From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear this show at KCRW.com.

Fans of my guest, Director Peter Peter Worf had to wait eight

years since his last film, Masson, Commander. His new film, the way back follows the escape

from a Soviet gulag through frozen tundra across the Himalayas into the Gobi Desert. His gift has been

to plunge as protagonists and us into a foreign situation immediately, but the films in first and foremost, about the relationships that develop in those alien environments.

Those films include, of course, The Year of Living Dangerously, Green Card, Fearless, and his new film The Way Back.

Peter, first of all, thanks for coming back to the show.

It's great to be here, Elvis.

And that's the thing that always fascinates me about the pieces, though.

I mean,

from things as Ves Wild and Various as Gallipoli to the Truman Show, you've always so often been about plunging your protagonist into a completely new environment in some way. And then the

films being about those relationships that come out of those environments. That's true. I mean,

I think, you know, I think it was Robert Hughes, the art critics said, you know,

talked of the gunpowder trail that leads back to childhood.

That's where, you know, so many formative things, of course, you know, have entered our sensibility.

And for me, I would pick, really, at 20, getting on a ship to go to Europe, a five-week journey.

That was the way you travel then.

That was the cheap way for the young kid going off for a working holiday in Europe as I did.

And, you know, it was a life-changing experience.

I mean, today you'd fly.

But that journey, you know, not just the five weeks at sea, which is a long time.

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