From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com.

When I saw a writer-director, Stuart Townsend's film Battled in Seattle in Toronto last year,

the film festival, I offered an invitation there and then

because I thought it was a pretty daring film to do as many things as he did

and his directorial debut.

He's known primarily as an actor, but it's a really impressive first-time-out film.

Stuart, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks. Daring or stupid, I don't know.

We'll get into that later. I'll judge it later, but first we'll just talk about the making of it.

We should say the film is set in 1999 with the World Trade Organization Conference in Seattle.

It feels like this kind of combination of Altman and Ken Loecious, you know, an ensemble film with a real grasp of social responsibility.

Yeah, it definitely was the first sort of major mass mobilization of people in America since the Democratic Convention of 1968.

There have been the Ken State riots.

There have been a few riots here and there in protest,

but this was really this giant mobilization happened just before the

millennium. And it was this kind of burgeoning movement that had been around for maybe a decade.

It started in the global south. But this was the first real moment where the spotlight shone

on globalization and these institutions that most people didn't really know about, like the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO.

So it was a real chance to bring attention to the world these organizations.

Given it it's a look at what's happening in this city, these riots that break out, people trying to sort of protect.

It's very much to me a film about territory, either sort of psychological or physical territory, and people trying to sort of protect terror. It's very much to me a film about territory, either

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