Script Apart with Al Horner

Why don't you take a seat, Script Apart listeners? 'Primetime' screenwriter Ajon Singh is my guest this week, breaking down in spoiler detail his script for the Robert Pattinson-starring thriller that looks at one of the most infamous events in American television history – the shocking final episode of 2000s reality series To Catch A Predator, and the awkward questions it invited around questions of justice and spectacle.

We get into the true life origins of the story, Ajon's relationship with the TV show and the terrifying supernatural flourish that takes the film to strange new places in th...

There's plenty to reckon with in The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin's sequel-of-sorts to The Social Network – one of the most lauded films of the century so far. That David Fincher-directed tale explained how Facebook, one of the most powerful companies on the planet, came to be – and the alleged spite and insecurity that caused its creator, Mark Zuckerberg to create it. Sixteen years later, he's back – this time in the director's chair, with the story of what social media spiralled into as Zuckerberg – this time played by Jeremy Strong – chased profits at the expense of civic responsibility.

On today's...

Live from the belly of the beast – aka a London hotel room before the European premiere of their new movie – Brian Duffield (Spontaneous, No One Will Save You) and Daniel Kraus (the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angel Down) are my guests this week, breaking down a survival thriller with surprising emotional dimensions. Whalefall is the pair's exhilarating new underwater adventure, and on today's episode, the three of us reunite, having spent time together on the set of the movie in 2025.

Get ready for a deep dive – sorry, couldn't resist – into all the film's twists and turns, as well as...

That's all, folks? Not by a long shot. Coyote Vs Acme – the Who Framed Roger Rabbit-esque courtroom comedy written by my guest today. Samy Burch – was famously cancelled by Warner Bros in late 2023 but has since experienced a remarkable revival, making its way to screens this summer as the result of enormous public outcry.

Today on the show, Samy breaks down both the film itself and the ways in which life imitated art in the aftermath of the movie's creation. The Dave Green-directed Looney Tunes tale is ultimately a story of David vs Goliath – an underdog (quite litera...

The world has forgotten New York's famous web-slinger in the latest blockbuster outing in the MCU. The irony is, in real life, Peter Parker is a character that pop culture could never forget or cast aside. In today's Script Apart, Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna – the screenwriters behind this summer's all-conquering 'Brand New Day' – contemplate why that is and what makes him so enduring. They also share how Daredevil himself, Matt Murdock, almost had a presence in the movie, as Peter's lawyer during a court case after Spidey becomes the victim of IP theft. Yes, you read that right.

Time to delve into screenwriting parts unknown with the writers of one of 2026's most moving coming-of-age dramas. Todd Bartels and Lou Howe are my guests today, discussing in spoiler-filled detail how they cooked up a biopic exploring the teenage life and times of one Anthony Bourdain – author, chef and beloved TV travel host. Discover how they approached the various story threads and characters in the Matt Johnson-directed drama – and what they had to get right in the script to do right by the great man, whose memory could easily have been desecrated.

Script Apart is hosted by L...

Five weeks in hospital. Five months of being away from your podcast feeds. Yes, listeners, it's been a weird time. But Script Apart is finally coming back in the coming days! Before new episodes start dropping, here's a quick note from Al, with some a couple of announcements.

To submit your questions for our mailbag episodes, click here or email [email protected].

You can also reach us on Instagram and TikTok.

Got a screenplay that you'd like comprehensive feedback on? Head to scriptapart.com/coverage for notes, one-on-one Zoom development sessions with...

Ground control to Script Apart listeners – today on the show, we’re blasting off into the cosmos with three formidable sci-fi storytelling talents. Phil Lord and Chris Miller are the writer-director-producer pair responsible for films like Into The Spider-Verse, Across The Spider-Verse, 21 Jump Street, 22 Jump Street, The Lego Movie and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. Screenwriter Drew Godard, meanwhile, you may know from movies like Cloverfield, Cabin In The Woods, World War Z and Bad Times At The El Royale, which he also directed. 

Project Hail Mary is their new film, directed by Lord & Miller and w...

Today on the show – a conversation about Bugonia, with the film’s writer, Will Tracy. Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the upcoming Academy Awards, the Yorgos Lanthimos-directed film is an black comedy thriller about a pharmaceutical CEO, Michelle, played by Emma Stone, who’s kidnapped by a conspiracy theorist, Ted, played by Jesse Plemmons. Ted is convinced that Michelle is not of this planet. He’s insistent that she’s an infiltrator from an alien world, responsible for the collapse of Earth’s bee population and plotting a full-scale invasion. 

The film’s an adaptation of a South Kore...

Pandora beckons once more, guys. Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa are back on the show today, spilling secrets from their screenplay for the recent third film in the Avatar franchise, Fire & Ash. The husband-wife duo came on the show around the release of Avatar: The Way of Water a couple of years back, and it’s always a good time chatting with them – I love the unapologetic earnestness of their storytelling and the habit they have of taking huge, billion dollar IP and using them as vehicles for stories about the wonder of nature and what we risk by not...

Today on the show, our short run of episodes about Oscar 2026 awards contenders continues with a story about grief and growth amid the final flickers of the old West. Train Dreams – adapted from a novella by Dennis Johnson by my guests today, Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley – takes viewers back to Idaho, 1917. The Spokane International Railroad is under construction and quiet tree logger Robert Granier, played by Joel Edgerton, is one of the labourers paving the way for it. Midway through his life, he experiences an unthinkable tragedy and finds himself plagued by the question: was it karma? Perhaps for...

It’s officially that time of year again: Oscar season! We’re now just a few weeks away from the 98th Academy Awards and to celebrate, over the coming days and weeks we’ll be posting conversations about movies in the mix for all sorts of major awards at this year’s ceremony (not just the writing categories). We have of course ticked off a few of the front runners already on the show in recent months - scroll back in your podcast feed to hear our chats with Ryan Coogler about Sinners and Chloe Zhao about Hamnet. But there’s...

The Plague is writer-director Charlie Pollinger’s unflinching portrait of childhood bullying in which the titular contagion is a skin rash that may or may not be real. Set in 2003, at an all-boys summer camp, it follows Ben – played by Everett Blunck – as he enters a group with a clear social hierarchy. At the top is Jake, a smirking bully played by Kayo Martin. Very much at the bottom is an eczema-ridden outcast named Eli, played by Kenny Rasmussen. When Ben shows kindness towards Eli, he finds his footing in the group beginning to shift. What happens next makes for un...

In Rental Family, the new Tokyo-set drama starring Brendan Fraser, writer-director Hikari poses the question: “Can fantasies and fictions ever fill the gaps left in our lives by the people we miss; the things that we long for?” It’s a question the filmmaker – real name Mitsuyo Miyazaki – sets up and then resists answering in any declarative way. Instead, the film – about a washed-up American actor named Phillip who begins playing roles in the lives of strangers – treads around the topic with curiosity and empathy. Loneliness and loss, this drama seems to say, are a part of life, and sometimes we a...

To record an episode about Hamnet, the new film from Chloe Zhao, or not to record an episode about Hamnet? That was the question – and a question I answered in a heartbeat when Chloe’s team reached out late last year about chatting with the Nomadland writer-director. The historical drama, starring Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescal, takes viewers inside the anguish of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes Hathaway, after the death of one of their children in 1596. In the movie, Shakespeare throws himself into his work as part of his mourning process, resulting in one of the best-loved and...

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 week after week, to keep The Smashing Machine as he was nicknamed chugging along – never...

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 where I’m from. He shot a lot...

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 Valley. This year, you might also have caught his collaborat...

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 restraints forced upon her by a misogynistic upper class? Is she a tragic figure, numbed then maddened by the...

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. Rian’s a filmmaker...

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 entertainment in the form of a gameshow in whic...

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 and othered. All of a sudden, a war stood on the horizon. And so, Winnie got to work with composer Stephen Schwartz o...

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 them behind closed doors. They had to be br...

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, wasn’t just another Marvel movie. It was a bold, operatic, Kendrick Lamar-soundt...

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 houses. As Boyle’s true self – and name – is revealed, we tumble with him down...

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 – this new film goes straight to the so...

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 entrepreneur obsessed with expensive colognes, designer...

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 of the streaming era’s premier fright-masters – a writer-director whose output so far have...

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 Things. Brett, meanwhile, is the writer-performer known for Ted La...

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 began back in 1979 with Ridley Scott’s tale of...

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, director and star.

U...

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 impact of this show that shook Britain. 

Adolescence stirred rea...

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 Old Bailey as soldiers in the provisional Irish Republican Army saw them sentenced to life imprisonment. In jail, the pair went o...

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 forces her to confront a childhood trauma that has stalked her her enti...

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 rebellion actually is. 

That is, until Andor – the acclaimed Star Wars TV show created by Dan’s broth...

Welcome to Eddington – population: all of us. The new film from writer-director Ari Aster transports audiences to a town on the brink of combustion that, in a way, we’ve all been residents of for five years now. Look out your window right now and there may not be a New Mexico mountain range hugging the horizon like in the Eddington of Aster’s movie. But chances are you’ve absolutely felt it in the air – the same dread, the same fury, the same entropy and exhaustion that pollutes that dustbowl town.

May 2020 – when Eddington takes place – was...

All aboard the Cat Bus for a moving conversation about one of the greatest animations of all time – and the emotional madness of trying to bring that tale to the stage in London’s West End. If you’re in London at the moment, you need to see the current theatrical adaptation of My Neighbour Totoro currently showing in the West End. Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company with puppet designs by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, this magical re-telling of the iconic Studio Ghibli animation was written by our guest today, Tom Morton-Smith – a storyteller whose past work includes Oppenhei...

In 2023, Megan – a sassy robot, designed to be your daughter’s best friend – danced and dismembered her way to internet infamy. The title character of director Gerard Johnstone and writer Akela Cooper’s Blumhouse horror-comedy was an evil doll in the tradition of Chucky from Child’s Play, but at the same time, distinct in her modernity. As I asked in my review for Empire Magazine at the time: “Has Chucky ever interrupted a stabbing spree to sing Sia’s pop smash ‘Titanium’? Has Billy the Puppet ever broken into a TikTok-style dance before another Saw franchise victim met their violent demi...

Today on Script Apart, we’re taking a long, hard look in the mirror – Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series Black Mirror, to be more precise, with the beloved British writer joining Al for a spoiler-filled breakdown of the show’s brilliant latest season. Yes, this week we’re delving into a show that reflects back at us our darkest fears about the unrelenting march of technology on modern life. Across thirty three acclaimed episodes and one interactive special, Black Mirror has wondered what parts of the human experience might soon be transformed – or worse yet, disfigured – by advances in artificial i...

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 abdu...