From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

Now, you're probably familiar with my guest, Clark Gregg, through, well, seeing

him in shows such as The New Adventures of Old Christine or this summer as Agent Colson and Iron Man,

but he's also worked extensively with Aaron Sorkin and with David Mamet. You should get to know him

as a director. He chose a most unconventional way to make his debut as a director, an adaptation

of the novel, Cho Clark, thanks so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me.

You read the book and you think, I'm not sure there's a movie in this, but you found one.

I've since learned that it was an implausible adaptation, but I was protected by my naivete. I think when I read the book, I felt that Chuck Pollanick creates characters, kind of the likes of which I don't see anywhere else. They're very satirical. They're very kind of types in a world that he's trying to expose that I don't see other places. And yet at the same time, they're grounded in something very human. And I think that's what drew me to it. And I saw so much kind of funny, visual stuff in the world of the book that I thought, oh, this is fantastic. I'm just going to rip this thing off and just do a cut and paste job, call it an adaptation, and there

we go. And it turned out to be a little trickier than that.

You actually found a way to make a kind of, well, redemptive in its way just because you make

it more about a need for affection than the, I mean, it's not nearly as angry at the blog.

I guess like any interesting writer, everybody sees something a little bit different in Chuck's work and in probably most novels.

But I saw that there.

I felt very clearly that in within this kind of really unflinching dark nealistic world that

the chuck creates that there also is so much humor and so much pathos and that you know as

someone who kind of comes to writing or directing from acting i i'm always hooked into how does

this character transform or try to anyway.

And I felt like it was all there.

I felt like there was a real compassion toward this character.

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