From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can hear the show at KCRW.com.

You probably know my guest, Jason Schwartzman, certainly for movies such as Rushmore this summer.

He had funny people.

It's a pretty great fall for him.

He's got the great new series, Bored to Death, on HBO, and the new Wes Anderson movie, his first anime, filmed a fantastic Mr. Fox.

Jason, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

This is very exciting.

It is for me, too. One of the things I've always

wanted to ask you is that you play a lot of characters who are incredibly verbal and such a

narcissists and so in love with the sounds of their own voices. It's a real interesting sort of

skill you have. And obviously, from watching a lot of that dialogue is improvised, you can sort of

see the characters kind of just taken with their own kind of self-regard or their need to be the center of attention. And I wonder where

these performances come from for you. We can start with Jonathan Ames and board to death.

Yeah. Really, it's Jonathan Ames, the writer, who my character in the show is also Jonathan

Ames. Really, I'm just saying these new lines that Jonathan Ames has written for me.

And I think that's why he was crucial to do his own adaptation and to be, you know,

to turn this short story into a TV show.

A lot of it, in the short story at least, there's not as much dialogue.

A lot of it's very internal.

So he was so great at adapting it and turning it

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