From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also do this show at KCRW.com.

My guest, Mark Romantic's best known work as a director,

if music videos such as Nine-Each Nails Closer and Johnny Cash's Hurt,

deal with loneliness, and so did his feature film directorial debut,

one-hour photo, and to some extent, so does his new film as director,

the adaptation of Never Let Me Go.

Mark, first of all, thanks so much for coming back.

Hi, Elvis.

Always nice to chat with you.

And you too.

And before we get going and I ask you to explain, never let me go, there is a bent towards dealing with loneliness in some of your best known work.

Where does that come from?

Hmm.

I was kind of a lonely kid, actually, if we're jumping right into the psychotherapy.

But, you know, I kind of felt like an outsider kid kind of on my own most of the time in my own head. And then I really responded to a sort of subgenre of cinema that was happening back in the 70s that later got labeled the cinema of

loneliness. There was a book written about it that I used to, was pretty well dog-eared by me.

But it was films like, you know, the taxi driver and the conversation and the tenant and the

parallax view. There was a lot of films about lonely outsiders in their paranoia and stuff.

And it seemed like it just struck me and I kind of dug it and thought it was, I like those movies, I guess.

You probably talk about never let me go.

I can ask you to explain that for the audience, tell them what's about.

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