Hey, it's Elvis Mitchell. You know me. I host the treatment here at KCRW. Stand by. We're going to start the podcast in about five seconds from now. But let me ask you your support because, hey, you know you're listening. I know you're listening because you can hear my voice. Why are you holding on that money? You're just going to go waste it at Starbucks anyway. We do original programming here. We get the best people who come to talk to you and to me. So send us a few bucks. In fact, send us 10 bucks by texting KCRW to the number 20222. Right? You got that? All right. Here we go.

In three, two, one. From KCRW, Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. My guest, writer, director, Will Slocum, has made his first

film an interesting romantic comedy melodrama called Cold Turkey with quite an impressive cast.

Well, first of all, thanks so much for being here. Oh, great to be here, Elvis. Thanks so much

for having me. Good to have you here. And the movie plays around with a lot of things. I mean,

it starts off as one thing. In fact, it has kind of a short story feel.

Is that what you're looking for? Yeah, that's interesting you say. I mean, like, you know,

it's based on, given that it's an indie, given that we didn't have a lot of money, given that

we got to be in one location, there are long dialogue scenes, and you have to break it up a bit.

And we, one of the tricks was we set the whole movie around three dinners, three meals,

because, you know, it's a family dromedy.

And I feel like often, I don't know if this is true with your family, but I know with my

family, the only thing it's okay to talk about is like meals.

Like, when are we going to eat?

What are we going to get for dinner?

Like, what do you like? What do I? Like, I'll cook. No, I'll do the dishes. And then once you sit down,

you can't get up. Like, you have to sit down and you have to talk and you have to behave yourself.

That sounds almost like the classic thing of you're making an indie film with not a lot of money.

How do you maximize your resources? Yeah. So that was the puzzle you set for yourself to solve, wasn't it? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I knew I needed to write something that was basically all in one location. I knew I needed to have the story be contained, so it takes place over the course of three days. I knew it had to rely on actors and rely on dialogue. And given all that, again, I think it's broken up in a funny way that maybe is this short story thing you're talking about.

I'm not sure. I never really thought of it like that.

But I just, the reason I say that, because in textual terms, it takes a while to get to what the heart of the story is because you're building up character stuff.

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