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.

What is manhood? Well, for writer-director, John Hamburg, it's the source of comedy.

You look at his films from Zoolander to meet the parents, which you wrote the screenplays, the films he wrote and directed.

Along came Polly in his newest. I love you, man. He would find a lot of comedy in the modern and shifting definition of masculinity.

John, thanks so much for doing this. Oh, it's my pleasure.

Great to be here.

And before you go any further,

I should say you did one of my favorite films

of the last 10 years, Safe Men.

Oh, I didn't know you'd seen it.

Thank you very much.

That was my first movie as a writer-director.

It's really something, too.

And again, it's one of these things where your ear for kind of satirizing what people think of as being manhood kind of first emerged.

Yeah, it's funny. We, you know, touring the country, doing press and screenings of I Love You, Man, you know, people say, oh, what about this new bromance thing? And, you know, two guys, two buddies showing their feelings. And

really, really 10 years ago, Safe Men, my first movie was kind of a bromance between Sam Rockwell

and Steve Zahn as these singer-songwriters who get forced into being Safecrackers. It debuted at Sundance

and had really great screenings. And I was, you know, 26 at the time and thinking, oh, this is going to be huge. And it was two weeks in theaters. It made about $52,000. And, you know, it took years for then sort of the cult appeal of the movie to kind of catch on.

I think it's the most things that it took away just because there wasn't anything else in the culture that's really kind of like it. I mean, because it wasn't a relationship movie or comedy about relationships or at least romantic relationships. It was a comedy about guys trying to figure out what it was like to be grown men.

That's exactly right. It was about these sort of lonely kind of misfits, Paul Giamatti, Michael Lerner, Mark Ruffalo, you know, who kind of in this, under the

guise of sort of a mistaken identity crime caper.

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