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

Welcome to The Treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com.

My guest, the upstart director Sam Mendez,

ruined American film when he won an Oscar for directing his debut, American Beauty.

Since then, he's done a few other films, including Road to Perdition,

Jarhead, which happened to like quite a bit, and I think he's going to have more political resonance now,

revolutionary wrote, and his newest film is, of course, the newest James Bond, the 23rd Skyfall.

Sam, thanks much for being here.

Great pleasure, Elvis.

You know, one of the things I want to talk to you about, and so many things you've done,

you take a look at the basically heroism.

You've been asking questions about it from the outset, I mean, and almost everything that you've done. And I just wonder if that came to you at a really young age,

just sort of took a look at iconic figures and asked questions about them,

because you're asking questions about the nature of a protagonist

and everything that you do.

Well, I think that a lot of it stems from where I started in the theatre a little bit.

You know, if you train on Shakespeare and

classical theatre, you know, you're talking in terms of myth and mythic stories from, you know,

when you grow up. When you do discover how much audiences love stories about mythic characters

and stories told on a mythic scale,

then I think it does suffuse your work in some way.

When I was at university, I remember having a kind of Damasican moment.

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