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

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. Well, if you grow up around guys like

Francis Ford Coppola and Terrence Malick, the odds are you're going to become a filmmaker at some point in your life.

My guest who had a sort of like a run-in with acting before you found his true bent as a filmmaker is Emilio Estevis, whose new film as director is the public.

First of all, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Elvis. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. My pleasure. And one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is some of the films that you directed, be it Bobby or rated X with a word at home, which we just

talked about a bit before we got started, the public, or even, God, so much of the stuff you

even meant at work, these films are about kind of an emotional PTSD, aren't they?

Well, indeed. I think that the one aspect of life, I think, that connects all of us is a shared trauma.

Nobody walks the planet pain-free.

We all carry a certain amount of trauma with us, and I think that that is ultimately what

connects us in our humanity is a shared pain.

But that idea of trauma being so central to these stories that you're attracted to as a filmmaker,

it seems to be unique to you that that's the same, even something like wisdom, which is kind of

about suffering through that kind of thing, about, in fact, the impact that violence has on people in this country is something you gravitate towards as a filmmaker.

I do, and it's not unique. Certainly, the trauma is not unique to me.

But I...

But you've made, every film you made has been about wrestling with the impact of violence in one way or another.

That's right. That's right. And it's not that I grew up in a violent home. I grew up with two

very loving parents who had their issues like any family does, but they're still very much

together. But again, I was born in 1962. I came up watching the violence on television,

of course, living through the assassinations of Dr. King and Bobby and the Democratic National Convention

...