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.

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