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

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. I've known my friend Sam Levins so long. I actually thought he'd done the show before. That's how bad my memory is.

But anyway, his newest film, which opens on the 21st of September, is Assassination Nation. And Sam's good to finally have you do this show after knowing you for so long.

Thank you for having me.

And it's funny because between this and your first film, your first film kind of is just about exploring incidents through

time. And this one feels like it's kind of anecdotal. But in fact, there's a plot point and the

plot momentum. I mean, you make it feel like it's in the opening, like it's just sort of people

moving along to no particular point. And I just wonder what it is about that structure you like,

where it feels like things are just sort of happening in real time

rather than in this case a real plot.

Well, I think it was like the intention was at least going into it,

was this idea that, you know, I wanted to make a film,

I wanted to write a film, and I wanted to shoot a film

that felt indicative of the

sort of emotional volatility of the internet in real time. And so normal kind of plot conventions,

you know, normal structure, normal pacing, you know, I just, it's like I wanted to kind of

throw a Molotov cocktail in it. Only in the

sense of like, when you wake up in the morning, right, and you read the paper, you know, having

your coffee, you know, or, you know, you're going through your Twitter feed or whatever it is,

and you read a New York Times article, you see a video from like, you know, inside of a school during a shooting. You see, you know, a cat video. You see, you know,

a thing about, you know, Russian interference in the election and all that, all within the span

of like five minutes. And you go, what's that genre? What's the genre of life right now online?

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