Script Apart with Al Horner

Sofia Coppola. Is anymore introduction really necessary? As writer-directors go, her influence (and place in one of American cinema's greatest dynasties) can't be overstated. The filmmaker is one of the best-known and most-loved working today, renowned for the lilting feel and femininity of films like Lost In Translation, The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, On The Rocks and most recently, Priscilla.In 2022, Al spoke to Sofia about her writing process, for the ScreenCraft Summit – a weekend of interviews with great storytellers, designed to inspire emerging writers. With the latest Summit just weeks away, featuring a host of amazing guests, we thought it'd be a great time to post Al and Sofia's conversation from that event – a freewheeling chat about hotels, the intimacy with which we get to know her characters, her love of using photo books as mood boards for her movies – and why she still experiences self-doubt, even today.Sign up for this December's ScreenCraft Summit by clicking here.Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected] for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft, FILMD and WeScreenplay.To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.Support the show

Here's a question: is the “spirit of the Blitz” that’s become one of the pillars of British self-identity actually a myth? The idea of ordinary people coming together in a moment of collective resilience during WWII is invoked regularly in UK politics and beyond. There might be more to that story than meets the eye, though, according to Blitz – the astonishing new historical drama from revered British artist Steve McQueen. The film forefronts the experiences of people of colour and other marginalised communities during the notorious London bombings – people who were excluded from that togetherness, often with violent force. Instead of the “stiff upper lip” that Britain has since proudly woven into its self image, Blitz teases a more feral reality, full of community, yes, but also opportunistic criminals robbing the dead and sex on the tube tracks of Stepney Green underground station. In this spoiler conversation, Steve breaks down what’s fact and what’s fiction when it comes to this mythologised part of British history – and how he turned it into a cinematic experience unlike any other in modern memory. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected] 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

On today’s episode – a crime thriller? A musical? A coming-out drama? Emilia Pérez, the new film from famed French auteur Jacques Audiard, is all of the above and somehow none of these things at all. It really is hard to understate the disorientating excess and madness of this somewhat opinion-splitting new Netflix awards contender, which is tipped for Oscar glory after picking up the jury prize at Cannes earlier this year. Jacques is, of course, the writer-director of works like A Prophet, Rust and Bone, See How They Fall, The Beat That My Heart Skipped and The Sisters Brothers, a masterful western from 2018. But Emilia Pérez is like none of those films. It’s a film that sees Jacques – who, at seventy-two years young, could be making victory-lap movies at this stage in his career – swinging for the fences. The movie follows Rita, a criminal defence lawyer played by Zoe Saldaña, who is kidnapped and brought before someone terrifying – Manitas Del Monte, one of Mexico’s most feared cartel bosses, played by Karla Sofía Gascón. Manitas has something to ask of Rita. This crime lord – responsible for such brutal bloodshed, in a country blighted by thousands of cartel-related missing persons – wishes to fake their death and transition gender. And to do so, they need Rita’s help. Reborn as Emilia Perez, this character embarks on a new life that she finds, over the course of the movie, had to untangle from what came before.Al caught up with Jacques a few days after the film’s release on Netflix to break down the script, with a little help from his translator, Nicholas Elliott. Get ready to learn about the version of Emilia Pérez in which the character of Rita was a man, and in which a romance blossomed between the lawyer and the eponymous former crime lord. You’ll hear about why Jacques is so drawn to characters attempting to reinvent themselves in his work, and there’s also a breakdown of the story’s dramatic climax – an ending that asks complicated questions of the audience, questions with no easy answers. Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected] 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

On Election Day in America, with the nation at the polls, Al spoke with a man uniquely placed to comment on the fractures underpinning the battle for the nation. Chuck Palahniuk, you see, is the author of 21 novels, but probably best known for his first - 1996’s Fight Club, later adapted by David Fincher into one of the defining films of its era. Since then, the story has had this unexpected cultural half life, going on to become an unlikely part of the rhetoric of modern politics. The term "snowflake," popular with young men within the right-wing MAGA movement, is derived from Chuck's novel. But the connections don’t end there between Chuck’s work and an America ablaze with male rage, as cultural commentators frequently put it. Across his career since that culture-shifting story, the author’s work has continued to contemplate the "real" America – not what the country wants to be, but the sometimes uncomfortable reality of what it could become. In books like his 2018 novel Adjustment Day – about a version of America splintered off into different enclaves sorted by political ideology – hints lie at perhaps how we got here. His latest novel, Shock Induction, released earlier this year, feels just as loaded with insights about our time.On this today's show – a conversation to mark the 20th anniversary of Fincher’s Fight Club, with the man from whose imagination Tyler Durden first sprung. Chuck didn't write the movie adaptation of Fight Club – that honour fell to screenwriter Jim Uhls. Instead, Chuck was able to witness from afar the oddity of this story he’d written – about a white-collared insomniac who forms an underground bare knuckle fighting ring with an enigmatic soap salesman – becoming itself commodified and turned into merchandise, despite its warnings against consumerism. He got to witness the film intersect in a strange way with 9/11 and an immediate shift in the culture afterwards, away from subversion. And he was left with the question, what will Chuck Palahniuk do next? The answer was a bibliography full of more grime, dirt, depravity and yes, mayhem.This show is typically an interview series reserved for screenwriters, but when Al was reading Chuck's brilliant latest novel, Shock Induction, released earlier this year, he was overrun with questions for the Portland-based author. Questions like: what is it that's so necessary about the grotesquery of his stories, in an increasingly sanitised culture of storytelling? Where exactly did the anti-corporatism of his work come from? How did he devise that twist in Fight Club that continues to reverberate to this day? And of course, what's the latest on rumours of a Fight Club rock opera that he was once said to be devising with Fincher? Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected] for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft, FILMD and WeScreenplay.To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.Support the show