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

Welcome to the Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. My guest, writer-director James Ponsult, has gone from shorts to features,

documentaries to fiction, work with people from Nick Nolte, Octavia Spencer, Mary Elizabeth

Winstead, Aaron Paul, and in his new film, The Adaptation of Spectacular, Now he asked

to that list, Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley, and Andre Royo. Thanks so much for being here, James.

Oh, thank you so much for being here, James.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. Let's start with Spectacular Now, though. It's an adaptation,

and it's not your screenplay, but it's a movie that kind of feels very close to, in a lot of ways, to things you've done in the past. Tell the audience what the film's about.

The Spectacular Now is a teenage love story that's in many ways for adults.

It's an adaptation of Tim Tharp's novel, Scott Neustadt and Mike Weber, who had written 500 Days of Summer, did the adaptation.

And I think all of our fascination with the story was that, you know, it reminded us of a lot of films that we had grown up with,

you know, in the 80s, I guess, from Cameron Crow and John Hughes movies.

And then for myself, it reminded me of sort of last picture show and splendor in the grass

and bits of other films that I love, like Over the Edge and the Outsiders.

But there were films that took the emotional inner lives of teenagers seriously.

It's funny because a lot of these things you're mentioning as relate to you are films that are

also adaptations. Yeah. I mean, Tim Tharp's book, it's interesting, it has a first person

narrator and an internal monologue of this kid that's kind of Caulfield-esque, and he has a real soul.

And I think a lot of times films about teenagers, they seem to be either cynical or they're

about kids who can, you know, turn into werewolves. And they don't just sort of dignify what it

is to be 16 and confused. And Tim's book certainly does.

But all these, again, these things you're talking

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