Script Apart with Al Horner

Pandora beckons once more, guys. Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa are back on the show today, spilling secrets from their screenplay for the recent third film in the Avatar franchise, Fire & Ash. The husband-wife duo came on the show around the release of Avatar: The Way of Water a couple of years back, and it’s always a good time chatting with them – I love the unapologetic earnestness of their storytelling and the habit they have of taking huge, billion dollar IP and using them as vehicles for stories about the wonder of nature and what we risk by not showing our environment the appropriate care.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes. Jurassic World. These are huge-scale blockbuster spectacles that, in an era of franchise films drenched in irony and a certain cynicism, make these very sincere pleas to appreciate animals. To revere and protect nature. Because to lose it or underestimate it leads to chaos and collapse. Fire & Ash is another film to bear that signature of theirs – and it’s an epic of mythic proportions. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, we break down the intricacies of this latest collaboration with director James Cameron.

They tell me about the moment in which a character very viscerally contemplates suicide, in a scene I was really surprised to see in a Disney tentpole movie. They tell me about the conversations that led to the heartbreaking moment in which Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully agonises over whether to do the unthinkable to save his Na’vi tribe. And we also get into the ending of the movie and what exactly is happening as series antagonist Colonel Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang, throws himself to his apparent demise.

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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Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage.

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Today on the show, our short run of episodes about Oscar 2026 awards contenders continues with a story about grief and growth amid the final flickers of the old West. Train Dreams – adapted from a novella by Dennis Johnson by my guests today, Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley – takes viewers back to Idaho, 1917. The Spokane International Railroad is under construction and quiet tree logger Robert Granier, played by Joel Edgerton, is one of the labourers paving the way for it. Midway through his life, he experiences an unthinkable tragedy and finds himself plagued by the question: was it karma? Perhaps for his inaction during the brutal, racist murder of a colleague. Or maybe even for the environmental sins of felling so many trees, so much life. The planet somehow evening the score.

If you’ve seen the film, I doubt you’ll be surprised in the slightest by its four nominations at this year’s Academy Awards, for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best Original Song. Train Dreams is a heart-wrenchingly elegy to another time, to another world and to the people we lose in life, who are sometimes ripped from us with sudden cruelty. Clint and Greg know all about the latter. As you’ll hear in this episode, Clint, who directed the movie as well as co-writing it with Greg, lost both his parents in quick succession before filming. And in fact experienced what he’s called “visitations” from them after their deaths, in his dreams like Robert does in Train Dreams.

Support for this episode comes from Final Draft's Big Break screenwriting contest.

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

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

Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s officially that time of year again: Oscar season! We’re now just a few weeks away from the 98th Academy Awards and to celebrate, over the coming days and weeks we’ll be posting conversations about movies in the mix for all sorts of major awards at this year’s ceremony (not just the writing categories). We have of course ticked off a few of the front runners already on the show in recent months - scroll back in your podcast feed to hear our chats with Ryan Coogler about Sinners and Chloe Zhao about Hamnet. But there’s always room for more, right?

Which brings us to Weapons – writer-director Zach Cregger’s astonishing Hansel and Gretel-esque horror fairy tale, structured like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. The film hit cinemas last summer and quickly became a surprise box office smash, earning a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Amy Madigan along the way.

It tells the tale of a town in Pennsylvania who wake up one morning to find their children missing. Ring camera footage reveals that at precisely 2:17am, an entire class of kids – bar one child – got up and ran from their homes, running through the night towards an unknown destination, with their arms spread wide. The film grapples with the aftermath of that mysterious event, zooming in one-by-one on members of this community as they wadde through the trauma, the confusion, the suspicion, the guilt. Julia Garner plays the alcoholic teacher of the class that disappeared. Cary Christopher plays Alex Lilly, the sole kid remaining. And Josh Brolin is in the mix too, as a dad besieged by strange dreams – including one of a giant assault rifle in the sky that doubles up as an alarm clock, in an image that set the internet ablaze with debate.

What does it all mean? In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, Zach responds to the many different interpretations of the film among film fans – including the suggestion that it’s a response to the ongoing epidemic of school shootings in America. He tells me what he’s come to understand he was working through while writing the script – and we dig into details about his original draft for the film, titled Dancing In The Head, which began with 27 suicides and at one point had an entire segment dedicated to the inner-life of the film’s terrifying antagonist, Aunt Gladys.

Support for this episode comes from Stowe Story Labs.

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

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

Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Plague is writer-director Charlie Pollinger’s unflinching portrait of childhood bullying in which the titular contagion is a skin rash that may or may not be real. Set in 2003, at an all-boys summer camp, it follows Ben – played by Everett Blunck – as he enters a group with a clear social hierarchy. At the top is Jake, a smirking bully played by Kayo Martin. Very much at the bottom is an eczema-ridden outcast named Eli, played by Kenny Rasmussen. When Ben shows kindness towards Eli, he finds his footing in the group beginning to shift. What happens next makes for uncomfortable but vital cinema.

On today’s episode of Script Apart, Charlie joins me to describe how this story began in his childhood bedroom during the Covid-19 pandemic, flipping through his own childhood diaries. We get into the cruelty that kids are capable of and the realness and relatability with which he translated that cruelty to the page. We also break down every key scene and character in spoilerific detail because that’s what we do here on Script Apart – so be sure to watch the movie first beffore diving in.

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

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

Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Rental Family, the new Tokyo-set drama starring Brendan Fraser, writer-director Hikari poses the question: “Can fantasies and fictions ever fill the gaps left in our lives by the people we miss; the things that we long for?” It’s a question the filmmaker – real name Mitsuyo Miyazaki – sets up and then resists answering in any declarative way. Instead, the film – about a washed-up American actor named Phillip who begins playing roles in the lives of strangers – treads around the topic with curiosity and empathy. Loneliness and loss, this drama seems to say, are a part of life, and sometimes we as a species go to unusual lengths in search of a balm for that pain. That’s not necessarily healthy. It’s not necessarily unhealthy either. It’s just something that we do. And it leads to phenomena like “rental families” – a concept that really does exist in Japan, in which actors perform the role of a loved one in exchange for a fee.

In today's spoiler conversation, Hikari – a former dancer and rap photographer, best known in film and TV for her work on the Netflix series Beef – joins Al to discuss what the growth of rental families in her home country of Japan says about where we’re at as a society. The filmmaker breaks down how she translated the universal loneliness epidemic that the rental family industry is testament to, into this beautifully understated tale.

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

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

Get coverage on your screenplay by visiting ScriptApart.com/coverage.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.