Script Apart with Al Horner

Today on the show – a movie in which Emma Stone attempts to punch a baby, by a playwright and screenwriter whose stories never fail to pack a punch. Yes, Tony McNamara is here, talking all things Poor Things, his latest collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos. Having previously worked together on the ten-time Oscar-nominated historical comedy The Favourite in 2018, this awards-tipped odyssey is a Frankensteinian creation as beguiling and impossible to pin down as its protagonist, Bella Baxter. It’s part coming-of-age comedy, part sexual conquest and part travelogue through an eye-popping steampunk planet both like and unlike our own. You might also classify it as a father-daughter drama – except here, the father is a mad scientist whose home is a cornucopia of unholy experiments, his daughter, played by Emma Stone, just one of them.Stone is astounding as Bella, a reanimated dead woman, whose body, dragged from the Thames, has had life breathed into it once more. The horny journey of self-discovery that the character goes on from there, adapted from a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, comments on our culture’s (male-driven) obsession with control, explains Tony in our conversation. It’s a riveting chat with a storyteller whose other screen credits include creating the TV show The Great, loosely based on Empress Catherine the Great of Russia’s rise to power in 18th century Saint Petersburg and 2021’s Cruella. Listen out for insights on the changes made to Gray’s novel, the scene that Yorgos and Tony sadly had to cut for time, the idea of sex as a liberating force for the film’s main character and what each of the new lands Bella visits are meant to bring out of her evolving character. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft 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.

On October 13, 1972, a plane carrying 45 passengers and crew – 19 of whom were young rugby players – took off from Carrasco International Airport in Uruguay heading to Santiago, Chile. The plane never reached its destination. Adverse weather conditions caused Flight 571 to crash into a mountain ridge, ripping the aircraft in two over the Andes mountains – one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Those who didn’t die immediately in the wreckage – the so-called lucky ones – faced unimaginable horror. For 72 days, these survivors, aged between 19 and 26, endured frostbite and an avalanche. They watched as, one by one, friends and teammates perished in the plummeting temperatures each night. Starving to death in this endless white abyss, the passengers of Flight 571 were forced to do the unthinkable to survive, resorting to eating the bodies of the deceased as a means of desperately clinging to life. You probably know all this, because the story of the Miracle in the Andes as it became known is a story that’s been told many times before, in books, films, documentaries and TV shows. What happened – how 16 people not only survived, but forged their own rescue – is well-known. How it actually felt to be out there in the wilderness, though – the philosophical and spiritual conundrums the survivors faced – has never really been truly translated to screen until now. Society Of The Snow – directed and co-written by our guest today, the great J.A. Bayona – is a drama that finds transcendence in the true-life tale of Flight 571. Yes, the film abides by the facts of what went down in that frosty mountain range across those agonising 72 days – Bayona spent hundreds of hours interviewing the survivors before penning the movie’s screenplay with his co-writers Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego. But more importantly, inspired by a great book – La Sociedad de la Nieve by Pablo Vierci – it takes a lyrical approach to the story. One bordering on the metaphysical, full of dialogues between the living and the dead. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, JA tells us what it is about tales of people forced to confront the full might of nature that he finds himself drawn to as a storyteller (his previous films include tsunami drama The Impossible and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which had similar themes nature versus man). We talk about crafting the plane crash scene on the page, the bold decision he made involving the narrator of the tale and why the film doesn’t end on a note of triumph but something more melancholy. If you haven’t seen Society Of The Snow yet, be sure to hit pause now, watch on Netflix then come back as we dive into every detail. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft 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.

In our final episode of 2023, Michael Arndt – the acclaimed writer of films like Little Miss Sunshine and Star Wars: The Force Awakens – drops by for a two-hour dissection of his script for Toy Story 3 –a Pixar sequel that went to infinity and beyond when it came to thrills, laughter and emotion.  Directed by past Script Apart guest Lee Unkrich, the 2010 film could have repeated the formula that made past the franchise’s previous films a global phenomenon, making instant icons out of Woody, Buzz and their found-family of fellow play-things. Instead, it leapt forward in time to find Andy, the toys’ owner, all-grown up and about to head to college, heaping huge existential questions on fans’ beloved characters. If a toy is retired to an attic, never to be played with again, what is their reason to be? What does it mean to be outgrown by people you love, who no longer love you in return?If that sounds heavy for what is ostensibly a kids’ tale, wait till we remind you that Toy Story 3 was a movie set mostly in a brutal toy internment camp that ends with our heroes about to be incinerated. That boldness is why many regard the film as being “peak Pixar” – and can you blame them? Toy Story 3 capped a remarkable run of hits for the animation studio that included Ratatouille in 2007, Wall-E in 2008 and Up in 2009. No wonder Michael and co felt emboldened to take risks on this third instalment of the franchise – risks that reaped incredible storytelling rewards.Michael was picked by Pixar – presumably via email or a phone call, rather than a giant mechanical claw like the ones in Pizza Planet – because few storytellers do grounded emotion and dysfunctional families like he does. At the onset of his career, across three days in May 2000, he’d written a screenplay about a family on a road trip to New Mexico that became a monster hit. Little Miss Sunshine earned the Virginia-born screenwriter a Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 2006 and catapulted him onto the radar of Pixar, whose brain trust would soon begin cooking up a story for a third movie in their Toy Story franchise.In the conversation you’re about to hear, Michael breaks down the many early iterations of this movie, including an abandoned Toy Story 3 from before his time on the project, in which the toys travel to Taiwan after Buzz is shipped there following a global product recall on the toy. We get into the machinations of Lotso Huggin’ Bear, how the story is deep down one about parenthood and of course, that traumatising moment our heroes hold hands, staring down certain death. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft 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.

On today’s episode, an interview at the end of a TV show: A Murder At The End Of The World. That’s right, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij are with us, breaking down every detail of their phenomenal techno-thriller whodunnit, which reached its breathtaking conclusion last night. As we’ve come to expect from the creators of head-spinning drama The OA – which felt like the signalling of a bold new era of ambitious narrative television when it hit screens in 2016 – A Murder At The End Of The World was a triumph of both ideas and emotion. Few filmmakers today combine both as seamlessly and elegantly as Brit and Zal, whose latest show offered meditations on the following: artificial intelligence, online misogyny, the desensitisation in our culture around violence towards women, extreme wealth, climate crisis, the deification of tech company CEOs… the list goes on. The fact that A Murder At The End Of The World can so smartly probe all those topics without ever toppling in on itself like a house of cards in an Icelandic snow storm is an incredible feat. The fact that all those big intellectual ideas never overshadow the emotion of the show – the journey we go on Emma Corin’s courageous hacker Darby Hart – is even rarer. Darby’s story, zigzagging across three different periods of her life, is the heartbeat of this tale, about a group of high-achievers and industry leaders invited to a mysterious retreat among the frozen fjords of the Fljot Valley. The aim of this gathering? To solve the challenges facing humanity, its tech billionaire host Andy Ronson explains. A slight snag in that plan emerges, though, when one by one, guests begin to be bumped off in terrifying ways. Only Darby can solve the mystery of the killer’s identity.In the conversation you’re about to hear, Zal and Brit discuss philosophies behind the show, the world war origins of the whodunit genre, the ethical way to approach violence against women on screen without perpetuating that violence in the real world, and of course, the revelations of the show’s final episode. As ever, this is a spoiler-filled interview, so if you haven’t watched A Murder At The End Of The World in full, please be sure to catch up before tuning in.Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft 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.

New disaster movie Leave The World Behind deals with themes that its writer-director, Sam Esmail, finds impossible to leave behind himself. Eight years ago, the filmmaker introduced himself with Mr. Robot – a techno-thriller piece of prestige TV that warned of the ways that society might grow fragmented, unreliable and open to exploitation, the more it hinged on technology. The show ran for four seasons, winning three Emmys along the way. Now, he’s back with another tale that highlights the dangers of digitalism and how quickly our technology-dependent society might be dismantled with the click of a button, or more accurately the right line of hacker code. Leave The World Behind stars Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as parents who escape to a Long Island vacation home, only for a stranger and his daughter – played by Mahershala Ali and Myha'la Herrold– to turn up unannounced in the middle of the night, bearing tales of electrical blackouts in New York City. It’s a great watch that keeps you guessing till the very end, punctuated by some incredibly unnerving imagery that will rattle around in your brain for days after. And it speaks very much to anxieties of our time. In the years since Sam created Mr. Esmail, we’ve seen Russia hack the 2016 US election and Cambridge Analytica influence Brexit. We live in a time of global superpowers seeking to disrupt society via digital means. So maybe the question isn’t why Sam would go back to the themes of Mr. Robot. Perhaps the question is: why wouldn’t he?In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, which covers every important plot point and detail of this great movie, Sam discusses the huge departures made from the Rumaan Alam novel this movie adapts, the meaning of the menacing animals throughout this film, and how the TV show Friends came to be a massive motif running through Leave The World Behind – resulting in one of the best movie punchlines of 2023. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft 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.

Something sinister simmers beneath the surface of suburbia in Eileen, a psychological thriller about pent-up desire, parental neglect and escaping the shackles of the life expected of us. It’s a story that first existed as a novel, launching the literary career of Boston-born author Ottessa Moshfegh in 2015. Since then, Ottessa’s career has skyrocketed: novels like Lapvona and the tremendous My Year of Rest and Relaxation have seen her lauded as one of her generation’s most exciting voices. Or as the fantastic Jia Tolentino once described her, “easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive, when being alive feels terrible.”Through all that success, though, Eileen has followed her. The character, a secretary at a correctional facility for teenage boys in a small American town, lost in time, never quite left her side in all that time, and in the new film adaptation of her story – penned with husband and screenwriting partner Luke Goebel – it shows. The movie, directed by William Oldroyd, stars Thomasin McKenzie as Eileen and Anne Hathaway as the older woman, Rebecca, she becomes enchanted by. The closer they get, though, the closer Eileen gets to a dark truth involving one of the young inmates at the prison where she works.On this week’s show, Ottessa and Luke take time out on a recent trip to London to break down their screenplay and take us inside the mind of the film’s Hitchcockian anti-heroine. Ottessa recounts the parts of herself she left on the page when she initially wrote the story, while Luke – a great author in his own right, whose Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours collection is a brilliant read – unravels the meanings of key scenes as he sees them. We also crucially debate whether the festive backdrop of this film – all snow and fairy lights, to the tune of constant carols –  makes this a Christmas movie. This is a spoiler conversation, as ever on Script Apart, so do be sure to check out the movie, in cinemas now, before tuning in.  Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft 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.

Author Samy Burch discusses the film 'May December', exploring themes of stability vs. problematic relationships, the significance of the title, the symbolism of the monarch butterfly, the impact of music and location change, the portrayal of Gracie as a symbol of American family life, and the mysteries and unanswered questions in the film.

Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight… and if you can do all that while listening to The Smiths, even better. That’s the mantra of the eponymous assassin at the heart of The Killer, directed by David Fincher and written by our guest today  – the fantastic Andrew Kevin Walker. The Killer is a movie that deconstructs the hitman movie genre like Michael Fassbender’s glassy-eyed gun-for-hire deconstructing a McDonald’s sandwich on a park bench in Paris. It opens with a blaze of images that tease the explosive action typical of these films then swerves in a different direction. The result is a defiantly meditative two hours in which the violence of the movie’s revenge plot is almost incidental to the character’s meticulous ways and detached observations about the world.It’s an absolutely riveting watch but then again, what did we expect? Unlike The Killer himself – who misses his target early on in the film, sparking the film’s descent into chaos – Andrew and Fincher rarely miss their mark whenever they work together. The pair first teamed up on 1995’s Se7en, which began life as a spec script that Andrew wrote after moving to New York from suburban Pennsylvania. Since then, Andrew’s taken passes at Fight Club and The Game for Fincher, on top of his solo adventures in Hollywood, penning films like Sleepy Hollow and 2022’s excellent Windfall.In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Andy answers our questions about the subtle commentary on materialist culture woven into the film. We get into the influence of the novelist Somerset Maugham on Andy’s work and break some of the film’s most intriguing moments, including its enigmatic ending – in which a life is spared but existential questions loom.Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft 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.

Can you find the wolves in this podcast? Our guest today, Eric Roth, is the Academy Award-winning writer behind films like Forrest Gump. He wrote The Insider for Michael Mann, Munich for Steven Spielberg, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for David Fincher and 2018’s A Star Is Born for Bradley Cooper, and two years ago, we had the delight of his company as we broke down his script for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune on this very show. Today, we're joined by him once more to discuss what – whisper it – may just be his crowning accomplishment. Few films this year have left the extraordinary imprint left behind by Killers of the Flower Moon – a tale of love, murder and quite-literally-poisonous greed in 1920s America, directed by Martin Scorsese. Eric’s script for the film, which he co-wrote with the beloved auteur, was adapted from a non-fiction book by author David Grann, but with a very different approach to the story told in that tome. The book investigated a series of killings of members of the indigenous Osage Nation – deaths caused, then covered up, by white men who coveted their oil-rich land. At the heart of all this was a woman: Mollie Kyle, played in the film by Lily Gladstone, who marries a first world war veteran named Ernest Burkhart, played by Leo DiCaprio. Ernest had a corrupt uncle, William King Hale, portrayed by Robert DeNiro, who masqueraded as an upstanding member of the community. Molly was forced to watch in horror as at least 24 family members and friends were systematically killed as a result of Hale’s scheming – unaware that her uncle-in-law was masterminding these deaths and unaware that the man she loved was helping him. Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, however,  was subtitled “the birth of the FBI” for a reason – it focused on the white law enforcement response to the killings rather than the Osage Nation itself. As you’ll discover in this episode, Eric’s first draft of this movie adaptation followed suit – before he and Scorsese realised they had a responsibility to navigate this tale from a different perspective. It wasn’t as simple as making Molly the lead. That story, as non-indigenous filmmakers, Scorsese has implied, wasn’t theirs to tell. Instead, they set about making a film about complicity that would centre Ernest in all his cowardice and employ Molly as the movie’s moral heart.In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, we break down all of the film’s key scenes, uncover some fascinating details about its first draft and break down the meaning of the movie’s astounding finale – a moment on film unlike anything else in Scorsese’s filmography. Eric, as ever, was a total pleasure to chat with: a storyteller so inspiringly in love with what he does, that at 78-years-old, there’s no sign of him slowing down. Writing screenplays is simply what he does. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro 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.

Film history is full of troublesome hotels, isn’t it? A few of them we've even covered on this very show, from the haunted Overlook in The Shining to the labyrinthine, unsettling Airbnb in Barbarian – the kinds of places that make you vow to never complain about a Premier Inn again. This week, revered writer-director Kitty Green releases a thriller that adds to that long list with the sublime The Royal Hotel – an at times unbearably tense exploration of gender and toxic masculinity, set in rural Australian. On today’s episode of Script Apart, Kitty stops by for a spoiler breakdown of the movie, in which two young women in need of money check into a dilapidated pub in a remote mining town. What happens next, as the line is blurred between drunken boys-will-be-boys and truly dangerous behaviour, is impossible to tear your eyes away from, beautifully written and impeccably directed.In the conversation you’re about to hear, Kitty tells us about her own family connections to the mining town pub culture depicted in the film, which was co-written with Oscar Redding. We unpack what’s going on in the heads of the film’s two leads, Hannah and Liv, as they encounter some of the community’s many microaggressions towards them. She also breaks down the film’s connections to her last movie, The Assistant, and what the two dramas combined express about the epidemic of male violence towards women. Please be sure to check out the film before listening as this episode has more spoilers than you can shake a taxidermied snake at.Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro 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.