99 episodes

A podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies and TV shows. 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. Hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.

Script Apart Script Apart

    • TV & Film
    • 4.7 • 131 Ratings

A podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies and TV shows. 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. Hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek.

    Script Club: Children of Men with Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)

    Script Club: Children of Men with Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)

    Welcome to another Script Club episode of Script Apart, in which storytellers we admire pick a film or show they love and talk about why it's special. Today, revered Folio Prize-winning author Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties, In The Dream House) breaks down the dystopian delights of Alfonso Cuarón's Children Of Men, co-written with Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby.

    Based on a 1992 novel by P.D James, this 2006 action thriller forecast a Britain in the mid-2020s on the verge of collapse, governed by a party waging a cruel war on asylum seekers as a distraction from its problems. The UK may not currently be staring down a fertility crisis like the one depicted in Cuarón's film, but Children Of Men was, in other ways, eerily ahead of its time in some of its predictions.

    In the spoiler conversation you're about to hear, Carmen shares what she finds so impactful about the tale, and the influence it has had on stories of her own, such as 2017's chilling Inventory.  Carmen is one of Al's favourite working writers, and someone whose work has been a north star in his own fiction, so we were delighted to have her on the show, breaking down a drama that only grows more relevant with each passing year.

    ** COME TO OUR FOURTH BIRTHDAY LIVE SHOW! Script Apart presents Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa with Neil and Rob Gibbons at Picturehouse Central, London – March 11th **

    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

    • 1 hr 16 min
    Expats with Lulu Wang

    Expats with Lulu Wang

    “We are what we survive.” That’s the message of Expats, the powerful new limited series from our guest this week, Lulu Wang. Lulu is a writer-director whose stories are unflinchingly intimate portraits of characters captivatingly full of contradictions. In this show, adapted from a novel by Janice Y.K. Lee, those characters are three women, different in age, class, personal circumstance and relationship to motherhood, who become linked by an unthinkable tragedy. These women’s stories combine to tell a tale of grief and privilege in a modern day Hong Kong battered by typhoon weather and simmering political dissent. And they do so movingly.

    Lulu till now has been best known as the writer-director of 2019’s The Farewell, based on a radio story she wrote in 2016 for This American Life, about her own Chinese-American immigrant family. This follow-up to that breakout hit sounds like from the outset some kind of thriller: Nicole Kidman plays Margaret, an American living in Hong Kong whose youngest son disappears at a night market. Instead of a pulse-pounding pursuit, full of cops, clues and criminals like most abduction dramas, Expats instead unfolds at a meditative, mournful pace, against the backdrop of the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong.

    In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, celebrating the magnificent finale that dropped today, Lulu discusses about what happened to Margaret's child Gus, why the show refused to give an explanation for his disappearance and instead prioritised what it means to grieve; how grief doesn’t shrink, leaving us instead to grow around it.

    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

    • 1 hr
    How To Have Sex with Molly Manning Walker

    How To Have Sex with Molly Manning Walker

    Today on Script Apart, we're heading to Malia with Molly Manning Walker, writer-director of How To Have Sex. Since wowing audiences at Cannes last summer, the sun-sea-and-consent drama has proved a box office hit, been hailed as one of the strongest feature debuts by a British filmmaker in recent year and sparked long-overdue, nuanced conversations about the attitudes towards sex that young people inherit. The film  tells the tale of Tara, a sixteen-year-old played by Mia McKenna-Bruce, on a rite-of-passage summer holiday blowout with friends while she awaits school exam results. What begins as a sun-soaked adventure, full of borrowed hair straighteners, karaoke and bright-blue-coloured cocktails, soon becomes something bleaker when the girls meet a group of lads in the holiday rental apartment opposite them. Amid the thumping music and blinding lights of Malia’s club scene, a taboo-shattering expose of everything wrong with the way teenagers are encouraged to view sex unfolds – and it's absolutely heartbreaking.

    Molly wrote the film while revisiting memories of going on a number of clubbing holidays herself between sixteen and eighteen, and realising what little room there was for discussion about the pressuring sexual elements of those trips and the harrowing experiences they can result in. When she was the victim of a sexual assault at age sixteen, she remembers “wanting to talk about it. But I’d walk into rooms and it would suck the air out of the room. How are people supposed to move on if no one’s allowed to talk about it?” How To Have Sex is a movie that does to talk about it – and does so movingly without ever lurching into lecturing or sentimentality.

    In the spoiler-filled interview you’re about to hear, Molly break down key scenes from the film, including the heart-wrenching final exchange in the airport between Tara and Skye – what isn’t being said in that moment, and why. We talk about what she’s learned about how global the problems depicted in How To Have Sex are by the response to film beyond Britain – and how working on this film at the same time as Scrapper, Charlotte Regan’s brilliant surrealist comedy set out on a UK council estate – taught her about the necessity of female coming-of-age stories.

    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, Magic Mind and WeScreenplay.

    To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.
    Support the show

    • 45 min
    American Fiction with Cord Jefferson

    American Fiction with Cord Jefferson

    American Fiction is two films at once – a farcical comedy take-down of white gatekeepers who only want one type of Black storytelling and a beautifully tender drama that underlines the richness possible when filmmakers of colour are allowed to operate outside of the boxes they’re often put in. Written and directed by Cord Jefferson, whose past writing credits include work on Succession, The Good Place and Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen TV adaptation, the film tells the tale of Monk, a frustrated academic played by Jeffrey Wright, who becomes an accidental literary sensation when a manuscript he writes as a joke, perpetuating Black stereotypes, becomes a best-seller. There’s sensitivity beneath the scathing satire of that premise, however: American Fiction is a movie that reels you in with its funny premise, then moves you to tears with its elegant portrait of a family as they search for meaning in grief and growing older.
    In this spoiler conversation, Cord tells Al what struck him about Erasure, the 2001 novel by Percival Everett that American Fiction is an adaptation of. We get into the personal experiences that helped him relate powerfully to Percival’s story – and what inspired the changes from page to screen, such as the omission of a storyline involving a murder by an abortion protestor. Listen out, also, for what Cord has to say about the film’s meta ending and the symbolism behind the enigmatic image that closes the film. 
    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, Magic Mind, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

    To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.
    Support the show

    • 55 min
    The Holdovers with David Hemingson

    The Holdovers with David Hemingson

    Alienation, abandonment and dislocated shoulders: not really your usual ingredients for a tender festive heart-warmer. But then again, The Holdovers – unequivocally one of our favourite films of the last twelve months – isn’t your average Christmas movie. Directed by Alexander Payne and written by our guest today, the brilliant David Hemingson, it's a drama steeped in the pain of reaching the so-called “most wonderful time of the year” and feeling nothing but loneliness.

    The film tells the story of three loners thrown together by circumstance over the  Christmas break at a New England boarding school, each disillusioned with a world that doesn't seem to want them. They have their differences. One – Paul, played by Paul Giamatti – is a miserly middle-aged academic with an odour problem. Another – Angus, played by newcomer Dominic Sessa – is a brash student of his, on the brink of being sent to military school. The third and possible heartbeat of the movie, Da'Vine Joy Randolph's Mary Lamb, is their school cook – a woman who recently lost everything. These characters find a richness in each other that's uplifting without ever feeling schmaltzy or sentimental. It's a staggeringly beautiful film.

    In the spoiler conversation you're about to hear, David tells us about Uncle Earl, the real-life family member he based the character Paul on. You'll hear how his first draft involved a woman Paul used to date with porcelain fingers, after injuring her hand in a car accident. We also spend some time debating the words "not for ourselves alone are we born" – the lesson, if there is one, of The Holdovers, and a mantra we could all doing with reminding ourselves of more in our fragmented 2024.

    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, MUBI, Magic Mind, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

    To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.
    Support the show

    • 1 hr 4 min
    All Of Us Strangers with Andrew Haigh

    All Of Us Strangers with Andrew Haigh

    This week we're joined by writer-director Andrew Haigh, whose new metaphysical drama All Of Us Strangers is a bruise in movie form: all swirling blue and purple hues, symbolic of hurt and longing to heal. The film tells the tale of a quiet screenwriter named Adam, played by Andrew Scott, who lives in a lonely London tower block, divorced from the world. His only neighbour is Harry, played by Paul Mescal, who one night makes a drunken move on Adam, only to be turned down. Instead, we follow Adam as he boards a train and visits his childhood home. The unexpected reunion that follows takes the film on a dream-like turn representative of the scars he still wears as a gay man who grew up in conservative 1980s Britain. As the drama goes on, that dream quickly curdles into a nightmare.

    In the spoiler conversation you're about to hear, Al speaks to Andrew about the "aloneness" rather than loneliness that powers All Of Us Strangers. We get into the construction of its devastating twists, the process of adapting the 1987 Japanese novel on which it's based, the meaning of the pop music threaded into the house and the catharsis of writing this powerhouse story – one that audiences have found themselves unable to shake for weeks after viewing.

    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, MUBI, Magic Mind, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

    To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.
    Support the show

    • 51 min

Customer Reviews

4.7 out of 5
131 Ratings

131 Ratings

Hzgpxofz ,

Absolutely Inspiring!

As a college student who is an aspiring screenwriter it is amazing to hear these stories and be inspired by industry professionals. It’s also great to be exposed to amazing tools to use as a screenwriter who is still getting their feet wet in the industry. Script Apart has been my daily listen and I absolutely love it!

Htrostle ,

Love What I can Hear

I’m really enjoying these interviews and am glad I found this podcast. Only thing is I have a really hard time with the volume. I have my speaker (that I listen to other interview pods on without issue) maxed out, and I still really struggle to catch a lot of what is said. Please adjust mixing levels so I can enjoy the whole ep!

DK360 ,

Hard Core Feminist

Common man, You're distorting the narrative by characterizing every male character as a preditor.
Its beyond obvious youre pushing your ideals on listeners and sometimes testing the limits with the writers you interview. Please give it a rest. Its much more unsafe being a man. We do all the dangerous jobbs and die in way in greater numbers.
Leave it alone. Other than that, its great.

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