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.

If you know the work of writer-director, Sean Baker, you probably know it from his

absurdist sort of real-life fairy tales featuring a puppet character with real-life people's stuff

like Warren the ape and Greg the Bunny.

His feature films have been sort of like that, but still very different.

I mean, incredibly gritty street tales that feel like fairy tales.

His newest film is

writer-director is the film Prince of Broadway. Sean, first of all, thanks so much for being here.

Oh, thanks for having me. I listened to this program religiously, so it's a little surreal

for me to be here. Well, good, because you're surrealist stuff, so it's perfect for you to feel like

it's surreal. But I guess what I wonder is is how big an influence fairy tales in the sense of Grimm's fairy tales have on you?

Because everything you've done has kind of a fairy tale feel to it in some kind of way.

You know, I can't say that I really use fairy tales, but perhaps it has like a subconscious effect on it, on me somehow.

Well, if you can tell the audience what Prince of Broadway is about.

Prince of Broadway is the story of two men who work in the wholesale district of New York City.

One of the men, Lucky, is a West African immigrant who is selling counterfeit goods on the street.

He's also an undocumented immigrant.

The other man is Levon, who is an Armenian-Lebanese

immigrant who owns a shop, who sells counterfeit goods out of a back room in which Lucky and other

street hustlers take people on the street and bring them into this backroom.

So it's this relationship between the two guys.

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