From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

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

We, of course, know my guest, Director Joe Berlinger from his documentaries, from Brothers

Keeper to some kind of monster.

This newest, which makes great use of its title, is the film crude.

One of the things you've done as a filmmaker is to sort of make films about communities,

even with Metallica and some kind of monster, there's a kind of ad hoc community there.

And I wonder if it's those kinds of connections to people and what

goes on in there's what kind of attracted to you in some ways to this. Yeah, actually, I never even

thought of it that way. I always think of myself as somebody who likes to put on screen kind of

outsiders and people you don't normally see in films. Outsiders and widely people, and I like to explode stereotypes.

To me, even though the film is about the lawsuit, the lawsuit is really an excuse to tell a

larger story, and that larger story is the mistreatment of indigenous people.

I mean, it kind of hit me over the head like a ton of bricks, but, you know, and maybe this

is an obvious conclusion for some people, but, you know, and maybe this is an obvious

conclusion for some people, but for me, walking around these indigenous villages where I saw

utter devastation because of oil production, I emotionally felt what I've intellectually known

in the back of my mind, which is that for the last six or seven hundred years, white people

have treated indigenous people

abysmally. And it's something we've never dealt with, never talked about. And, you know,

as Americans, we often think that that treatment of indigenous people is in our distant past. And in some respects, it is.

But in the, you know, what multinational corporations do in the extractive industries in the third world, what they did in Ecuador is just to me the 21st century continuation of this abysmal treatment of indigenous people, whether it's legal or not, you know, I'm not smart enough to figure out whether Chevron has wrapped itself up and enough legal technicalities

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