Welcome to Significant Others.

I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in this month's bonus episode, we're joined by the Oscar-winning

screenwriter behind such films as Forest Gump, Dune, the Curious Case of Benjamin Button,

and the newly released Killers of the Flower Moon.

Eric Roth, thank you so much for joining us today.

I thought it would be interesting to talk to you because as a screenwriter, you occupy

an indispensable, yet relatively low profile position as far as the public is concerned

in the movie-making process.

But even more specifically, your screenplays are often adaptations of novels, which makes

you a significant other, so to speak, of not only the director and actor of the movie,

but also the author who wrote the original work.

And you've done this with a bunch of your screenplays, right?

I have.

It's a little bit of a misnomer, not because they are.

They certainly are, literally adapted, but some of the adaptations, I would say, were particularly

original, that Benjamin Button, for instance, was from just, not just, but Episcopus Gerald

had a spectacular idea of what happens to be eight backwards.

But the story he wrote, which was in Collier's Magazine in, like, 1918 or something, he

just did it for money and the story is not very good, to be quite honest.

I'm judging it.

It's just anybody who judges, not his best work, but so I had the either temerity or the

blessing of just starting from scratch and creating my own story.

...