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].

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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].

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Talk about setting a high bar. Nickel Boys – the new film from RaMell Ross – is a drama that may be one of the first releases of the 2025, but will almost certainly still be reverberating come the end of it. Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by The Underground Railroad author Colson Whitehead, it tells the story of a reform school for primarily Black young offenders, where violence and cruelty are carried out and covered up in a rapidly changing America. The Nickel Academy as it’s known in the film is fictional, but the Dozier School in Florida, on which Whitehead based his tale, was all too real. In 2010, an investigation into the site uncovered an 111-year history of beatings, rapes, torture and murder of students by staff. Fifty five unidentified bodies in unmarked graves were discovered. More than one hundred children in total were killed, often in the most unthinkably inhumane ways, with much of the worst abuse carried out in a building known only as the White House.

In Nickel Boys, a beautiful friendship begins amid that horror and injustice. The film adopts a unique first-person perspective to show a deep bond bloom, between Ethan Herisse’s Elwood and Brandon Wilson’s Turner. Jumping between then and now, with Daveed Diggs playing a haunted older version of one of these characters, it’s one of the boldest films in this year’s Oscar conversation, narratively, aesthetically and otherwise. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, RaMell and Al discuss the film’s approach to memory, the meaning of the crocodile that stalks the backdrop of scenes in this film – and why the film juxtaposes the terror of earth with the beauty of the cosmos, through shots of the atmosphere as America wins the space race.

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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We’re starting 2025 way down in the hole, with a look back on one of the undisputed great TV series of our time. Our guest today is a storyteller responsible for shows like Treme, Generation Kill, The Deuce, The Plot Against America and We Own This City, but best known of course for The Wire – a show that began at a crime scene, with blood splattered across granite, police lights painting the pavement red, white and blue. It was here that audiences first met Detective McNulty, played by Dominic West, chatting with a murder witness. A kid had been killed for trying to rob a dice game – a stunt he tried to pull often. Usually, the kid in question, named Snot Boogie, got away with just a beating. This time, not so lucky. “I gotta ask you,” McNulty asks the witness. “If Snot always stole the money, why’d you always let him play?” The witness sighs, and the camera cuts to Snot’s motionless body, gazing towards us from the floor. “Got to,” replies the witness. “This is America.”

That line was the first clue that The Wire wasn’t going to be like other television series. David wanted this police procedural, informed by his own experiences reporting on crime in the area as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun, to be more than another show about cops and criminals; it was to offer a microcosm of America itself. The Wire won no awards. Just 70,000 people tuned into the show’s final episode, capping five critically and commercially overlooked seasons in 2008. Its creator didn’t watch TV – David, in fact, pretty much hated the medium. And yet, The Wire has become recognised as one of the most important pieces of American pop culture of the millennium so far: a novelistic cross section of the Land of the Free, that bloomed from a tale about a phone-tapping team of lawmakers into an interrogation of media, education and everything in between.

The spoiler conversation you’re about to hear is a window into everything that is possible in the medium of television – and everything that’s perhaps wrong with it right now, too. David was really candid about his struggles to get new work off the ground and onto screens in 2025 despite the enormous influence of The Wire. You’ll hear how McNulty came to be, the real-life inspirations behind the show’s most iconic character Omar, how far western society has come in addressing the systemic problems exposed in The Wire (spoiler alert: not very) and much, much more. And you’ll also discover the lost season of The Wire that David devised, but that never made it to air.

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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Justin Kuritzkes is the very talented writer behind Challengers, the Luca Guadagnino love triangle topping all sorts of end-of-year lists right now. The film is a tennis drama that declared game-set-and-match with critics and audiences alike on release in April, becoming a pop culture sensation in ways usually reserved for franchise films. Steeped in the messy wants and desires of three complicated characters, it's the sort of film that doesn't often dominate discourse. But that didn't stop Challengers becoming a phenomenon whose influence altered fashion, music, memes and more in 2024.

Which for most writers would be enough achievement for one year thank you very much. But Justin’s 2024 didn’t end there. Queer – also directed by Guadagnino – is a William Burroughs adaptation that hit cinemas this month. The film stars Daniel Craig as William Lee – an American expatriate living in 1950s Mexico City who becomes obsessed with a younger man and goes on a quest into the jungle in search of unlocking drug-induced telepathic communication. Both films bear the hallmarks of a storyteller insistent upon bringing deeply nuanced explorations of flawed people searching for connection into multiplexes.

In the double-bill episode you’re about to hear, breaking down in spoiler-filled detail both acclaimed films, we discuss the overlaps between Challengers’ carnal chaos and Charli XCX’s Brat Summer, and what both say about this moment in the culture. We get into the tragic real-life death of Burroughs’ partner, killed by the famed author in an supposed accidental shooting, that lends uncomfortable context to the story of Queer (and that Justin threaded into the movie). And you’ll also hear his thoughts on whether both of these films could be a bellwether moment for movies. In a year that saw franchise after franchise struggle for critical applause and box office might, does the success of a movie like Challengers suggest that an appetite might be growing again for original stories? Now there’s an exciting thought to carry into 2025.

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, we’re heading in our proverbial Popemobile to Rome, with the BAFTA Award-winning writer of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Men Who Stare At Goats and more. Peter Straughan's latest film, Conclave, directed by Edward Berger, is essentially Succession at the Vatican – a masterful, muted thriller about the election of a new head of the Roman Catholic Church. It tells the story of Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, who's been tasked by the late Pope with overseeing the selection of his replacement. Surrounded by powerful religious leaders in the halls of the Vatican, he soon uncovers a trail of deep secrets that could shake the very foundation of the Roman Catholic Church.

There are more twists and turns in this film than the ruthless Cardinal Tedesco could shake a vape pen at – and in the spoiler conversation, we get to the bottom of each and every one of them, including the shocking revelation at Conclave’s conclusion – an ending that Peter says is both radical and at its core, deeply Christian.

Get ready to discover how the writer's own background as a lapsed Catholic helped guide his writing process. Discover whether or not Donald Trump and Joe Biden served as inspirations for certain members of this warring clergy. And find out what’s really happening as bombs explode outside the Vatican’s walls – a plot thread that we as an audience, sequestered with these cardinals, never quite see the full truth of.

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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Richard Linklater is a hit man, but not in the assassin sense of the word. No, the hits he trades in are of the movie variety – stylish cult classics that vary in genre and form, but always manage to ignite something powerful in viewers. It’s been that way for three and a half decades now: among his hits, dating back to 1990, are Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, Boyhood, School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly, Slacker, Waking Life, Everybody Wants Some, Fast Food Nation… the list goes on. No wonder the Texan is one of the most respected names in modern American cinema – a force both prolific and patient, as his multiple movies shot across numerous decades prove. 2014 coming-of-age drama Boyhood was filmed across twelve years, with Merrily We Roll Along – a Paul Mescal-starring Sondheim adaptation, to be shot across twenty years – among his current projects.

Earlier this year, he released Hit Man – a romantic comedy of sorts, with a hint of thriller thrown in for good measure, about a bashful college professor with a unique side hustle. Gary, played by the film’s co-writer Glen Powell, has a recurring gig with the New Orleans police force, pretending to be an contract killer. He wears a wire to meet with people seeking to order a hit on their spouses, their work colleagues, their parents and so on. It’s a gig that’s going smoothly for Gary, until he meets Madison, played by Adria Arjona – a woman trying to escape an abusive husband, who Gary begins to fall for. What follows is Linklater in full-blown crowd-pleasing mode.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, we discuss what it was about this true-ish story, adapted from a newspaper article by journalist Skip Hollandsworth, that spoke to Richard. We talk about the baseball injury that put him on a path to filmmaking (and how it might have led to the unstoppable pace with which he makes movies). And we break down every detail of Hit Man, one of the movies of 2024, in spoiler-filled detail.

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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Season’s greetings, Script Apart listeners. As you may have noticed, it’s the last week before Christmas – the year’s coming to an end, and so, we figured, let’s end 2024 strong. So all this week, on this podcast about the first draft secrets of great movies and TV shows – interviews with the writers behind some of the best movies of the last twelve months that we didn’t manage to cover upon release. And holy prince of House Atreides, what a way to begin today. 

Our guest today made one of the most pulse-racing crime thrillers of the century so far, in the form of 2015’s Sicario. He’s made one of the greatest movies about the power of language of all-time, in 2016’s Arrival. And in 2017 and 2021, he took on the impossible twice – crafting first a sequel to one of the greatest blockbusters ever, in the shape of Blade Runner 2049, and then a movie adaptation of a novel previously thought unfilmable: Frank Herbert’s Dune. 

Yes, the great Denis Villneueve is with us today, stopping by for a chat about how his gargantuan Dune: Part Two – starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendeya – helped define 2024. Not just in the way it dominated the box office, earning almost three quarters of a billion dollars (which by the way, is not bad for a hallucinatory epic full of spice-induced visual experimentation). No, it’s reflective of the year just passed because notions of fascism, faith, false messiahs… these have all been uncomfortable parts of the backdrop of 2024.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Al had thirty minutes to ask Denis his most probing questions about the script. Questions like: was there ever a moment in the making of Dune: Part Two when he contemplated keeping Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen – played by Austin Butler – alive to explore in further films? What does the ending of the film, which veers away from Frank Herbert’s source material, mean for the future of the franchise? And if Dune: Part Two is a film that warns about colonialism and facism, does he believe that cinema has the power to actually dismantle those structures, or is just about expressing a kinda howl of resistance?

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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Motherhood is a doggone nightmare in the new film from Marielle Heller. This week, the writer director of movies like The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood returns to cinemas with one of the more surreal-sounding offerings of the year – Nightbitch, a drama in which Amy Adams plays a parent by day and a dog by night. If you weren’t already familiar with the 2021 Rachel Yoder novel on which it’s based, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this film is a frantic comedy, or possibly the mad fever dream of Charlie Kelly from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia – a character with his fair share of hound-based ideas for movies. But no, Nightbitch is something else – an affecting, magical realist tale of a woman pushed over a feral brink by the physical and societal demands placed on women, that needs to be seen to be believed.

On today’s episode, Marielle joins Al Horner to break down in spoiler-filled detail this remarkable film. We get into why the realities of birth – the body horror of it all – are so under-acknowledged in pop culture. We talk about why, after the gentleness of films like A Beautiful Day In The Neighbourhood, Marielle fled in the opposite direction, towards this anarchic scream of a story. And you’ll also discover the truth behind some of the movie’s more ambiguous, unresolved questions: such as, are the women that Adams character befriends also secretly dogs?

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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Never meet your heroes. At least, not these ones – the dysfunctional megalomaniacs that murder innocents and seed division in Prime Video’s The Boys, a show as satirically sharp as it is gore-splattered and gross. Created by our guest today, Eric Kripke, the comic book adaptation debuted in 2019 and has since become one of the most captivatingly timely stories in our pop culture landscape, commenting not just on our current era of superhero saturation but on American society at large. Across four seasons, it’s become a funhouse reflection of the way DC and Marvel movies are content machines with often jingoistic messages at their core. It’s mirrored the nation’s split into two furiously opposed political camps: Homelanders versus Starlighters in the case of the show; MAGA versus liberals in real-life. And along the way, it’s done things never seen on TV before. Octopus beastiality. Super-powered sheep. A guy called "Herogasm" whose name kinda says it all. The list goes on.

All of which begs the question: with The Boys’ final season approaching and America currently reeling from another dramatic election, how will the tale of Billy Butcher, Hughie Campbell and co end? It’s a question Eric, previously best known for creating the long-running series Supernatural, has been wrestling with himself. In the wide-ranging conversation you’re about to hear, he’s honest about the difficulty of “landing the plane” when it comes to beloved TV dramas. And as fans of The Boys know all too well, planes don’t often land in this show, so much as they have a habit of exploding in the sky in a fury of laser vision. 

We talk about the psychology of superheroes – why they continue to appeal, what fantasy they offer audiences in a post-9/11 world. We talk about the story choices in season four, and how they came to be, such as Homelander’s rise to near-presidential power. And you’ll hear whether season five of this show that’s dovetailed through the years with real-life events in American politics, will respond to the fact that Donald Trump has just entered the Oval Office again.

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 second in our series of ScreenCraft Summit throwback interviews, running on the Script Apart feed in anticipation of December's summit – it's Mike Schur! The lauded creator of The Good Place made his first appearance on Script Apart in 2022 and, a few weeks later, spoke with Al again in front of hundreds of emerging writers to break down his wider writing process on shows like The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Saturday Night Live and Parks & Recreation.

This was a wonderful conversation to be a part of – Mike is as hilarious in person as you'd expect of such a magnificent comic resume, and his insights are remarkable. Strap in for some brilliant observations on the elasticity of time in great sitcoms, the importance of punching up rather than down when writing jokes and what it is that keeps him turning up in front of a blank page time and time again – his relationship with the craft of writing itself. Enjoy, and don't forget to sign up for this December's ScreenCraft Summit by visiting ScreenCraft.org today.

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.

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