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

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

My guest, Brad Bird, has made some of the most phenomenal films of the last 10 years, Iron Giant, the Incredibles, Rattatouille.

But now he turned himself to something really hard, working with human beings.

His new film is Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol.

He's in New York.

I'm in Los Angeles.

First of all, thanks so much for coming back.

It's a pleasure.

And I want to have to say about this movie more than anything else is that so much of it plays like almost Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton physical comedy. I mean, that you take the absurdity

of those life-threatening stunts and get some extra tension out of them by making them funny.

When did you decide to do that?

Well, one of the things I loved about the Mission Impossible, you know, for want of a better word, franchise,

is that Tom was determined to have each film have the style of its director.

So, you know, Brian De Palma and John Wu and J.J. Abrams made three previous

Mission Impossible's, and they're all sort of distinctly different from each other, even though

they're all Mission Impossible films starring Tom Cruise. So, you know, it just enabled me to

feel like I had some elbow room and could, you know, do it the way I wanted to.

And both Tom and J.J. Abrams, you know, who were producers as well as Tom being the star, were incredibly supportive of, you know, they wanted me to do whatever my thing is, you know.

But that's a fascinating thing to bring to it because there's also something that I hate to use the word physical wit, but people often use that in action films that sort of make that kind of playfulness.

That doesn't happen a lot.

I'm sure if you studied them, you saw that.

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