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].

To 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].

To 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, 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 on a musical that would subtly grapple with the skyrocketing racism of that moment. Soon, something Wicked was to come our way.

Inspired by a book of the same name by author Gregory Maguire, Winnie and Stephen's Broadway extravaganza took one of the defining stories in cinematic history – the Wizard Of Oz – and invited audiences to look at it a little differently. What if the so-called Wicked Witch Of The West in that film – all green skin and shrill cackle – wasn’t actually the terroristic threat that Dorothy and viewers thought her to be? What if there was a more tender truth to this woman, who lest we forget, in that 1939 movie, was just trying to retrieve the ruby slippers worn by her dead sister, crushed by Dorothy’s house when it’s transported via tornado to Oz? 

Chances are you know what happened next. Forbes Magazine estimates that 65m people have seen Wicked since it hit Broadway in 2003, quickly expanding around the globe. It’s the fourth longest-running play in Broadway history. And now, it’s a blockbuster smash too. Last year, Winnie’s screen adaptation of the musical, written with my other guest today, Dana Fox, of Cruella fame, began its emerald takeover of movie theatres. That first film, simply titled Wicked and covering the first half of the stage play, was a smash. Now, Wicked For Good is here, bringing this tale to the end of its yellow brick road, and Winnie and Dana are full of emotion and reflection. 

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, they tell me about the strangeness of this movie arriving in this particular political moment. I don’t know about you guys at home, but the sight in Wicked and Wicked For Good of marginalised groups – munchkins and animals – rounded up and forced from their homes in a year of ICE raids and anti-immigrant anger, struck a really heartbreaking chord for me. It’s not all politics, though, I promise! We also get into the prisons of perception that Elphaba and Glinda, played by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande respectively, both exist in and have to break free of in this story. And you’ll also hear the pair’s reflections on the huge differences between this story about the Gregory Maguire original, which saw Elphaba join an underground terror cell. 

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

To 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.

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].

To 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.

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].

To 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.

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].

To 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, 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].

To 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.

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].

To 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.

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].

To 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.

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].

To 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.