From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

You can also hear this show at KCRW.com.

Well, they said it couldn't be done.

They said Push by Sapphire couldn't be turned into a movie.

If you read Push, you had to ask yourself, wow, how do they do this?

Sitting across from me is the Oscar-nominated screenwriter, adapter of Push, which is now known as precious based on Push by Sapphire.

Jeffrey Fletcher.

Jeff, first of all, thanks so much for being here.

My pleasure, Elvis. It's an enormous undertaking because so much of the book is about chaos

and about her coming into her own over, basically obviously, it's a color purple in a lot of ways.

But with each chapter, she becomes more and more articulate, precious, and figures out who she is.

You don't have that kind of freedom to do that kind of thing at the very beginning of a movie.

So what was the first thing you thought about when you looked after you read the book?

What did you ask yourself about how best to serve the material?

Well, one of the questions early on was whether to have voiceover, I felt it was the right

thing to do.

And then the team had asked, well, is it going to be her voice or this sort of omniscient narrator?

And I thought, oh, no, this book is so much about her gaining her voice.

Let's take it from her point of view.

And I'll tell you, the book was tough stuff, not only because we've got it from the perspective of a semi-literate character, but the content is rough.

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