From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

My guest, Robert Benton, has gone a long way from art director at Esquire Magazine to being one of the more fable screenwriting partnerships of all time to finally, of course, writing and directing all his own.

Now, this is a career that's included Bonnie and Clyde, Superman, all the way up to places in the heart and his newest film as a director is Feast of Love.

Bob, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you, Elvis. It's really good to be here.

We should start a little bit with Feast of Love, which is unusual for you because it's not a

screenplay that you wrote.

Correct. About five years ago, my friend Richard Rousseau, the novelist, said there's a book I love that you ought to read.

It would make a terrific movie.

And he told me about Feast of Love.

And so I read it and I thought it was terrific.

And I tried to get the rights and couldn't.

Ultimately, found out that Tom Rosenberg had the rights, who had done human stain.

And I called him and told him how much I

which I also directed. He loved the book as much as I loved the book, and he said, but he had

signed a screenwriter, and he had a director. So I thought, okay, that's just my bad luck. Then about

six weeks later, he called me up and said there was a scheduling problem with the director. He asked

me if I would be interested. I said yes. I have worked with other people's screenplays three times. Once with Tom Stoppard on Billy Bathgate. Once with Nick Meyer on Human Stain. Once with Alison Burnett on this picture, on Feast of Love. And I worked in collaboration with writers before, but never on another person's screenplay.

It's interesting to me, too, because these are all screenplays adapted by the writers from novels that they had not written.

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