From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear this show at KCRW.com.

As a filmmaker, director Brett Morgan, is attracted to real-life subjects with larger-than-life characters.

We can start with his film on the ropes, which dealt with the world of boxing, to a movie that took place inside the mind of Robert Evans.

The kid stays in the picture, and his new film is the biggest yet.

It's Chicago 10, a mixture of archival footage, recreation, and animation.

Brett, first of all, thanks for coming back. Thanks, Ellis. You do like taking real-life,

epic landscapes, don't you? Yeah, no, I like starting from there and then kind of making it my own.

And I think one of the things I'm really interested in is, well, in Bob's case, it was self mythology, but I'm really into approaching history as myth and sort of liberated from history of facts and dates and letters and whatnot.

And with Chicago 10, it was a kind of heavy assignment because this is one of the most written about and covered periods in American history.

The 20 books on the subject, films, documentaries, there was just a wealth of stuff.

So we kept saying, well, what can we contribute to this canon of work?

And ultimately, I said, you know, let's try to do something experiential. Let's, you know, the way Bob Evans film I used to describe was not so much film about Bob, but film that is Bob. And we sort of wanted that with Chicago except to be the yippie experience. And what you do with it, too, is you also stage it like drama. I mean, at one point, there's a great quote from Abby Hawley. He says, basically, we took this whole thing and made everybody characters in a play. And to me, that seemed to really be the capsule of what the film is.

That's absolutely right. I mean, that was the subtext that we were working off of is that this is all a piece of theater. And therefore, the film should be as sublime as the visceral experience that they were trying to create in Chicago.

And we just say this takes place during 1968. It's the trial of the aftermath of the Chicago Democratic Convention in 68.

But the protest in Chicago were conceived to be a piece of political theater on a massive scale,

probably one of the largest pieces ever staged for the cast of thousands.

The yippies from the point that they conceived of the protests knew that all they had to do

was show up in Chicago and daily would go berserk and bring out the National Guard

and the troops because they look different.

They daily saw them as, you know, referred to anyone who didn't look like him as a communist.

And I think Daly and Judge Hoffman felt it was their duty to responsibility to cut the head off the snake before they polluted the rest of the country.

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