From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the Treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.

My guest, writer and director Chris White's, is a writer and director who directs films that he doesn't always write.

So the more notable ones have been New Moon, American Pie, the Golden Cup is, and this newest film, which is actually a very personal film, happens to be one he did not write either.

A Better Life First of all, Chris, thanks for coming back.

Thank you for having it. Let's not forget about a boy, the film that everyone always

mentions whenever they interview me, which to me says, why haven't you done a good film

since About a Boy, usually when they say that? I thought I tried another tack, because I'm fascinated

by that that you have directed, because I think most people do think of you, because about a boy and down earth they think of you as a writer-director, but most of the films you've directed have not been from your own scripts.

Yeah, that's right.

I think it's because I'm lazy, really.

And also a lot of the stuff that my brother and I worked on and also that I've worked on have been adaptations.

And I think it's because I have a difficult time believing in characters that I've made up in my head. Is that true? Yeah, I think

that I find a pre-existing narrative much easier to work with because there's already a kind of a

block of marble there to chip away at. Whereas, you know, my brother is very brave and he makes up characters from

whole cloth or from his imagination. And you should say your brother is Paul White. Yeah, my brother is

Paul White's. It's funny because so often, I think you and I even talked about this,

the idea of adapting something or taking an adaptation, you're dealing with something that you have an enormous emotional attachment to

that belongs to you in the way that a movie really never can,

and you have to get past that to find the movie in that material.

Yeah, it can be difficult, especially in the case of something like Golden Compass,

where I was in love with that book,

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