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

I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's the Treatment. About a year ago, writer-director, Ryan Cougler's first film, Sinners, was released. Coogler's first film, Sinners, was released.

Coogler's first original project since his debut, Sinners has gone on to become the highest grossing original film in 15 years,

and picked up 16 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and his first ever best director nomination. He came by here when

sinners had just been released to talk about it. Here's that conversation in a shorter form.

The thing that occurs to me watching all the stuff to get ready for this is that every

movie you made is about somebody trying to go home. Wow. That's very interesting. Even going

back to Fruitvale, he's trying to get home.

Yeah, no, totally.

Totally.

And I wonder where that comes from for you as this kind of dramatic motor.

I don't know.

Yeah, I haven't thought about that extensively.

I've always been very aware that I'm a product of my environment, that home

matters to me. I always get homesick very easily if I left. And I'm still that way. Whenever I leave,

I'm counting down the days to get, you know, to get back. Though it's been certain cities,

like where I've gone to make movies, where I felt more at home than others, New Orleans making this was one of them.

New Orleans, but I love being there.

But one of the biggest reasons I love being there was because it reminded me so much of home.

The Bay Area, specifically like the colors in the, you know,

my grandmother, who's from Port Arthur, Texas, she told me that all the, the black migrants that came during the second wave of the great migration, they came to the bad area, they painted the houses to look like where they were from, which was, you know, essentially the Gulf. You know what I mean?

Sure, yeah. Right. Right there's Louisiana. Louisiana and Houston. And like, so when I got to New Orleans for the first time, it looked like I was at home in North Oakland.

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