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 uncomfortable but vital cinema.

On today’s episode of Script Apart, Charlie joins me to describe how this story began in his childhood bedroom during the Covid-19 pandemic, flipping through his own childhood diaries. We get into the cruelty that kids are capable of and the realness and relatability with which he translated that cruelty to the page. We also break down every key scene and character in spoilerific detail because that’s what we do here on Script Apart – so be sure to watch the movie first beffore diving in.

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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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 as a species go to unusual lengths in search of a balm for that pain. That’s not necessarily healthy. It’s not necessarily unhealthy either. It’s just something that we do. And it leads to phenomena like “rental families” – a concept that really does exist in Japan, in which actors perform the role of a loved one in exchange for a fee.

In today's spoiler conversation, Hikari – a former dancer and rap photographer, best known in film and TV for her work on the Netflix series Beef – joins Al to discuss what the growth of rental families in her home country of Japan says about where we’re at as a society. The filmmaker breaks down how she translated the universal loneliness epidemic that the rental family industry is testament to, into this beautifully understated tale.

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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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 most influential plays of all time. In doing so, though, Agnes is left alone with just ghosts, grief and her remaining children – themselves angry and confused at Hamnet’s death – for company. 

Adapted from an acclaimed novel by Irish author Maggie O’Farrell, who joined Chloe and I for our conversation, the film is as emotionally bruising as they come. It’s a tale about parenthood, personhood, how storytellers process pain through their art and what it means to witness that. The film ends with this remarkable final scene shot at London’s historic Globe Theatre in which Shakespeare has transmuted his pain into a play that both pours salt into the deepest imaginable wound for Agnes, and seemingly offers her some closure. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, the three of us get into the evolution of that moment, and other key scenes from a film that won Best Drama and Best Actress for Buckley at the Golden Globes and is expected to be in the mix at this year's Oscars. Maggie talks about the connections between this story and her other work, such as I Am, I Am, I Am – which also dealt with mortality. And Chloe reveals how she uses colour as a storytelling weapon in Hamnet – with red representing Agnes and inky blues representing the Bard himself.

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 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 breaking, never faltering. Addicted to powerful painkillers, the pressure to win was killing him.

Which is why The Smashing Machine, the recent biopic about Kerr, from my guest today, writer-director Benny Safdie, is a sports movie unlike most others. Think of a sports movie you love. Break it down at its core and I bet you, it’s a tale about someone learning to win, right? Starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, The Smashing Machine is about someone learning to lose. The liberation that comes with it. The power of realising that we’re not our accomplishments. What defines us is our actions out of the wrestling ring – whatever your version of that ring may be.

On today’s episode, Benny tells me about the quote, “radical empathy” that guided this story – and how it was also perhaps present in his work up till now. Films and TV shows like the hugely acclaimed Good Time and Uncut Gems, both created with his brother Josh – and The Curse, created with Nathan Fielder. We get into all the key beats and scenes from The Smashing Machine in our usual spoiler-filled detail – including that mesmerising ending in which Dwayne Johnson seems to unburden himself of the expectation that he can never falter, not just within his performance of Mark Kerr, but also kind of as himself, this megawatt blockbuster star whose recent career took an interesting path to this story, filling it with metatextual meaning. 

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 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].

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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].

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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].

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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].

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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].

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

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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.

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