From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear the show to KCRW.com.

At the Hot Docs documentary show last year in Toronto,

I had a pleasure of seeing an astonishing film,

The English Surgeon, which I think is a really breathtaking piece of filmmaking

and uses all the resources of the medium to tell a story of,

while as director, Jeffrey Smith.

First of all, Jeffrey, thanks a bunch of you doing this.

Thank you.

Tell us about the movie.

The thing that we all love about documentary

is that you really are watching the director's relationship with the subject.

And if that's a great relationship,

if it's one built on love and trust,

then that chemical feeling transmits to an audience.

And in a film like this where the surgeon, Henry Marsh,

takes us into some sensitive, intimate situations, you've got to feel safe. You've got to feel

as an audience that it's all right to be there, because it is reality. This is not made up.

So that relationship was in place for five years before we made this film. You were completely immersed in his life.

Yeah, I mean, we met in 2003 over some vodka on the first night.

We discovered we both had this love-hate relationship with Ukraine.

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