From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

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

The Day Trippers?

Super Bad, Adventureland, director Greg Wintell has made films that are about road trips both literal and metaphorical.

His new film, Paul, he combines that with two Brit comic geeks and an alien.

Greg, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you, Elvis.

It's a pleasure.

Before we get into, Paul, I'm going to ask you, I'm sure you've heard this question before. When I watch the day trippers, I find myself thinking about three sisters.

Is Chekhov any kind of influence on you at all?

Yeah.

I mean, Chekhov actually is probably my favorite prose writer.

So I end his plays, of course, but I mean, I love his short stories. And I thought about it a lot. I mean, you know, he really wrote stories about people from all walks of life. He treated class differences didn't mean anything to him. He just wrote about what he saw. And I guess I was trying to do my sort of middleclass version of an observed family study in its own ridiculous way.

Because it feels in some ways all like Easter Eve to me in the very weird way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's probably unconsciously, you know, one of the things that I stole from while I was writing that movie.

I think I was just trying to write about middle class life in a way that I feel, like, I don't know,

I feel like often in mainstream movies it's treated with a, everyone has a heart of gold,

and it's very sentimentalized.

And there's another genre of kind of suburban movie that's more indie that's, you know,

it's sort of the rip-off of

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