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 brought to trial and held publicly accountable for the unthinkable horrors of the Holocaust – the entire planet made aware of the systematic cruelty they’d inflicted. 

Giving these charismatic monsters a chance to excuse their actions in front of the global media, though, ran the risk of giving their ideology a chance to spread. Get this wrong and in fifteen years, the Nazis might come back stronger than before, some on the prosecution worried. It’s this terrifying prospect that propels James’ new historical drama, Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, delving into the legal saga that followed the supposed war to end all wars.

Today on the show – a spoiler conversation about Nuremberg in which James and I break down the need to tell this story at this moment in time, as the number of people who lived through the Holocaust dwindles. We talk about the throughline between this film and 2007’s Zodiac, written by James and directed by David Fincher, which James came on Script Apart to discuss in 2020. You’ll hear about how Silence Of The Lambs became an unlikely roadmap for this wartime epic. And we also get into why the movie ultimately arrives at the message that the barbaric tendencies of Hitler and acolytes weren’t unique to the Nazi psyche; fascism and authoritarianism could happen – and perhaps is happening – right underneath our noses today.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

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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-soundtracked moment in the culture, that surpassed a billion dollars at the box office. In 2022, a sequel followed, grossing just shy of that mark and capping a remarkable decade: Coogler, critics raved, was a filmmaker who’d grown into the spectacle of blockbuster cinema as a Hollywood craftsman, without outgrowing or leaving behind the powerful character-based emotion and complexity that he delivered with Fruitvale Station.

And yet still, the 39-year-old found himself concerned that for all that visibility, he perhaps hadn’t yet made a film that was wholly his– his personality, his history, his family lineage, imprinted in the page, pressed into celluloid. Those films were his takes on existing IP – or in the case of Fruitvale, a true story. And so, he got to work on something new. A film inspired in part by his uncle James, who loved blues music and told stories of a different America. A film that had plenty to sink your teeth in for genre cinema enthusiasts – but simultaneously dove into questions he was grappling with, in the wake of considerable loss. Ryan’s Uncle James died during post-production on Creed. Other family members had passed away too. And then of course there’s Chadwick Boseman, the star of Ryan’s Black Panther smash hit, who died following a battle with cancer in 2020, hitting the writer-director hard. 

Today on Script Apart, Ryan and I break down how those losses manifested in Sinners – one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2025. He tells me about the conversations with his Uncle James and his Grandmother that helped inform this vampire period piece, starring Michael B. Jordan as Smoke and Stack – twin brothers with a dream of opening a juke joint for their community. We also get into the meaning of Sinners’ dance sequence, in which Sammy – played by Miles Caton – summons the ghosts of Black musicians past and future. And we talk about why this is a story about the joy of community when you look past the blood shed – the defiant glee of deciding to build something of your own, in a world that lets you own so little. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

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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 a neon-splashed, teal-and-red rabbit hole of addiction and emptiness.

And it was this emptiness I was particularly eager to discuss when I sat down recently with Edward and Rowan, across two separate conversations. Rowan is the creator of the TV show Tin Star, and the writer of films like 28 Weeks Later and Before I Go To Sleep, which he also directed. He’s also, as tells me in this conversation, a recovering alcoholic, sober for many years. Edward, meanwhile – well, if you’ve followed the Oscars and indeed this show over the last few years, Edward needs little introduction. Conclave, his 2024 drama about the election of a new pope, and All Quiet On The Western Front, his 2022 Best International Picture-winning war epic, have seen him rocket to modern cinema’s top table in terms of respected auteurs.

In the midst of that success, though, Edward has described finding himself plagued by an empty feeling. And in this episode, he tells me how that informed this latest story. We get into the curiosity that drives his storytelling and also clear up something I read long ago about Ed’s love of rollerskating – and I also hear from Rowan about what it is that he thinks casinos represent in our culture; the capitalist tendencies they act as temples to.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

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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 source, directly adapting one of the novelists who inspired him at an early age: Donald E. Westlake, or Richard Stark as he was sometimes known. Westlake wrote 28 books in total about a career criminal named Parker – a cold, calculating loner who lives by a code: thou shalt not double-cross. Unless of course, he’s double-crossed first…

In this spoiler conversation, Shane tells Al about what Parker means to him as a lonely bookworm adolescent, and how he threaded the needle between this quiet character and the quippy dialogue both he and star Mark Wahlberg specialise in when it came to telling his own Parker story. We get into how he constructs his action scenes, how his writing has and hasn’t changed as a result of CGI – and why there was only one outcome possible in this story for a certain character who doesn’t make it to the end credits.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

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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 clothes and living a luxury existence; this despite working in the not exactly glamorous world of local government. His acclaimed stand-up work has also touched on materialism. And who can forget Master Of None, the Netflix series he wrote and directed, from 2015 to 2021. That Emmy Award-winning show frequently discussed social mobility. As a child of Indian immigrants, Aziz’s character Dev found himself on more than one occasion reflecting on the life that he gets to live compared to the one his parents sacrificed to give him.

Which brings us to Good Fortune – the comedian’s hilarious feature directorial debut. It’s a movie that could only exist in our depressing era of gig work and Amazon so-called fulfilment centres. Aziz plays Arj – a Task Rabbit employee trying and failing to make ends meet. At his wits end after a series of setbacks, he’s visited by an angel named Gabriel, played by Keanu Reeves, who swaps him into the shoes of his ultra-rich boss, Jeff, played by Seth Rogen. He’s meant to learn that actually, money isn’t the solution to all your problems. True happiness comes from within. Just one problem – in our cost-of-living crisis era, money does at the very least make people’s lives much easier. Arj doesn’t want to swap back. Cue a ridiculous and ridiculously funny romp through LA’s glitziest parties and seediest shadow spaces. 

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Aziz tells me about actually becoming a Door Dash worker in real life, delivering food to people’s doors, as a window into the impossible economics of jobs like that.  We break down the funniest moments and the most powerful truths in this tale. And you’ll also hear Aziz reflect on his own relationship with luck and so-called good fortune.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

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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 included vampire priests (Midnight Mass), acid showers (Fall Of The House Of Usher) and some of the most harrowing small-screen deaths in recent memory (The Haunting Of Hill House, I am still not over you).

"Feel-good" is not how you’d typically describe the icon of literary terror he’s becoming closely associated with, either. The Life Of Chuck is the third time Mike has adapted the great Stephen King, after Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep (he also has new adaptations of Carrie and The Dark Tower on the way). But The Life Of Chuck is, nonetheless, as “feel-good” as apocalypse stories come. It stars Tom Hiddleston as an ordinary-looking man who mysteriously begins appearing on billboards as a divorced couple’s leafy suburban existence is interrupted by a series of globe-threatening disasters. The mystery of “Who is Chuck?” propels a story more still and sentimental than many viewers might expect from Flanagan, from King, from the end of the world.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Mike calls in from the set of Carrie, which he’s in production on at the moment, to break down the film in extensive detail. We get into the meaning of the Carl Sagan-inspired monologue that Mike added to King’s source text. We talk about the one detail in the film’s transcendent dance sequence that breaks my heart just to think about. And of course, we touch on that moving, ambiguous ending and how it fits into a body of work that often involves locked rooms. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

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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 Lasso, in which he plays hardman Roy Kent. He’s also the co-creator of Apple TV’s Shrinking and hosts a very entertaining podcast named Films To Be Buried With. 

In All Of You, Brett plays Simon – a journalist whose best friend is a woman named Laura. The pair have undeniable chemistry but their timelines have never quite aligned, romantically. Instead, when the film begins, their relationship is strictly platonic. Laura has found her supposed 'one true love,' according to science. But something remains unresolved – Simon and Laura’s attraction to each other unable to be fully dimmed. 

The film began life in 2013 as a short that later was developed into an AMC anthology series named Soulmates, which lasted one season. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Brett and Will reflect on that journey to this feature version of the script – what it was they just couldn’t quit about this concept and these characters, whether they’d take the test themselves, how their attitudes towards the idea of soul mates have shifted over time. Plus, of course, what it is that’s happening in the heads and hearts of our two protagonists during the film’s heartbreaking final scene. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

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Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage.

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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 a crew of space truckers hunted by an extraterrestrial killing machine. You certainly don’t need to tell Noah, who knew precisely the risks involved in bringing Xenomorphs to TV for the first time. Luckily, this is a writer, director and novelist we’re talking about who’s turned major movie IP into surprise TV smashes before. With five seasons of a brilliant TV adaptation of Fargo behind him, the 58-year-old understood the assignment in front of him. 

This week, the first season of the show reached its violent climax, capping the first chapter in the tale of Wendy – a terminally-ill child plunged into the body of a synthetic human adult, and subsequently caught up in a fight between corporations for five dangerous alien specimens. Listen in for Noah’s spoiler-filled revelations about the real-world inspirations behind its power-hungry trillionaire antagonists. Discover more about the huge swing for the fences the show takes in its final two episodes involving Wendy and a Xenomorph. And finally, learn what the future perhaps holds for these characters, with season two as yet unconfirmed…

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

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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.

Until this impressive debut feature, Eva was best known for a series of online videos – videos that eventually caught the attention of one Barry Jenkins, director of Moonlight and one of the first ever guests on Script Apart. Spotting a flair for comedy and observations about the human condition in those viral shorts, the story goes that Barry reached out to Eva inviting them to send him a screenplay that his production company might be able to produce. What Eva came back with was a tale of a college student whose life is upended by a bruising betrayal of trust by their academic mentor. 

When we meet them years later, the film’s protagonist, Agnes – played by Eva – seems to be trapped in carbonite by those events, while all manner of change and chrysalis cruelly occurs around her. Their best friend, Lydie, played by Naomi Ackie, is gliding through milestones in her life. The world is moving on. Agnes, meanwhile, still has a way to go in putting the past behind them. 

In the spoiler-filled conversation you’re about to hear, Eva and Al get under the skin of that captivating character. They tell us about how the initial idea for Sorry Baby involved a character who habitually attended court hearings. We get into the film’s non-linear structure and its mirroring of how recovery from assault is a journey full of movement back and forwards in time. We also discuss the scenes cut from their shooting script that would have made for a quite different movie – including a non-sequitor sequence involving two random guys talking about sandwiches for two minutes in the middle of one of the movie’s most important scenes, and an earlier encounter with Pete, the sandwich shop owner with whom Agnes shares a pivotal moment of quiet human co-existence, in the film’s beautiful third act.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

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Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage.

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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 real-life change in a way few TV shows can. It caused parents and legislators to ask important questions about the digital realms their kids disappear into behind closed doors. It’s been made available to every school pupil in Britain for free. And there are growing calls for a ban on smartphones in schools, all because of this one-take tale of a 13-year-old boy driven to unthinkable violence by corrosive content served to him on his phone. 

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Jack tells us his conflicted feelings over the show’s handling of Katie, the young girl whose death propels the show. He tells us about the fifth episode he would have loved to have written, focusing on Jamie’s friends. And you’ll also hear about Jack’s research into real-life online misogyny, preying upon the insecurities of boys like Jamie.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

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Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage.

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