Script Apart with Al Horner

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 of Urchin in locations I used to tread every day before moving to LA earlier this year. And as we discuss in this spoiler conversation, we’ve both volunteered with local organisations a stone’s throw from each other, providing support to unhoused people in east London. In fact, it was while doing this volunteer work one day that Harris conjured the idea for Urchin – a story about a young man sleeping rough in Hackney, struggling with addiction and poverty, played by Frank Dillane. If that sounds like a gritty social realist drama you’ve seen before, well, you’re only half right. Urchin takes raw ingredients from that cinematic tradition and adds big, strange, lyrical leaps that make you feel the isolation and alienation that Frank’s character, Mike, feels. It all leads up to an ending that’s spine-tingling. In the conversation you’re about to hear, Harris and I break down key scenes and characters from the film, the real-life problems he hopes the film helps draw attention towards – and of course, Atomic Kitten, because how could we not? I hope it makes you whole again, listeners. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected] get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 collaboration with director Paul Greengrass – a thriller that would have been an exciting throwback to the disaster cinema of decades past, were it not for one particular interesting texture to that film. The Lost Bus told the true life tale of a bus driver, Kevin McKay, played by Matthew Maconahey, who stepped up to save a class full of children amid devastating wildfires encroaching on the small town of Paradise, California. Those fires were in 2018. In January this year, California was devastated by all-new wildfires that cemented a sense of new normal. Climate scientists are warning in unison that we can expect more of the precise scenario depicted in this movie. So, how did that fact affect Brad’s approach to the script? What’s behind his love of stories set in rural communities not often depicted on-screen? Why is it that his storytelling often centres around parents being pushed away by children on the cusp of adulthood? And what lesson is there about writing and life in the fact that, at the end of The Lost Bus, McKay reaches a realisation: the only way out of the fire is through? Brad spills all in this riveting chat.Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected] get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 spiritual emptiness of a bourgeois life? Or is she more simply put, a monster - someone so bored, she seeks entertainment in the destruction of others?In writer-director Nia DaCosta’s new take on the character, starring frequent collaborator Tessa Thompson, she’s perhaps all of the above and more – this is a queer retelling that fizzes with intrigue and nuance and a kinda Brat Summer-era celebration of feminine messiness. Today on Script Apart, a podcast about the first draft secrets of great movies and TV shows, Nia joins me to talk about the thematic through line in her work, connecting Hedda with her 2018 thriller Little Woods and her 2023 foray into superhero cinema, The Marvels. We get into her fascination with unconventional women on-screen, the literature in her childhood that led her to Hedda and every important spoiler plot point from this new adaptation.Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected] get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 who you might know from 2005 high school noir Brick, 2008’s The Brothers Bloom or the fantastic 2012 sci-fi Looper. He directed one of the best episodes of TV this side of the millennium in the form of Breaking Bad’s ‘Fly’ episode, and created the brilliant Poker Face, starring Natasha Lyonne. In 2019, he wrote and directed Knives Out, starring Daniel Craig as a Southern-accented sleuth, which was a huge sensation. A sequel followed in 2022, as part of a major deal with Netflix. And somewhere amid all that, he made a low-budget indie that probably completely passed under your radar because it was barely discussed upon release. Let me just check my notes here… Star Wars: The Last Jedi? Never heard of it personally.Wake Up Dead Man is maybe his most personal and politically-charged film yet, though, as you’ll hear in this conversation. Rian’s relationship with religion is… well, it’s complicated. In this spoiler conversation, he tells me about his lapsed faith and story of growing up in the Church… before leaving it. It’s a story that totally altered my perspective on The Last Jedi – a movie about lapsed faith – and shone a fascinating light on this latest adventure in the life of Benoit Blanc. We get into the overlap between the “cult of personality” church figurehead, Wicks, in Wake Up Dead Man and the politicians in our newspaper headlines each morning right now – many of whom position themselves of Christians and preach messages of fear; them against us. And Rian also tells me what the future perhaps looks like for him, twenty years on from Brick – the next steps in his storytelling to come.Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected] get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 which cash-strapped contestants are hunted down and dispatched as a form of TV spectacle. The longer you survive, the more money you make for the loved ones you’ll soon be leaving behind. But of course, if you somehow manage to make it through thirty days alive, you can return to that family, one billion dollars richer. Edgar and Michael are no strangers to the sort of kineticism inherent in a premise like that. Edgar is of course the filmmaker behind breathless popcorn classics such as Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz and 2017’s Baby Driver. Michael meanwhile is the writer behind both 21 and 22 Jump Street – two of the best action comedies in recent decades. The Running Man sees the pair – who previously worked together on the script for Scott Pilgrim Vs The World – back at maximum velocity and bringing the noise. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Edgar and Michael tell me about the overlaps they found between the 2025 that King predicted and our own real-life version (the original novel was set in our present day). We talk about the anger that drives their protagonist in this tale, Ben Richards, played by Glen Powell. And, with A.I such an integral part of the malevolent Network and their manipulation of the public in this tale, I was also curious to ask Michael and Edgar where each of their heads are at, in terms of that technology and the slow, dangerous creep of it into our moviemaking landscape?Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected] get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.