Game emulation is having a big moment on the iPhone. Earlier this month, in a surprise move, Apple updated its app review guidelines to allow for retro game emulators on the App Store, a change that the company has resisted since the original iPhone launched in 2007.

Since Apple’s pivot, Delta, a game emulator that can play ROMs from the Nintendo Entertainment System to the Nintendo DS, has been hanging out at the top of the App Store’s charts. New regulation abroad and increased scrutiny from lawmakers in the U.S. have seemingly “encouraged” Apple to start changing how its platforms operate, and in the U.S. retro game emulators are the first to benefit.

But the success of Delta on the App Store is the canary in the coal mine of bigger changes coming to the company’s hardware. Where Apple once ruled over its most successful product with an iron fist, it now feels like the company has lost control of the iPhone. Apple’s reasons for making the iPhone work the way it does — as a closed, not open platform — are falling by the wayside. The question isn’t if the iPhone can open up more, it’s how open and computer-like it will be when the dust finally settles.

Brian Helgeland’s journey to write Man on Fire started with a video store clerk named Quentin Tarantino recommending a film. It would later involve contributions from Mexican gangs, Clint Eastwood, and Saddam Hussein. Talk about an unconventional love story.

Yes, a love story. A love story with an ass bomb. That’s how the Oscar-winning screenwriter of L.A. Confidential and Mystic River describes Tony Scott’s beloved film to Inverse.

“We got a note from Fox that said ‘Nothing happens in the first hour.’ I replied and said, ‘You’re right, except they fall in love with each other. Everything happens,” Helgeland says.

Two decades after Man on Fire’s April 2004 release, Inverse sat down with Helgeland to chat about making the film, but the director of A Knight’s Tale also discussed the plot for a sequel to his beloved medieval action comedy that Netflix recently passed on, and the biblical Game of Thrones spinoff he wrote that earned George R.R. Martin’s endorsement.