From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

You can also hear this show at KCRW.com.

My guest, writer-director, Lynn Shelton, makes friends about the demands of friendship

and how they can take some very peculiar avenues in her film of last year.

My Effortless Brilliance is very much about the way friends were testing each other.

And in her new film, Hump Day, there are some very, let's say, provocative tests that come about.

Lynn, first of all, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me, Elvis.

You started really as an editor, and I wondered what that does you as a filmmaker,

if you start to think about films in terms of rhythms in a different way

rather than just thinking about the bigger picture at all.

You know, it must be the way that, you know, editing can

transform a mediocre script into a much, much better script, and an actually good movie, can take a

poor film, you know, and turn it into a mediocre film. I mean, it really, there's a lot of power,

and that is where I learned how to be a cinematic storyteller.

And it is incredibly important for this type of filmmaking.

The edit process always is, of course, Aung Lee calls it, you know, the production is like shopping and getting the shopping cart as full as you can with good stuff.

And then the editing is like making the recipe and cooking the meal.

You've done a number of shorts as well as features as an editor, and your films as a director

are more anecdotal, and I wonder if that's something you feel like you sort of got from

doing the shorts, which were the shorts you've done are kind of anecdotes themselves.

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