From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's always good to have old friends to the show.

There's no better friend to the show, or to me than our old friend Edward Norton,

who is back as writer-director with his adaptation of Jonathan Leitham's Motherless Brooklyn.

So first of all, it's so good to have you back here.

Thank you.

It's fun.

And it's so interesting that you change the period of the book because if you take away a lot of the slang that's contemporaneous 1999 from the mother's Brooklyn,

it feels like a period piece, doesn't it?

It does, yeah.

And, you know, Jonathan will tell you how much he loves Chandler and, you know, his Marlowe

detective and the many, and the films of that era.

There's no question his novel is a postmodern homage to that whole style and convention.

And I actually think, despite the references to Prince and his music and this and that,

there's a vernacular in the book that has a somewhat 50s feeling to it.

The fact that the other guys that this Touretic operative in a detective agency came up with

in an orphanage call him freak show, you know, that doesn't feel to me like the 90s.

It didn't feel to me like the 90s.

It felt to me like something a little more hard-boiled and a little less sensitive. And there's a lot about the book with Minna, the private

eye, the world of Brooklyn. It feels a little bit like a time capsule. And I think that film

is a more literal experience than reading a book.

In a book, the mind is creating images and interpretations of the words.

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