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

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell.

I first saw my guest, John Slattery, on stage and betrayal was right around the cover of the

old American Airlines Theater.

And that was such a great production.

And since then, we've, of course, come to know him as Roger Sterling on Mad Men, but his first

feature film as director is an adaptation of Pete Dexter's first novel, a terrific book that

happens to be one of Dennis Lehane's favorite books.

Kidding.

Yeah, God's Pocket.

Absolutely.

First of John, thanks so much for being here.

Glad to be here, Elvis, thanks.

You have a take on arrogance that it's almost kind of like you were influenced by Bob Mitchum or something.

It's a really interesting sort of thing where you sort of cool it out, but you sort of show what we should think of the arrogance at the same time.

That's funny. I'll take that Mitchum reference. That's the movie I wanted God's Pocket to

look like was Friends of Eddie Coyle. Absolutely. Yeah, sure. Arrogance is funny. I mean,

there's nothing funnier than a confident fool to me.

That's sort of the humor of retribution because the audience wants him to get it

and he thinks he doesn't deserve it and then he gets it.

And there's this sort of combo, satisfaction and payoff to the joke.

I think that's a lot of the humor in the movie in God's pocket is that someone acts like an

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