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

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell, here on the college campus of Santa Monica

College, where my guest, Steve Conrad, got the chance to revisit the disorientation of Chicago,

or rather of college,

and he lives in Chicago.

And his films,

the many of the films he written have been about kind of a sense of dislocation

and trying to figure out who and what you are.

And also just about how,

whenever I think about your movies be the weatherman or,

or certainly the promotion or this new show on Amazon that you're doing now, The Patriot,

it's always what people, that line from Kirkgar comes in mind,

the closer you get to a dream, the more tattered and dusty it becomes. People trying to sort of get to their dreams and never being able to sort of get their hands around them.

Yeah, that's nicely put. I think the other common nominator among the films and then Patriot is that the characters are largely left to fend for themselves. One way or another, there's a moment in each of the narratives where they take a moment to look

around and discover that there's nobody there to support them, lift them up.

They're going to have to, if they will find the means and the endurance to finish their

particular tasks, they're going to have to do that by themselves.

That sounds like, too, are people, yourself is so often about people trying to make themselves part of the middle class by whatever means necessary and never quite fitting in.

Yeah, that's an aspect to it too. But what I can reduce that to make it, I think, hopefully, something

that audiences can find something in personally is that it just amounts to struggle, that

particular struggle to improve your conditions. In-Patriot, those aren't exactly our concerns

here because it's largely suspense and it's oriented around the execution of an intelligence task. But he's also, his undercover job is being a part of the corporate world.

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