From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

It's The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

As a director, John Fabro, has taken films that are about transition, about basically

boy men moving into being men. If you look at his first film as writer, swingers, to his

film as writer, director made, and certainly Zathura, he's done that as well. And in his new

film, Iron Man, he gets into that same kind of category. John, welcome to the show. Thank you.

But I would say the last three moves you made as a director between Elfs, The Thorra, and Iron Man all fall pretty squarely

into that kind of mythology, don't that? Yeah. I think when you're making a movie, you got to

fall back on the old, you know, the whole Joseph Campbell hero's journey. I think you need a

roadmap. And why not pick the best roadmap that there is.

It works for the Bible.

It works for, you know, Homer's poems.

It works for great films.

And, you know, and so I know enough to know what to use as my guiding force through it.

And you have to constantly look back and see if you're telling a story in the proper structure in the proper way.

And once you give it that spine, you could add as much detail or you could play with the

dialogue, the humor, special effects. All those things are just adornments to the basic

structure of story. Well, if you look at Iron Man, Stan Lee's original conception, it's both

Frankenstein and the man in the Iron Mask.

It's two of those kinds of myths, isn't it?

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