From KCRW, Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. My guest, Daniel Schechter, made an interesting

little movie a couple years ago about kind of a family that forms around a crisis called supporting characters, two editors.

Remind me actually a lot of the Albert Brooks film, Modern Romance.

We shamelessly stole a lot of that, yeah.

As long as you're shameless about it, his new film, which isn't shamelessly stolen, it's adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel called The Switch, It's Life of Crime.

First of all, Dan, thanks much for being here. Thank you very much for having me. And how did you end up

connecting to the Switch, which happens to be one of my favorite books, and Elmore was a friend of

mine? Ooh, that makes me happy to hear. If you went to my home, you would see two full bookshelves, all of Elmore Leonard's stuff. I'm a huge fan. I've read probably almost all of his

books many more than once or twice, but the switch just jumped out to me. I thought I could do it

and I can do it well. I don't think they'd all make great movies, even the ones I like a lot as books,

but this one was lean and mean and had good action in seven beautiful parts, and it just felt like a film I could see in my mind

as I was reading it.

And one of the great things about it is you learned the lesson that Scott Frank and

Graham Yos learned, which is you take dialogue from the books because a lot of the dialogue

in the book plays so well anyway.

Yeah, Tim Robbins and I, there's a picture of us on set somewhere where he has the book open and I have my laptop open and we're just cribbing these great lines and it was like legal plagiarism. That's what we joked about on set. But I agree with what you said and I think the adaptations that I didn't love as much from Leonard were the ones that just veered more off of what he had originally.

He's pretty enormously talented, obviously.

And even changing it from 1978 when our movie takes place to present day, which was an option,

it just felt like that would have thrown the whole movie off, and it wasn't something I ever even considered.

And there's a line to the characters, Ordel Robbie, who we see later, or earlier, I guess, in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown and Lewis Garrow.

At one point they described as guys who when they talk, you can't tell if they're joking or not.

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