From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

My guest, Mike White, is a writer, director, and sometimes actor. His work

as a screenwriter and director includes a kind of aesthetic, I think that includes both comedy

and melodrama often simultaneously, from School of Rock to the Good Girl, one of my favorites of his,

and his newest year of the dog, Mike Mike, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me. We've got to talk a little bit about Year of the Dog, what you wrote and directed. First of all, tell the audience what it's about. Well, it's about Molly Shannon plays this

woman, Peggy, who, you know, she's a career secretary. She lives, she's single.

She has, she doesn't have love in her life,

but she does have this beagle that she's kind of obsessed with.

And it's, what happens is the beagle kind of unexpectedly dies

in the beginning of the movie,

and it's about how she tries to replace the love that she has for this beagle somewhere else,

put it somewhere else, and the kinds of comical dead ends she encounters.

And ultimately, I think she sort of comes to learn more about herself and life.

And that's the movie.

It's amazing because this project seems to me kind of an apotheosis of the kind of things you've done before where this sort of tricky blend of comedy and melodrama, which could border on comedy and then goes through the other side to become comedy again.

How do you work these things out for yourself?

How do you write these scripts?

It gets complicated as it goes along because, you know, I don't know, you become kind of like

you become very particular in terms of what you like and you don't like as time goes on.

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