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

It's The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. What an auspicious thing to do to take the

1987 August Wilson play, The Piano Lesson,

and make it your own as a debut feature.

I'm talking to the gentleman who did just that.

The film is, let's see, oh, the piano lesson.

And its director and co-writer is Malcolm Washington.

First of all, thank you so much for being here.

It's such an honor.

You're a legend.

And I tell you this every time I see you and don't, you can't stop you.

Fortunately, you've only seen me twice.

So that makes it very easy before this is to go down.

But I'll put it to you this way.

It's interesting because you actually treat the material as a lesson.

You start the movie off with a lesson, a lesson about American politics and also a lesson about American culture.

And I want to talk to you about that because it's a very different, I mean, we've talked about before that there was another adaptation that was done for television.

There was much more prosaic and nothing wrong with that. You know, we're not hating on that.

But you start off what seems, what is ostensibly a celebration and is much more nuanced than that. Talk about that opening. I think the kind of films that I really like and my entryway into telling stories in the first place, it starts with a different kind of context, and I wanted the film

to represent that. You know, I came in to making movies from studying movies and film theory,

and as you know, you know, when you study films, it's really just a gateway to get into

other bigger ideas, whether it's a historical idea or philosophical idea or something like that.

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