Script Apart with Al Horner

Think of your worst experience with online dating – the most excruciating Hinge disaster or Tinder catastrophe. However bad you might think that ordeal was, it’s nothing on the tale told in the extraordinary recent indie I Love My Dad. Part cringe comedy, part family drama and part horror movie for the MySpace generation, the film followed a screw-up father who’s desperate to reconnect with the child he pushed away. Blocked on social media, this father – Chuck, played by Patton Oswalt – resorts to posing online as a beautiful young waitress whose friend request his estranged son will surely accept. The scheme is soon complicated, however, when the teenager begins to fall for this stranger in his DMs, growing determined to meet her in person.

That premise – a teenager cat-fished by his own father – might sound like the logline for a zany, high-concept Hollywood romp, but what’s so special about I Love My Dad is how grounded it is in the loneliness of being a certain age and desperate for connection. The lure of the internet, the versions of ourselves we present online and the sometimes unhealthy fantasies that permits – these questions are all explored in the film by the film’s outrageously talented writer, director and star, James Morosini, who it was a delight to chat with for this week’s episode.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, James explains how I Love My Dad has such an air of emotional truth to it because, well, “this actually happened” to quote the film itself. There are ways in which James’ story deviates from the one in the film but yes – his father really did cat-fish him in real-life, in events that inspired his screenplay. We discuss Age, Sex, Location – the title of James’ first draft of the film – and why an early ending in which Chuck has a heart attack and Franklin gets together with the real-life Becca had to go. It’s a fascinating conversation about the inherent performance of social media – how we’re all cat-fishing one another to less explicit degrees – and why running towards our most embarrassing moments and most vulnerable parts of ourselves, rather than running away, makes for great storytelling.

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

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Judd Apatow needs little in the way of introduction. He’s a filmmaker synonymous with an entire era of American comedy – that mid-’00s explosion of zeitgeist-grabbing movies about incapable men, grappling with the realisation that it’s about time they grew up. There’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which Apatow wrote and directed. There’s also the cult classic music biopic satire Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which he co-wrote with Jake Kasdan. The Cable Guy, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Step Brothers, meanwhile, are just some of the projects he’s served on as a producer.

A remarkable run of movies since the beginning of the 2010s have seen his comic signature evolve into something more tender. Films like Funny People, This Is 40 and The King of Staten Island are all funny, sure – but there’s an introspection to his work nowadays that has been fascinating to behold. 

On this week’s episode, Judd revisits one of his best-loved movies: 2007’s Knocked Up. But it’s not his first draft we delve into. Instead, as a window into his creative process, we uncover emails that the filmmaker sent to himself in the run-up to writing the movie, full of lengthy streams of consciousness about what the comedy could be – and why a stoner played by Seth Rogen having a baby with a high-flying media personality played with poise by Katherine Heigl would be hilarious.

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

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Our guests this week are Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao – writers of Joy Ride, 2023’s rowdiest comedy. The film tells the incredibly explicit tale of four friends on a wild journey of self-discovery following a business trip gone awry. Each character has a different relationship with their Asian heritage, which they’re forced to confront in hilarious and moving ways as a series of chaotic events sees them travel across the continent. Cherry and Teresa, who met in the writers’ room on Family Guy, didn’t fill their script with hilarity and depravity, though there’s plenty of that. Their script packed an emotional punch too, reminding audiences that “home” is maybe best defined as the place in which we love and are loved in return.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Teresa and Cherry tell us all about the parts of themselves they brought to the page in Joy Ride. We discuss the genesis of its wildest jokes, how they wrote the movie’s hilarious K-pop scene and the “Asian good girl” trope they wanted to take a flamethrower to across the course of this story.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, MUBI and WeScreenplay.

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She brought a small town to its feet and a huge company to its knees – that’s right, this week we’re talking all things Erin Brockovich with the film’s screenwriter, Susannah Grant.

Susannah is a talent who, over an impressive three decade career, has gone from writing on the ‘90s teen TV drama Party of Five and conquering animation with Pocahontas to penning dramas like 28 Days, romcoms like In Her Shoes and science-fiction with The 5th Wave. She’s also a force to be reckoned with behind the camera: having made her directorial debut in 2006 with the comedy drama Catch and Release, Susannah wrote and directed episodes of the recent searing Netflix series Unbelievable, which took a scalpel to the problem of rape culture in America.

Erin Brockovich, though, remains one of her best-loved works. Her witty script for the Julia Roberts-starring, Steven Soderbergh-directed legal drama earned her an Oscar nomination on release in 2000, and it’s both a testament to her writing and an indictment about our society’s lack of progress that the film still feels so relevant today. The film told the true-life tale of a single mother who fought and won a landmark legal case against the Pacific Gas & Electric Company over contaminated water supplied to residents in the town of Hinkley, California. In order to secure justice for the hundreds of people made sick by PG&E’s malfeasance, the real-life Erin had to navigate misogyny, classism and the demands of parenthood. Susannah’s script captured all of that with poignancy and punch.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Susannah tells us all about grabbing burgers with the real-life Erin Brockovich, the importance of David vs Goliath stories like this, the balance of fact versus fiction in the film – and the one line that had to change at Erin’s request.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, MUBI, Magic Mind and WeScreenplay.

Go to magicmind.com/scriptapart to get up to 50% off your subscription for the next 10 days with the code: SCRIPT20.

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The world is changing and truth is vanishing in our very special episode today, accomplishing a mission we’ve been hoping to make happen since the very inception of the show. Yes, this week’s guest is a true maestro of modern blockbuster filmmaking – a writer-director who won a Best Screenplay Oscar before his 30th birthday for the timeless neo-noir, The Usual Suspects. Since then, he’s leaned into action cinema of most breathtaking spectacle, without ever losing sight of the stripped-down dramatic principles that made The Usual Suspects such a gripping introduction to his work. 

He’s one half of a director-star symbiosis arguably up there with Ford and Wayne, Scorsese and DeNiro, Scorsese and DiCaprio and Spielberg and Hanks. And this summer, he and his close collaborator, Tom Cruise are back with a terrifyingly relevant spy thriller sequel that needs to be seen to be believed. Yes, this week on Script Apart – it’s the phenomenal Christopher McQuarrie.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One lights the fuse on a number of fascinating questions. Questions like: how do you take a series that’s already threatened the world with nuclear bombs and all sorts of other threats, and raise the stakes even further, seven films into this franchise? Christopher’s answer was to take the anxiety around artificial intelligence that’s been such a fixture of our recent news cycle and fashion those fears into a espionage adventure pulsing with paranoia. What’s all the more impressive about this is how long-delayed Dead Reckoning Part One was by the Covid-19 pandemic – meaning McQ predicted this. In the conversation you’re about to hear, the filmmaker is really articulate about the real-life threat, its overlap with his movie and how he anticipated it,  far in advance. 

You’ll also hear how Christopher constructed the story and crucially, the emotional arc of this latest Mission movie – the journey Ethan Hunt, played by Cruise, needed to go on this time around, to make all the film’s stunts and spectacle mean something to those in the audience. Get ready to discover the rationale behind that shocking death, and how the film’s astonishing climax – a train sequence that acts as a literal cliffhanger – came together on the page and the rationale behind that shocking death at the end of the film’s second act.

One thing you won’t hear much about, unlike in most episodes of Script Apart, is the film’s first draft. And there’s good reason for that – there wasn’t one. What you’re about to hear is a tale about how writing a Mission: Impossible movie isn’t all too different from what it must feel like for Ethan, surviving one of these films. There’s a lot of improvising out of tight spots – the screenwriting equivalent of Tom riding a speeding motorbike off a Norwegian cliff top into a base jump and landing on a moving train.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, MUBI, Magic Mind and WeScreenplay.

Go to magicmind.com/scriptapart to get up to 50% off your subscription for the next 10 days with the code: SCRIPT20.

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Pack your bags, everyone. Today on Script Apart, we’re making an emotional Return To Seoul guided by Davy Chou – the writer-director behind one of 2023’s most alluring slow-burn dramas. Davy is a Franco-Cambodian writer-director whose own dual cultural heritages helped inform Return To Seoul, a film that poignantly probes questions of identity and displacement. It follows first-time actor Park Ji-min as Freddie – a young woman wandering through the home country of her biological parents in search of answers and in search of herself. Part inspired by the real-life experiences of artist Laure Badufle, with whom Davy co-wrote the screenplay, it’s a delicate, raw character study that will both move you immeasurably and made you want to visit Seoul right this very second.

There really is so much beautiful nuance to this story. In real life, we human beings are messy and contradictory. Return To Seoul basks in that complexity, forging characters out of it who are flawed, who let themselves down, who push people away when they ought to let others in. Around Freddie are a supporting cast of characters who are all similarly entangled in their own messy wants, desires, hopes and regrets. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Davy shares with me how he crafted these characters and this story. We talk about the clever ways the film accents the cultural disparities between Freddie and the parents who once abandoned her. We get into what the film seeks to say about transnational identity. And we break down the meaning of the film’s enigmatic ending – so be sure to check out the film, available on MUBI now, before listening in.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, MUBI, Magic Mind and WeScreenplay.

Go to magicmind.com/scriptapart to get up to 50% off your subscription for the next 10 days with the code: SCRIPT20.

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“Lately, I’m getting the feeling I came in at the end. That the best is over.” 24 years ago, a man stepped into a therapist’s office and with those few words, transformed television forever. That man was, of course, Tony Soprano – a great big brooding bull of a mob boss, whose violence as the head of a New Jersey crime family hid a subtle sweeter side to his personality. 

The Sopranos balanced scenes of his brutality with glimpses at his capacity for more humane behaviour, and it was these duelling elements that powered the show, created by our very special guest today, the one and only David Chase. Tony was a doting father with a twinkle in his eye. The kind of guy who would wade into a swimming pool in his dressing gown to play with a family of ducks, when he wasn’t wading through a sea of cocaine and criminals at the Bada Bing. He was complicated, and with that complexity, the series took a hit out on basically everything TV execs thought they knew about the kind of protagonist that viewers would root for on the small screen. Walter White, Don Draper, Bill Hader’s Barry – Tony Soprano walked so other morally dubious men could run rampant through our TV landscape for decades to come.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, which was recorded before the writers strike, David tells us about his memories of devising The Sopranos’ iconic characters. We talk about what David and members of his writing team – a staff that includes past Script Apart guest Terry Winter – took from the 1990s political ether and poured into the show’s storylines. And crucially, we also discuss how the question that drives The Sopranos isn’t which family will come out on top in any of the show’s vicious mob disputes. It isn’t whether Tony will be caught by the cops or if he’ll make it out alive, either. It’s whether it’s possible for a man with so much blood on his hands to better himself. The turf war for Tony Soprano's soul. 

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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Life found a way – Script Apart is back! Season four begins with an episode 65 million years in the making, about a movie lauded as one of the greatest blockbusters of all time. Yes, today on the show, we're venturing into Jurassic Park, with the film’s brilliant screenwriter, David Koepp, as our guide.

The film follows palaeontologists Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ellie Sadler (Laura Dern) as they're invited alongside mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to an island populated by living, breathing dinosaurs. These creatures have been cloned from DNA found in mosquitos by eccentric billionaire John Hammond, who insists this soon-to-open tourist attraction is perfectly safe. Famous last words. Our heroes soon find themselves pursued by prehistoric threats.

At least, that’s how the finished film goes down. Did you know in the first draft of the screenplay, there was no Ian Malcolm at all? In the conversation you’re about to hear, David explains how the film originally had a different ending – in which Alan Grant starts blasting raptors with a shotgun – and different characters. We get into why Jurassic Park is essentially the ancient Greek myth Prometheus (with added pterodactyls), how David and Steven Spielberg modelled John Hammond on Walt Disney, and why the story is a fable about capitalism. After all, it’s not the dinosaurs that doom the island to carnage – it’s the greed of human characters, trying to make a buck.

David is a storyteller who we're always overjoyed to chat with (you may remember listening to our conversation with the writer/director on Script Apart roughly a year ago, discussing another great movie of his, the original Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible). Elsewhere in his filmography are collaborations with David Fincher (Panic Room), Sam Raimi (2002’s Spider-Man), Steven Sodeberg (Kimi) and Brian de Palma (Carlito’s Way). His other collaborations with Spielberg include The Lost World, War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. His latest novel Aurora is out this week on paperback, and a fantastic page-turner – be sure to pick up a copy.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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This week on Script Apart, the return of Mike Flanagan! The response to our last episode speaking to the horror auteur, one of this generation’s true titans of the genre, was so emphatic, we couldn’t wait to invite Mike back on the show to get lost in the Overlook-esque hedge maze of 2019's Doctor Sleep, his near-miraculous sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep. We use the word “miraculous” because it really is astonishing what the Ewan McGregor-starring chiller managed to achieve, marrying the legacies of two notoriously different visions of The Shining. 

Stephen King wrote The Shining in 1977. When Stanley Kubrick made drastic changes to King's source text in his adaptation of the story three years later, it led to contempt between these two masters of their craft. Fans have been divided ever since over which version is the more powerful – King’s novel, which had a different ending and a sunnier message about the capacity for love to triumph over evil, or Kubrick’s ruthless cinematic journey into male madness; the bloody end game of toxic masculinity, as embodied by Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrence. When Mike was presented with the chance to adapt King’s 2013 literary sequel to The Shining, which continued the canon his story, ignoring Kubrick’s changes, the Haunting of Hill House filmmaker decided to attempt the impossible. His Doctor Sleep was to knit together the visual language of Kubrick’s Shining with the storytelling that King favoured,  honouring both iterations. 

The story of how he pulled it off, and the seismic personal changes it sparked in Mike’s own life, is a tale as fascinating as the film itself. Which is saying something. Doctor Sleep is a fevered festival of telekinetic children, travelling vampiric bohemians and the courage it takes to beat addiction. And though the film didn’t perform well at the box office, it’s since found a passionate community of devoted fans who rightly consider it a masterpiece. Listen out at the end for some mind-blowing information on the sequels and spin-offs that its disappointing commercial performance sadly stopped from going ahead – and a note of optimism that we may see some of Doctor Sleep’s characters again, featuring in Mike’s upcoming adaptation of King’s incredible The Dark Tower.

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

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Unlike Margot Robbie in the hedonistic tour-de-force Babylon, we at Script Apart have never fought a rattlesnake. We have, however, now had the pleasure of chatting with one of our favourite filmmakers working today, Damien Chazelle. The Whiplash writer-director’s latest epic is a fevered telling of how 1920s Hollywood reacted as the industry transitioned from silent film to sound, shining a spotlight on the drug-addled dreamers chewed up and spat out by Tinseltown as it underwent that seismic change. It’s a story that puts the “sin” in Singing In The Rain, following an ensemble cast of characters as they experience both the divinity and destruction of the American moviemaking machine, with Margot Robbie astonishing as the doomed Nellie LaRoy – a character loosely based on real-life actress Clara Bow.

If all that sounds drastically unlike Damien’s previous work, well, that’s intentional – the La La Land filmmaker wanted to make a movie at the other end of the storytelling spectrum to that acclaimed 2016 musical when approaching Babylon. “If La La Land was a love letter to Hollywood, then Babylon is written with a poison pen,” he told Al when they last spoke before the film’s release. Catching up now for a spoiler breakdown of the movie and its incredible screenplay, the pair discuss how early iterations of the film centered on Brad Pitt’s character Jack Conrad, the eye-opening real-life stories of 1920s Hollywood debauchery that Damien pulled from, and where next for the filmmaker now that he’s conquered his boldest, most ambitious project to date.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Arc Studio Pro and WeScreenplay.

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