Dustin Lance Black: ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’

The Treatment

KCRW

Arts

4.6 • 639 Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on The Treatment, Elvis welcomes back Academy Award winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. Black’s newest project is as executive producer and showrunner of the FX limited series “Under the Banner of Heaven,” streaming on Hulu. The series is adapted from Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name. Black won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for “Milk” in 2009. Black, a former member of the Mormon church, tells The Treatment about his own complicated relationship to the church and why he was drawn to the story. He says while he originally tried to adapt the book into a screenplay, the story was too complex to be condensed into two hours. And he says the series is a warning for people who don’t question documents written hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.
0:14.6	Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. The last time my guest, Academy Award winner Dustin Lance Black was here.
0:21.8	He was writing under the banner of heaven as a screenplay.
0:26.2	It has now seen the light of a day on television instead.
0:29.7	We're much better off of this, this terrific adaptation of John Crackauer's 2003 book.
0:34.6	First of all, Lance, I can't tell you how happy I am to have you back. Thank you for
0:38.4	coming back and do the show again. It's my pleasure. Are you kidding me? It's been too long.
0:43.8	It's been way too long, but I guess I find myself thinking, interestingly, instead of watching this,
0:48.0	and rereading the book, just how this thing that you do, that's about the way people toggle from one life to another,
0:56.9	and be it in this, or the way you worked certainly in milk, where you get to see sort of those
1:02.4	people figuring out their own real lives and trying to make themselves part of an institution.
1:07.8	And then watching the character play by Andrew Garfield here, try to never get these two worlds of being in his faith, but also, as they used to say in
1:16.9	the Old Testament, in it, but not of it in the real world, in solving this murder.
1:22.0	And I wonder if that's one of the things about this material that appealed to you.
1:24.7	There is about people trying to sort of toggle back and forth between their personal lives
1:28.9	and what the world is demanding of them.
1:31.0	Yes, I mean, I think that and believe that
1:34.5	what is personal often, if not always,
1:39.6	in some form, becomes political, becomes legal.
1:43.3	The political and legal realms are based on personal
1:47.6	struggle and trying to figure out what rules might make life more livable, hopefully.
1:54.1	And so I often write things about people who are trapped between their personal life
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KCRW, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of KCRW and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.