How do you follow a film like Longlegs, the chilling riff on serial killer thrillers that became one of the cult smashes of 2024? The answer, if you’re acclaimed writer-director Osgood Perkins, is to first swap out the pressure-cooker dread of that breakout hit. Next, add a cursed toy monkey. Then, harvest the wildest, darkest parts of your imagination for some of the most gruesome demises ever seen on screen. And finally, package all of the above into an existentialist comedy about embracing death. The result is The Monkey – a Stephen King adaptation inspired by the literary icon’s 1980 short story of the same name, but very much a work of Oz’s own invention.

From the moment a flamethrower-wielding Adam Scott opens the film with a maniacal cameo, screaming as he scorches everything in his path, it’s clear the movie is operating on a different tonal plane to Longlegs. But make no mistake, The Monkey is just as personal to Oz as that film and others before it, like The Blackcoat's Daughter and 2016’s I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Perhaps, in fact, even more so. As Oz explains in this moving spoiler conversation, the film is a meditation on death because death is something he’s experienced up close in the most unimaginably tragic circumstances; on September 12 1992, his father, Psycho actor Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS-related pneumonia at his home in Los Angeles. Almost exactly nine years later, his mother, the actress and photographer Berry Berenson, was aboard American Airlines Flight 11 when it was hijacked by terrorists and flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, on September 11, 2001. 

The Monkey, he says, features Theo James playing two roles as twin brothers Hal and Bill, because “that’s my life,” as he puts it. He and his own brother Elvis Perkins, an acclaimed musician, became “buried in the rubble of the tragedy” of their mother’s death on 9/11 and emerged with “differences more apparent than ever.” In the conversation you’re about to hear, Oz tells us the extent to which the movie helped reconcile some of the feelings towards his brother. Al asks him about the ending of the film, which involves a plane crash – a very emotionally-loaded image, given his tragic family history.  And he shares why accepting death is the only true way to find peace.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

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

Support the show

It was supposed to be “the cheerful Games.” That was the motto of the 1972 Munich Olympics, which was meant to usher in a peaceful new era on the world stage after the horrors in Germany just three decades earlier. Instead, on September 5th 1972, just after 4am. eight men in tracksuits jumped the fence at Munich's Olympic Village, armed with rifles and grenades. These men belonged to Black September — a group associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization – and their plan was to take the Israeli Olympic team hostage and hold them at gunpoint until 328 prisoners detained by Israel were released. The standoff ended in confusion and bloodshed. All eleven hostages died, as did a policeman and five members of the Black September group. This, despite media reports – broadcast to 900m people around the world – that the prisoners had been rescued. 

Today on Script Apart, we talk with the writer-director, Tim Fehlbaum, and co-writer, Moritz Binder, of a newly Oscar-nominated drama that contemplates what the Munich massacre might tell us about media complicity in acts of terrorism. The pair wrote this film with writer Alex David focused not on depicting the overall events of that terrible day – Steven Spielberg covered that with 2005's Munich, written by past Script Apart guests Eric Roth and Tony Kushner. Instead, Tim and Mortiz’s angle on the story is through the American sports broadcasters who suddenly find themselves tasked with covering the situation live as it unfolds – a world first. 

Never before had an event like this played out on television as it happened. Today, we’re very much used to consuming terrible atrocities as they happen on our digital devices. But in 1972, such a thing was unheard of. September 5 – which stars a great ensemble cast – puts the ethical questions involved with live-streaming terror under the microscope. It’s a period piece that resonates with disturbing power today not least because, since the film was finished, a harrowing new chapter in the history of violence between Israel and Palestine has been written. Maybe, the film seems to wonder, when you have a form of media that rewards being first and being loudest instead of being accurate, any type of live coverage is doomed to inflame and exploit rather than inform. 

This episode, as ever, contains spoilers.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

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

Support the show

Our guest today is a Palme d’Or-winning writer-director whose films centre characters “chasing the American dream but who don’t have easy access to that dream.” You might know Sean Baker from exhilaratingly raw dramas like Tangerine, Red Rocket and The Florida Project – each a compassionate and captivating dispatch from life on society’s margins, and each lavished with critical acclaim. His latest movie, Anora, has seen new levels of recognition for the 53-year-old, though. Next month, the film – about this tale of a sex worker named Ani, played by Mikey Madison, who falls for the son of a Russian oligarch – will compete for four awards including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the 97th Academy Awards, with internet discussion about the movie, its characters and their motives refusing to dissipate.

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Sean tells Al about how his own experience of heroin addiction in his twenties has influenced his storytelling. We talk about why this film is not a Cinderella story but a tale about shattered dreams, discuss a hopeful epilogue to the movie that Sean wrote but has so far refused to share with the world about what happens to Ani next, and break down the film’s devastating ending. A huge thanks to Sean for being a fantastic guest.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

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

Support the show

How will romance adapt to the age of A.I that lies ahead? What bleak (and beautiful) impulses might the technology bring out in us? And have you ever seen a Black Mirror episode inside a Coens Brothers thriller, inside a Barbarian-esque horror? These are the questions posed by Companion, the new movie by writer-director Drew Hancock. Today on the show, we talk devotion, dating and androids with Drew, whose directorial debut kept its cards close when it came to its marketing – and understandably so, because there are some really fun twists and turns in this script that are best experienced fresh. (Stop reading if you haven’t yet seen Companion and want to experience fresh, as recommended).

Companion is about a young woman named Iris, played by Sophie Thatcher. Iris arrives at a weekend away with her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) to glares of suspicion from his friends, who she’s meeting for the first time. As an audience, we experience her hurt at these friends’ strange microaggressions – and at Josh’s dismissive behaviour, callously, abruptly commanding her to “go to sleep” immediately after sex. Then – a murder. A murder and a reveal. Arguably the most humane character amongst this assortment of friends, is not human at all, but a machine. From there, a crime thriller unfolds with a large stash of cash at its blackly comic centre. It’s bold, original and manages to find new things to say about the intersection between technology and relationships. I had a blast watching it – and Drew from the sounds of things, had a blast writing it. 

On this episode of Script Apart, you’ll hear about the current real-world advances in technology like Iris that informed his vision of where we might be fifteen years or so into the future. We get into the hints at how A.I companions like Iris have altered the world beyond what we see in the film – and some early ideas for the movie that were completely different to what ended up on screen. And we break down every detail of the film’s emotionally satisfying ending. 

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

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

Support the show

The climate crisis is here and over the last few years, a question has loomed: how will Hollywood respond? Can blockbuster movies be a tool for mobilising audiences into action as global temperatures rise, fires rage and climate denialism continues to spread? Maybe in decades to come, The Wild Robot – a film by my guest today, Chris Sanders – will be looked back upon alongside Pixar's Wall-E as one of the first indicators of mainstream moviemaking’s processing of and pushback against the weather emergencies coming our way. The film – a stunning, Miyazaki-inspired animation about a robot washed ashore on a nature-abundant island, in an America devastated by unspecified ecological disasters – acknowledges what awaits if carbon emissions aren’t curbed head on, instead of alluding to it, like in other blockbusters. 

It’s a deeply moving tale that features the voice talents of Lupita Nyong'o as Roz – an android who learns to love through foster care. After an accident, she becomes the guardian of an infant goose named Brightbill, voiced by Kit Connor. Brightbill has to learn how to fly in time to migrate to warmer climes, before the brutal winter turns the island into a scarcely survivable tundra of sorts. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Chris reveals what the phrases “kindness is a survival skill” and “exceed your programming” – two mantras that informed the film’s creation – mean to him. We get into the truth behind Universal Dynamics, the shadowy company that created Roz. And you’ll also hear a deeply moving story about Chris’s mother and the regret he’s carried with him about their relationship, that influenced one of the key lines in the movie.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

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

Support the show

Jesse Eisenberg owes it all to an internet pop-up ad. A few years ago, while at an impasse with a screenplay about two friends on a trip to Mongolia, the writer-director and star of movies like The Social Network read an ad for “Auschwitz tours - with lunch.” And that jarring phrase unleashed an avalanche of ideas about, as he puts it, “the irony of wanting to connect to your ancestors’ pain but at the same time not being willing to experience any pain yourself: stay at the Radisson, eat your continental breakfast, have your croissant in the morning and your coffee in the van going to a concentration camp.” 

Skip forward to 2025, and the film unlocked in his imagination by that ad – A Real Pain – is an awards season frontrunner, nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor at this year’s Oscars. Its story of two cousins – David, played by Jesse, and Kieran Culkin as Benji – on a Holocaust “trauma trip” through Poland is a moving meditation on the shame it’s easy to feel in today’s world for feeling unsatisfied with life, when we think about the greater hardships our ancestors may have suffered. it’s devastating and deliriously funny in equal measure, not to mention bold in how it refuses an Eat Pray Love narrative of having international travel solve these characters’ problems back home. In A Real Pain, Culkin’s erratic livewire Benji ends up exactly back where he started – but we as an audience are changed. 

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Jesse tells me about how the film worsened rather than resolved his complicated feelings around what pain he’s entitled to feel. We get into that devastating final shot at the end of the film and why it is we feel the urge to connect to our pasts, with services like Ancestry and 23andMe. Listen out also for the parts of Jesse’s life he folded into the script – such as his use of medication and medication to tackle OCD and depression – and how Jesse reflects on the unanswerable question of, how much grief to allocate to the terrible situation in the world right now, before we cease functioning. It’s a fascinating chat about a fascinating film.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

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

Support the show

Thirty years ago, a film hit multiplexes that helped redefine love onscreen for moviegoers. So much so, in fact, that the history of the modern romantic drama might arguably be best separated into two distinct eras: before Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater’s enchanting cult smash stroll through moonlit Vienna, and after. Today on Script Apart, Richard’s co-writer Kim Krazin reflects on three decades of hearing from strangers about how this simple tale – in which two strangers on a train make a spontaneous decision to get off and wander the streets till dawn together – touched them deeply. 

The film starred Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as Jesse and Celine – one an American tourist, recovering from a botched trip to Madrid to see his now-ex girlfriend, the other a French student, heading back to Paris to continue her studies after visiting her grandmother. Kim and Richard had worked together before prior to Before Sunrise. Kim appeared as an actor in 1990’s Slacker and 1993’s Dazed and Confused. This time, however, they were co-writers, sequestered together for an intense eleven-day writing sprint, hard at work on a boy-meets-girl story with a difference.

Before Sunrise was to be naturalistic. There would be no melodrama – no conflict for the sake of it. Just conversation, as two people brought together by chance, who live a world apart, forge a connection against the ultimate ticking clock: at sunrise, Jesse has a plane to catch. As their attraction deepens, we’re left to wonder: will they see each other again after their expires, when dawn arrives? As it happens, they would; two sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, later followed, the first of which Kim has a “story by” credit on. But in 1995, as the credits rolled, audiences were famously left in the dark. The film’s brilliant cliffhanger ending – in which the couple decide not to exchange any contact information and instead meet at the same Vienna train station in six months’ time – was being written and rewritten right up until 3am on the last night of filming. 

You may have heard about how Linklater was inspired by a woman who he met in a Philadelphia toy shop and ended up wandering around the city with, talking deep into the night (this woman, tragically, died in a motorcycle accident before the film’s release). What you might not be aware of is Kim’s chance encounter at a Bob Dylan concert in London, one day on a train trip through England, that gave her some of the emotional kindling for Jesse and Celine’s tale. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, you’ll discover what parts of the movie wouldn’t fly today because of the modern technology that connects us brilliantly, but also robs us of the “romance of chance,” pervading every frame in Before Sunrise. We get into early plans to set the film not in Vienna but in Texas, and everything unlocked by the decision to set the movie abroad. And finally we get into whether or not Jesse in the film invents the concept of social media a good decade or so ahead of time. Hear us out on that one. 

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

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

Join Kim’s The Magic Hour community by clicking here.

Support the show

Today on Script Apart, a sneak peek at something new. We’re going to be running exclusive episodes this year for our Patreon supporters, in which – breaking away from the usual Script Apart format – Al Horner and a guest focus in on the screenwriting tips and tricks to be learned from a film that both adore.

Today, Lee Unkrich – director of Toy Story 3, Coco and other towering achievements in animation – returns to the show, to talk about what screenwriters might take and apply to their own work from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. You know how people are often like, “I wrote the book on X subject” as a way of claiming authority over a topic? Well, Lee literally wrote the book on The Shining. As you’ll have heard on our Script Club episode of Script Apart in 2022, breaking down everything Lee knows about the first draft of that timeless movie, the last few years have seen Lee take a break from filmmaking to assemble the most exhaustive, definitive take on the iconic horror, full of never-before-seen photos discovered in Kubrick estate’s vaults. Basically, on every page you’re being hit with a flood of amazing information about the film, rushing at you like blood from red elevator doors.

The book – called simply Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – is soon to be re-released at an affordable new price point after 2022’s limited edition run, which was all the excuse we needed to catch up with Lee about the reaction to it, before getting into five screenwriting takeaways from the film. Lessons like: why it’s important to be patient if you can’t find your ending; the ending to your script will eventually find you. We talk about how physical space can be used as a storytelling tool; something Kubrick does brilliantly with the Overlook, which dimensionally makes zero sense, contributing to the viewer’s sense of disorientation as they watch. And why sometimes the scariest thing to do in constructing a horror is to veer away from the hallmarks of the genre entirely (The Shining features barely any gore. And even less shadow and darkness).

Listen to the full episode now, and subscribe to our Patreon for more Writing Tips episodes coming soon.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

Support the show

Life is full of sweet highs and terrible merlots on today’s Script Apart as Alexander Payne – director of movies like Election, The Holdovers, Nebraska and About Schmidt – joins us to raise a glass to an indie drama that has aged like a fine wine. The brilliant Sideways was released in 2004 and soon earned four Academy Award nominations, taking home Best Adapted Screenplay. It won six Independent Spirit Awards, was picked up for Japanese remake and instigated a huge tourism boom in the California wine country that forms the film’s backdrop. Co-written with frequent collaborator Jim Taylor, it told the tale of two friends on a wine tasting expedition,  each struggling to break out of a certain middle-aged, middle-class male malaise (one of Alexander’s screenwriting specialties). The result? A dramedy widely regarded as one of the best of its decade.

The film saw Paul Giamatti play Miles – an aspiring author whose dreams of literary stardom are misfiring, much like his love life. Recently divorced, he and his old college friend Jack, played by Thomas Haden Church, hop in the car to celebrate Jack’s upcoming wedding. But Jack – a washed-up soap opera actor – is intent on hooking up with women as part of one last sexual hurrah before marriage. Caught up in the mix as the pair quarrel and cause trouble is Virginia Madsen’s Maya, a barmaid that Miles strikes up feelings for. Professing those feelings in a serious way, though, is difficult for the wine aficionado and English teacher – a man so mired in regret about what was, he’s unable to grasp the now and what could still be. 

Much is often made about the recurring quote-unquote “losers” that lead Alexander’s films, and what they might have to say about modern American man. The filmmaker, though, has always been pretty resolute that his movies centre the downtrodden and dopey simply because, deep down, these films are comedies – a genre the historically sides with the little guy, going all the way back to Charlie Chaplin. But how does he define the mix of pathos and hilarity that fill his characters? Where does Alexander’s affinity towards road trip stories come from?  What’s so relatable and real about Miles’ fear that his literary dreams might amount to nothing – and that a life of feeling like a loser awaits? And what was the inspiration behind the film’s beautiful ending – a knock at the door that we as an audience never see answered? All is revealed across a fascinating thirty-minute sit down with the auteuer.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

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

Support the show

It’s early January, a new year is here – and so too is a new chapter in American politics. Later this month, Donald Trump will enter the White House for a second term and right at this moment, people across the US and western world are wondering what the next four years may look like. Today on Script Apart, the filmmaker behind one of Hollywood’s first real attempts to grapple with the enormity of Trump and the implications of his political rise and fall and rise again, joins us to add his two cents and to discuss a film right up there in the mix this awards season. 

Ali Abassi is the Iranian-Danish director of The Apprentice, starring Sebastian Stan as the businessman turned President. Written by Gabe Sherman, who we hope to have on the show another time, it’s an origin story of sorts, charting a relationship that the movie alleges equipped Trump with the ruthless mode of attack that would become his ticket first to real estate dominance, then to tabloid media ubiquity and finally, decades later, to the Oval Office. 

Jeremy Strong plays Roy Cohn in the film – a lawyer who takes Trump under his wing at the onset of his career and moulds him in his image. But as one soars, the other begins a brutal decline. It’s a engrossing, humanistic watch that, as Ali explains, isn’t a story exclusively about Trump himself – it’s about a system that he is a product of. 

In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, we ask Ali about the Mary Shelley literary classic that helped shape his and Gabe’s take on Trump’s tale. We ask about the film’s most controversial moment – a scene based on divorce records, in which former wife Ivana Trump accused Donald of raping her and pulling out handfuls of her hair (Ivana later issued a statement insisting that the term "rape" was “not meant in a literal or criminal sense”). And we get into the scene from the film that had to be cut – a moment involving Trump kicking a dog, because of a lack of evidence that the real Donald Trump ever kicked a dog. 

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

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

Studiocanal’s The Apprentice is available to rent or buy now.

Support the show

Pour yourself a tall glass of milk (or better yet, have an admirer send you one) and prepare for a conversation about an erotic thriller blowing up the internet right now. Halina Reijn is the Dutch writer-director responsible for 2022’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, who’s followed up that razor-sharp murder-mystery pastiche with another film that infuses an old genre with modern politics. 

In Babygirl, Nicole Kidman’s tech CEO Romy begins an affair with an intern – Samuel, played by Harris Dickinson. The potential consequences of their relationship are catastrophic: Romy, married with kids, could lose her family and her rarified position as one of the few female leaders in a male-dominated tech world. But, as Halina explains in our spoiler conversation, Samuel is unlocking in Romy desires that she didn’t know she had – longings till now, clouded in shame.

Listen in to hear about the personal parts of Halina’s own journey with her sexuality that informed Babygirl, why she chose a dog attack as the thematically-important “meet cute” for Romy and Samuel – and what she hopes is the knock-on effect of this morally complex tale on the discourse around the pleasures women permit themselves to seek.

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

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft, Creative Command and WeScreenplay.

Donate to the American Red Cross here.

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

Support the show