Script Apart with Al Horner

Script Apart listeners, fortify your minds – this week, we’re joined by Michael Waldron, the screenwriting sorcerer supreme behind Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Directed by Sam Raimi, this latest Marvel blockbuster is superhero storytelling with the handbrake off. A cosmic adventure packed with inter-dimensional chases,  one-eyed squid monsters and motivational talks from zombie corpses, this 28th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe well and truly lived up to the “madness” of its title.

The film follows surgeon-turned-superhero Stephen Strange as he attempts to protect a young hero, America Chavez, with the power to open portals between locations in the multiverse. It’s a journey that sends the wizard on a horror movie-descent into darkness and violence, as familiar characters from the MCU make shocking lurches into villainy.

Wrestling all of that into some kind of coherent story would be challenging for any writer. Luckily, Michael was pretty well-prepared for such a task, despite having been roped into the project at the last minute following the departures of original writers Scott Derickson and C. Robert Cargill. Michael had prior experience bringing complex sci-fi concepts to life with a lightness of touch, having written for the hit animated series Rick and Morty. He was also on the Black List a few years ago for a genius spec script called The Worst Guy Of All Time, And The Girl Who Came To Kill Him. That screenplay contained a lot of the unrelenting momentum and time-hopping shenanigans that we see in Strange 2. It also helped, of course, that he was the head writer on Loki, the Marvel series that introduced the multiverse concept in the first place.

Michael told us how the darkness of the Covid-19 pandemic helped him craft that second act surprise. We also discuss how hard it was to balance the terror and tragedy of a certain witchy character in this movie, and address the meaning of the question “are you happy?” that Doctor Strange is faced with again and again in Michael's screenplay. Even superheroes, it seems, experience dissatisfaction and feelings of “what now? Is that it?” The film is out today on Disney+ so be sure to watch it before you dive into this spoiler special.

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 the show – an animated tale that puts the “panda” in “pandemonium.” Julia Cho is the co-writer of Pixar’s incredible Turning Red. The film follows a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl called Mei, who transforms into a giant red panda whenever she experiences strong emotion. What at first seems like a curse quickly becomes an opportunity for Mei and her friends, who are able to secretly raise money for tickets to see their favourite boy band, 4*Town, live in concert. That is, if the teenager can find a way to deal with her loving but protective mother, Ming.

Being a Pixar movie, it kinda goes without saying that Turning Red is packed with laughter, emotion, spectacle and sublime animation. But Julia and director/co-writer Domee Shi’s film broke new ground too, not just for Pixar but for Hollywood at large. It took a subject matter seldom addressed in mainstream movies – female puberty – and approached it with a cultural specificity that was utterly joyous to watch.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Julia about the difficulties and opportunities for change presented in the writing process on Turning Red. We talk about why the question “what if?” is such a vital storytelling tool, the significance of the film’s early 2000s backdrop, and why Julia and Domee refused to hide behind metaphor when it came to talking about periods in the movie. 

This is a very spoiler-filled conversation covering every plot point in the film all the way up to its exciting ending so if you’re yet to watch Turning Red, it’s probably best to do so before listening on. 

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.

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

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Today on the show, we’re overjoyed to be joined by the talented Hossein Amini, writer of 2011's cult smash thriller Drive. Based on the 2004 James Sallis novel of the same name, and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive told the story of a stuntman by day and getaway driver by night, whose dual lives collide after he strikes up a friendship with his neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan). From there, Hossein’s screenplay submerged audiences in a dangerous, hyper-stylised LA criminal underworld, strapping viewers into the passenger seat next to a captivatingly unknowable protagonist, simply named the Driver (Ryan Gosling).

If you’ve read the novel, you’ll know that Hossein had quite a task taking the lyrical, very interior prose and plot of the book, and turning it into a movie. Luckily, the Iranian-born storyteller is a bit of a master when it comes to adaptation: from 1997’s The Wings of the Dove to his 2014 directorial debut The Two Faces of January, Hossein relishes the task of taking a story from page to screen, adding a subtle sprinkle of his personality and past to the recipe along the way.

Across an engrossing chat, Hossein explains why Drive is in fact a fairy tale. We talk about what the film expresses about our culture of violence, why an early draft of the film featured the death of Irene, and how his storytelling habits were shaped by a childhood in the shadow of his parent’s divorce and the Iranian revolution. We also get into the meaning of The Driver’s Scorpion jacket, how the film’s iconic elevator sequence came to be, and the writer’s dark, gritty vision for the upcoming Obi Wan Kenobi TV series that he worked on briefly before stepping away from the project.

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.

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

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It’s not often you encounter a movie as staggeringly original as Everything Everywhere All at Once. The latest film from our guests this week, writer-director duo the Daniels, is surreal, hilarious, heartbreaking  and full of mind-blowing action – occasionally involving characters with hot dogs for fingers. We mentioned it’s original, right?

The film follows Chinese-American laundromat owner Evelyn, played by Michelle Yeoh, whose business, marriage and relationship with her daughter are simultaneously crumbling. As if that wasn’t enough chaos for the character, one day she’s thrown by the revelation that she’s not the only Evelyn that exists. It's revealed that an infinite array of Evelyns exist, occupying different parallel universes. One is a movie star, another is a Kung-fu master, so on and so forth. What happens from that moment on, is too manic and complex to describe here. Just trust us when we say it's one of the most joyously inventive sci-fis in memory.

For this spoiler conversation, we met up with Daniels in person – that’s right, the first ever IRL Script Apart! – to talk about their wildly different original opening to the movie, and early plans to use a narrator, quite possibly to be voiced by Susan Surandon. We go  deep into the meaning of the “Everything Bagel” at the heart of this movie, the scientific theory that fed into the film's plot and the conditions under which they'd consider making a Marvel movie.

Do be sure to watch Everything Everywhere All At Once before listening in – this is a spoiler conversation covering all of the film's major plot points in detail. Don't let us ruin it for you. 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.

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

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A decade before his recent Oscar nomination for his work on Denis Villeneuve's Dune,  Jon Spaihts co-wrote Prometheus – a bold prequel to the Alien franchise that celebrates its tenth anniversary this month.  It was a philosophical sci-fi horror odyssey like no other, that upended expectations and made the New Yorker one of Hollywood's go-to names for science fiction drama that both provokes and thrills.

You might know Jon as the man who co-wrote the first Doctor Strange movie along Scott Derrickson and past Script Apart guest C. Robert Cargill. He’s also shepherded his own sci-fi worlds to the screen, such as Passengers – a Jennifer Lawrence-starring romance among the stars that hit cinemas in 2016. Prometheus was his introduction to the world, however. He’d written a couple of impressive spec scripts that got him into rooms with high-powered Hollywood directors. Ridley Scott was one of them. As you’ll discover in this episode, the idea of an Alien prequel was kind of sprung on him. In an instant, he blurted out an idea for an epic that took the franchise and its mythology in a bold new direction, switching up the series’ visceral frights for grand existential contemplation and freaky robots. 

In this fascinating conversation, Jon delves into about his original draft for the film, titled Alien: Engineers. It followed roughly the same beats as Prometheus but with a few notable exceptions. For starters, Engineers made the bold move of suggesting that Jesus Christ was an alien, and therefore related to the Xenomorph of the first movie. It also had a different ending that set up a planned trilogy of movies with these characters, which Jon explains in detail.  You might also want to listen out for Jon’s pitch for a Star Wars series – one of the few sci-fi sandboxes he’s not had a chance to play in yet…

This is a spoiler-filled conversation – in space, no can you hear you scream that we ruined the plot for you. 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.

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

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We're back – and this season, we're covering TV shows as well as movies! Joining us today to kick off Script Apart season three in style is none other than Michael Schur – co-creator of shows like Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Rutherford Falls, and  a key creative force on The Office during its early seasons. 

Michael's most personal work, however, is undoubtedly The Good Place: a hilarious, philosophical probing of what it means to be a good person that ran for four seasons between 2016 and 2020. It starred Kristen Bell as Eleanor, a self-described “Arizona trash bag” with an insatiable crush on the wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin, who dies and finds herself in an afterlife that may not be all that it seems.

It’s the kind of show that could only have been created with the freedom afforded by Michael's  earlier small-screen successes – you hardly notice it while you’re watching because its jokes are so sharp and its plot so pacy, but The Good Place really did say “fork you” to a tonne of TV conventions. 

In this in-depth exploration of The Good Place's creation, we dig into into the screenwriter's vision for the show, how he crafted the jaw-dropping twist in its season one finale, why his original pilot screenplay doomed The Beatles to the Bad Place (sorry if you’re listening, Paul and Ringo) and what recently compelled Mike to write How To Be Perfect, a New York Times best-selling book that built on the themes of The Good Place. It’s a riveting and revealing chat with plenty of laughs along the way, as you might expect of someone with Mike’s resume. 

This is a spoiler-filled conversation that touches on plot points from all four seasons of The Good Place, so be sure to have watched the show before tuning in – we don't want to be sent to the Bad Place for ruining the series for you.

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.

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

Support the show

Great Scott, it’s the end of season two so we're going out with a 88mph, 1.21 gigawatt bang. Joining us before we make like a tree and get out of here, as Biff Tannen might say, is none other than Bob Gale –writer of the iconic Back To The Future. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, this 1985 time travel adventure needs no introduction – but trust us when we say it was almost a very, very different movie. In this special season finale, Bob delves into his radically different first draft of the film: one that included a time-travelling fridge (that's right, no Delorean) and Marty McFly and Doc Brown running a VHS film piracy operation out of the back of a rundown cinema. They have a pet chimp and there's even a shootout with the US military. The script climaxes with our heroes driving into the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb explosion, rather than using a lightning storm to get back home, as they do in the finished film.

You'll also hear about the elements of Bob's original screenplay that Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg borrowed for Forrest Gump and Indiana Jones 4 respectively. Bob also shares what it's been like working on the musical retelling of the film that recently hit London's West End, and exactly a film this outlandish – in which a teenager goes back in time and almost gets together with his own mother – took over the world. 

As for us? Well, we'll be taking a break while we work on some of our filmmaking projects, and generally try to catch a breather. Don’t worry though – we'll be back with season three and some surprises in the near future so don't go anywhere – we are your density, to quote George McFly. 

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. 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.

Support for this episode comes from Screencraft and WeScreenplay.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

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As the writer of movies like Lethal Weapon, The Nice Guys, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Iron Man 3, Shane Black is a true screenwriting auteur, known for his scripts' pulse-racing action, quippy dialogue and genre-skewing surprises. At the heart of his stories are usually two odd-couple characters, who must overcome their differences to solve a problem or often a police case. And did we mention all of this is often happening against a Christmassy backdrop? 

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – Shane’s 2005 festive film noir – ticked all the above boxes, and plenty more. As Christmas movies go, it's a cult classic renowned for its sharp satire and creative meta commentary on Tinseltown past and present. Robert Downey plays Harry – a petty thief who lands a Hollywood screen test after accidentally crashing an acting audition while running from cops after a botched toy story burglary. Adrift in LA over the holiday season, a string of strange events finds him reunited with his old childhood crush, Harmony (Michelle Monoghan) and entangled in a murder mystery with a gay private investigator named Perry (Val Kilmer).

Shane wrote the movie after a nine-year layover between projects. His previous film, spy thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight, has a huge cult following now but struggled at the box office on release, sparking a period of soul-searching for the screenwriter. In the conversation you’re about to hear, Shane explains how Kiss Kiss Bang Bang revitalised his love for movie-making. We discuss what is about Christmas that he can’t stop himself coming back to as a storyteller, to what degree this movie provided a comic template for Iron Man and the MCU, and how his first draft of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a romcom with intoxicating characters but no real plot. That is, until he planted a murder at the centre of it…

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. 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.

Subscribe to our new spin-off show How I Write here.

Support for this episode comes from Screencraft and WeScreenplay.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

Support the show

Today’s guest is none other than Tom Schulman, the Oscar-winning writer of timeless school drama Dead Poets Society. Released in 1989, Tom’s affecting and uplifting story of seven classmates who take a stand against the uniformity of the elite boarding school they attend is a valentine to never letting the world smoulder that flame in you that makes life worth living. Best remembered for an astonishing turn by Robin Williams as the kids’ teacher, John Keating, the movie walked away with Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards and Best Film at the BAFTAs, and remains an ingrained part of our pop culture three decades later: the boys’ emotive calls of “oh captain, my captain” and Keating’s advice to “carpe diem – seize the day” deeply embedded in our collective consciousness today.

Writing the film involved deep soul-searching from Tom, whose life story overlaps with the characters in his screenplay. He went to an elite boarding school and was inspired by an iconoclastic teacher. Speaking from his home in Los Angeles, he told us about an abandoned sub-plot in which Keating has cancer in his first draft, about the improvisational magic that Robin Williams brought to the role, and what he thinks the movie’s legacy is today. No need to stand on your desk at home to listen along – a sofa will do just fine.

This episode is sponsored by ScreenCraft and WeScreenplay.

Subscribe to our new spin-off show How I Write by clicking here.

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. 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. 

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

Support the show

Surfing into the Script Apart hot seat this week is W. Peter Iliff – writer of the astonishing Point Break. Peter was waiting tables in restaurants around LA when he began work on this dazzling adrenaline-hit of a movie, about a FBI cop who goes undercover with a bank-robbing surfer gang. The idea came to him while hanging out with the filmmaker Rick King who helped him flesh out the story, before Peter turned it into the blueprint for one of the great movies of the 1990s. The resulting film, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, was both an electrifying action thriller and something that transcended the genre entirely, with plenty to say about America, adventure and the bonds forged between men. 

In this fascinating conversation, Peter explores the connection between his own struggles with alcohol and the film’s life-on-the-edge characters, always chasing their next buzz. He also details how the film's most stunning sequences came together on the page, and how the iconic climatic fight between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze’s characters drew inspiration from samurai movies. You may also want to listen out for a tantalising breakdown of a Point Break TV show that Peter’s currently writing. You’ve met Johnny Utah. Now get ready to meet Joanny Utah, in a climate change-inspired sequel series that Peter’s been hard at work on.

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. 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.

Subscribe to our new spin-off show How I Write here.

Support for this episode comes from Screencraft and WeScreenplay.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

Get a free digital copy of the Script Apart Magazine by supporting us on Patreon! 50 pages of interviews with screenwriters, including exclusive conversations you won't find anywhere else. You can also now support the show on Ko-Fi.

Support the show