From KCRW, Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell, my guest, Olivia Wiley.

You may know from such shows as The O.C. and the Black Donnellys.

The only show of Black in the title that will never turn up on BET.

You never know.

Well, she's here to talk about her new film with Joe Swanberg, who wrote and directed Drinking Buddies.

She also edited the film. First of all, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you for having me. I have to say one of things you like about the character is you really get a chance to sink your teeth into a comedy. It's funny because

people classify the film as a comedy when in fact it's just as tragic as it is funny. It's Joe

Swanberg. It's appropriately lifelike. It is complex. And I hope people don't go in expecting this kind of romantic

comedy romp, but it is satisfying in its complexity, I think. It's dark, though. It's dark and real and

hopefully funny because it is so awkward. Yeah, because, I mean, you don't, it's more than just comedy, but the movies that Joe does are basically about shifting loyalties.

Yeah.

And the boundaries of friendships change.

So these then diagrams are sort of intersecting and intersecting and intersecting.

And I wonder if that's something that made you want to do a movie with him because of those shifts. You never know where you're going to stand from the beginning of the film to the middle to the end. That's exactly right. I did want to do it for that reason. All of his films also have really complicated female characters. He seems to really respect and embrace the idea of women not being one

thing or another, not being the heroine, not being the antagonist, being a bit of both.

And it's really interesting to see how people react to Kate, my character in this film,

because she is quite messy. In fact, all of the characters are

because it's sort of about that quarter-life crisis moment

when you have to kind of get your act together,

but nothing is defined as it is when you're younger,

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