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

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Louis-Vis Mitchell, also known as The Last Stop in Public Radio.

My guest is the director of one of the most interesting films of the past 10 years, I think.

And it's a big departure from her first film, Lulu Wang, her film, of course, is The Farewell.

And I guess I want to say this to you that there is a strain of absurdism that runs in your work, isn't there?

Yes.

Talk about where that comes from, because it seems to me as much a literary thing as it is a film thing.

Like, when I saw the farewell, I guess I found myself thinking about Ralph Ellis' invisible man

and that idea of duality and how everything for people of color trying to simulate in America,

it feels like life and death.

So when it comes to life and death, it becomes an extra sort of absurdity added onto that, isn't

there?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think that if you don't see the absurdity, if you don't laugh, how do you survive?

You know, it's the only way.

I mean, my parents really raised me to see everything through this lens, whether consciously or not.

But my mother has a very interesting sense of humor, which, you know, she is also colored by the fact that she read a lot of Russian literature and pushed a lot of that onto me.

Which Russian literature?

Is it Pushkin?

All of it. Tolstoy.

Justoievsky.

And there's also that kind of sense of life and death and the sense of the absurd net there too, isn't there?

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