From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment, which can also hear at KCRW.com.

My guest, Tony Gilroy, as a writer, has a gift for putting his protagonist and the audience in situations where nobody knows where they are.

If we go from the Bourne movies to his directorial debut, Michael Clayton, to his new film, duplicity, it's always the circumstance where people are figuring out who they are and reacting, and we're reacting along with them.

First of all, Tony, thanks for coming back.

Pleasure to be back.

And it really is about that thing with a twist.

We look at Dolores Claiborne.

Almost everything you've done as a writer, even cutting edge, we don't know where we stand.

And the characters don't know where they stand either.

I don't sit out to work with that as a conscious intention.

In this movie, I did. In this movie, for duplicity I did. It's not something

I'm navigating towards all the time, but I'm so, I'm so afraid of boring you. I'm so want to

hang on to your attention. I'm so craven about needing your attention that I'll do anything

to keep you watching. And one of the best ways to keep people interested

is to move the ground underneath them.

It's almost in a weird way, hitchcockian,

in that sense where the protagonists almost never knew where they were,

and they were asking questions at the same time we were as an audience.

But that's life is, you don't know what's going to happen next.

That's what life is.

That's what great acting is

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