the Avengers’ super-spy with a dark past and powerful fighting skills –  the solo movie she’s always deserved. His account of writing the film is a fascinating glimpse inside the Marvel machine: how their movies are written, the relentless pace at which that machine moves, and how each film is made to fit into a much bigger interconnected story at script-level. We’ll warn you now, though – you may well feel stressed just hearing about the challenges in front of him as he came onboard the project.Eric had inherited an outline mapped out by Ned Benson and Wandavision showrunner Jac Shaefer. Within that outline was a bunch of puzzle pieces, and not much time to make them fit – production was looming and sets for the movie were already being constructed for Black Widow. In this episode, Eric shares how he navigated that intense pressure, what guided him towards the theme of family at the heart of this movie and all the different avenues the movie explored – including the truth behind rumours of a planned cameo from Tony Stark.This is a spoiler-filled conversation so if you’re yet to see Black Widow, hit pause now, get yourself to a cinema then come back as we jump into all of this movie’s twists and turns.Support for this episode comes from Screencraft, MUBI and WeScreenplay.Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. 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. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! Featuring 51 pages of interviews with great screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.Support the show Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pop quiz, hot shots – which pedal-to-the-metal Keanu Reeves blockbuster set a breakneck new pace for action cinema in 1994? The answer is, of course, Speed – directed by Jan de Bont and written by our guest today, the fantastic Graham Yost. Graham had the idea for the film after a conversation with his father about Akira Kurusawa’s unproduced script, Runaway Train. Taking the Japanese auteur’s loose idea and throwing a bomb into the mix, as well as a maniacal bomber played by Dennis Hopper, the film saw Keanu star as Jack Traven, an LAPD officer tasked with saving a bus full of people from a device that will explode if the vehicle slows below 50mph. Full of nerve-shredding tension and death-defying set pieces, it’s regularly voted among the best action movies of all time, and rightly so if you ask us.We caught up with Graham, who you might also know for his work on Justified and From The Earth To The Moon, to hear about how he wrote Speed. We talk about his shockingly different original villain for the movie, the alternate way his first draft ended, the lines from the film that Joss Whedon punched up and his pitches for two further Speed movies that sadly never got off the ground. You don’t have to listen to this episode on a runaway bus tearing through traffic, but it might heighten the experience.Support for this episode comes from Screencraft, MUBI and Launchpad.Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com. Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 51 pages of interviews with great screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.Support the show Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Gunn, writer-director known for his adventure comedies, discusses the hilariously sharp screenplay of The Suicide Squad. They explore the creative freedom and significant changes made from the initial treatment to the final screenplay. They also discuss the challenges faced during the making of the film, James Gunn's writing process, and the decision to choose Star O'The Conqueror as the main villain.

Script Apart is a podcast about the first drafts of great movies. Or at least, it usually is. Today, in the final episode of our 2021 awards season mini-series, we’re delving deep into this year’s BAFTA Game Awards’ Game of The Year – The Last of Us Part II, with director Neil Druckmann and co-writer Halley Gross.If you’ve played this emotionally devastating survival thriller, you’ll know exactly why we wanted to cover it on this show. Set in a post-apocalyptic America brought to its knees by a parasitic infection, the game caught up with teenage survivor Ellie, five years after the events of the first Last Of Us. What begins as a tale of revenge eventually gives way to a profound meditation on the futility of violence, split into an ambitious two-part structure that forces players to empathise with the so-called enemy. There’s a reason why it sold over four million copies in its first weekend alone: The Last of Us Part II is a masterpiece in storytelling, full of brilliantly realised characters and sharp observations on who we are and who we could be as a society. We caught up with Neil and Halley to hear about how they wrote the game, turning back the clock to an early, open-world iteration of the Last of Us Part II that had a very different ending. Across a fascinating conversation, covering as much about this 20-hour game in forty minutes as humanly possible, we discuss the parts of their own lives they drew on to tell this story, the theme-building advice of author Robert McKee that helped shape The Last Of Us, and how a single detail in their first draft of the game’s final scene almost cast the future of the franchise in a totally different light.Speaking of the future – you may want to stick around till the end for some tantalising updates on a potential Last Of Us Part III, as well as the upcoming HBO TV series based on the first game. This is of course a spoiler-filled conversation so if you’re yet to play this astonishing game, hit pause, grab a copy on PlayStation today, then come back as we delve into every detail of this phenomenal game.Support for this episode comes from Arc Studio – the beautifully-designed screenwriting programme whose intuitive interface and host of innovative features helps you get the most out of your writing time – and Coverfly, who curate the best screenwriting talent-discovery programs into one place and connect emerging screenwriters with industry professionals who can bring their ideas to screen.Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. 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. All proceeds go to Black Minds Matter UK, the NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal and the Film and TV Charity.Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. You can follow Script Apart on Twitter and Instagram. You can also email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Support the show Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.