David Levien and Brian Koppelman

The Treatment

KCRW

Arts

4.6 • 639 Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2010

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As screenwriters, you know David Levien and Brian Koppelman for Rounders and Oceans 13. Their second film as directors, Solitary Man, is a drama about a different kind of a gamble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.
0:14.0	Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.
0:18.8	If you wonder how writing, directing teams work, my guest today, David Levine and Brian Culpman,
0:23.0	can help us solve that question.
0:24.8	You know the screenplays, of course,
0:26.0	rounders and runaway jury.
0:27.9	As directors, they've done knock around guys
0:29.2	in their new film, which Brian wrote by himself,
0:31.6	is Solitary Man.
0:33.3	Let me ask you how you guys decide
0:35.3	who does what on the set,
0:36.5	who directs actors, or if there's one of you guys who talks actors and somebody else who deals with the camera, how does that work?
0:42.1	We don't actually split up the responsibilities. We sort of share in all the responsibilities. We both talk to camera. We're both intimately involved in setting up the shots, talking about lighting. We'll both go up to the actors and talk to them.
0:55.7	We'll try to only give them one comment between any given take. I think we've heard about other
1:01.4	teams that completely divide. That's just not the way we do it. Because most of the other teams do
1:06.1	completely divide. I mean, the Cohen brothers have been here.. They talked about that. The Hughes brothers the same, but that doesn't work with that way for you guys? Yeah, we've never, even in the writing, we don't split up responsibility. It's not like one guy does dialogue and the other guy does description or action, though anytime Dave wants to take all of that on, I'm willing to let him. I feel the same way, which is why Brian wrote solitary man on his own.
1:29.2	Because he did write it on his own. I just wondered what was it like to work on a script that he
1:33.1	had written on his own compared to some of you guys had done as a team. Well, you know,
1:37.3	we've been best friends for going on close to 30 years now. So growing up, we watched all the same
1:44.0	movies, read the same books,
1:46.0	listening to the same music, passed back and forth, the stuff that we were really into.
1:50.8	We sort of saw it the same way. Sometimes we would have spirited debates about what we didn't
	...

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