From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell in New York. It's always good to have my old friend Oscar nominated by a director of D. Rees, whose new film is an adaptation of Joan Ditting is the last thing you want.

First of all, good to have you back here. Yeah, it's good to be back. And I guess when I saw it that you were doing this, I thought that it dovetailed neatly and there's so much of what you do, which is that all your films have been about emotional

violence, intimate violence, that ends up spiraling outside of the house.

And this was kind of the perfect sort of intersection of those two things, isn't it?

It is, yeah.

And it's like someone who isn't quite, you know, addressing that kind of like feeling of like

abandonment or that feeling of trauma and has kind of like feeling of like abandonment or that

feeling of trauma and has kind of like, she's kind of scabbed over. And so you're kind of

mean this like scabbled over person that doesn't even remember like why she soar.

And yeah, literally in real sense, it could be your protagonist from pariah 15 years later.

Okay, first of all, before we get any further with this, you should

tell people what this is about in case they haven't read the book. Yeah, yeah. So the protagonist

is called Elena McMahon, and it's about this kind of DC journalist, kind of hardened, you know,

interested in Central America reporter. And she is about her... I don't know, you say it takes

place in the early 80s. So it takes place in the 80s. So it's like the Iran-Contra scandal is like the wallpaper of kind of like the moment. And so it's about her, you know, kind of dealing with her father's issues. And it's about her investigating this case. And like she thinks, you know, it's like she enters into it for like the wrong reasons, like, which is to kind of like vind vindicate him and then she kind of stays in it for selfish reasons and it's about how she kind of repeats like

the same cycle of like neglect that her father you know kind of committed with her and you know we see

it happening with her own daughter as well exactly yeah so like you know like in like an early

scene like you know dick mcmann who's her dad played by willam defoe asked, you know, Dick McMahon, who's her dad, played by William Defoe, asked about, you know, like, where's your daughter? You got her, like, locked up somewhere. And she's like, no,

she's in boarding school. So it's like this kind of like justified, formalized abandonment in a way.

And so we kind of see Elena wrestling with that. And like, I think in the whole film. And if this was the protagonist, if this was

Alike 15 years later, I'd say Alike had the better dad, you know, so she did, but she might not

...