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

It's The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

If you grew up reading American superhero comics with their narratives about divided cells and acts of emotional violence, if you were a young person dealing with what used to be called issues of gender conformity, they might be a perfect place for you to land.

If you happen to be as talented an artist as my guest, editor, director, and now actor, Vera Drake,

you would have made a terrific movie called The People's Joker

that folds all that stuff in and so much more.

If you were to sort of combine, I guess, Terry Gilliam and Maya Darren

and the brothers Quay and maybe some Bill Sinkevich,

you might have some small taste of what it is she accomplishes

in this very short film,

not long enough at 94 minutes.

Vera, first of all, thanks so much for doing this.

Oh, thank you so much.

One of the things that I will ask you to do is to talk about the title,

because there's a really kind of interesting declamation.

The title itself, the People's Joker, kind of came from the mission statement of what the movie was.

Like, I used to have a web series called Hot Topics that was all about me just trying to get sponsored by Hot Topic so that I could finally have my high school emo girl phase.

But as an adult, and the aim was to make that happen on Hot Topics Dime.

That mission was never accomplished.

But on that show, I announced to my followers that I was going to start hopefully making a Joker movie kind of based around my experience

as a trans woman coming up in comedy. And anybody that wanted to help me do it should reach out.

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