Script Apart with Al Horner

• A Real Pain with Jesse Eisenberg

  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] 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

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• Before Sunrise with Kim Krizan

  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] 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

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• Storytelling Tips from The Shining with Coco’s Lee Unkrich (Patreon Preview)

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

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• Sideways with Alexander Payne

  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] 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

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• The Apprentice with Ali Abbasi

  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] 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

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