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

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. In the 21 years of doing this show, it's always good to have friends come back, and especially to be sitting across somebody who's been on this show.

With the exception of his first movie, Little Odessa, in 1994, he's been here for virtually every film that he has done.

And it's always a pleasure to have him here.

His new film, as writer-director, is Lost City of Z.

His name, of course, is James Gray.

Jim, good to have you back. It's great to be here, Elvis.

And, you know, this, I guess in this way, falls into what you've been doing with films.

I mean, really, I've known you since The Arts.

And We On the Night and Two Lovers.

He's all been films about families basically coming to the end of an era.

Or in that way, they almost always feel like Visconti films or something.

There's that sort of formal thing of a family's way of life coming to an end.

And this does that but also brings old school action adventure into the mix, doesn't it?

You know, it's funny you start out and you say to yourself, this time I'm going to do something different. I want to try and mix it up and then you wind

up making the exact same movie. In some ways, that's good. In some ways, that's bad, right? If it's,

if it's the same movie, maybe it means you're expressing something that is a value to you, it's personal to you, but you also don't want to repeat yourself. It's a very fine line. If you look at the careers of some of the best directors, what I've always been so impressed by is their capacity to speak in a personal way across a whole number of genres and across decades, really. You can almost

kind of tell what kind of person here she is from the movies they make. So I've tried to

rip off that strategy, whether it's successful or not, I suppose, is for people like you to

decide, I feel. Well, if you would, explain to the audience a little bit what the film is about.

It's about a guy named Percy Fawcett who was kind of a mediocre army officer with the British Army in 1905.

And they came to him and they said, you know, we need to have you map a territory in Amazonia, the border between Bolivia and

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