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

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. After I saw my guest, writer-director,

Shane Cruz's first film, Primer, I thought about a line from Walden.

And one can advance confidently in the direction of one's dreams. I don't know why the line occurred to me, but it did.

And so when I saw his latest feature, Upstream Color at the Sundance Film Festival this year, that piece plays a big part in it. I feel like people respond to your work because there is confidence in it.

I mean, there's a kind of specificity of vision that people, I think, tend to respond to.

Yeah. Well, wow, what a wonderful coincidence there about the Walden quote.

You're asking me if I think that's why? I don't know. I mean, it's what I would respond to.

I mean, it's maybe not the confidence,

or if that's really in there. It's that, I think it's clear no one would put these things

together, no one would put these elements together if there wasn't some purpose to them.

So my hope is that there's enough in the material, whether we're talking about primer or

upstream, there's enough

in it to give you some confidence that if you but pull apart the rest, that there will be something

behind it, that it won't be a futile effort, which is pretty much what I want as an audience

member. I want to be challenged. I want it to be compelling, but I don't want to walk away

from it knowing everything I'm ever going to know about the story.

I want something to do afterwards, and I want a reason to potentially revisit it.

And I want it to have been compelling enough to make revisiting it sort of an attractive idea, not a, not a torturous one.

I think there's certainly a confidence in the density, which I think people respond to,

too.

It doesn't feel like it's just layer to try to confound people.

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