DWI= Directing While Intoxicated

Getting busted isn't all bad. Writer/director Brandon Van Vliet once got nailed on a DWI and had to go to treatment. That doesn't mean he had to share a rubber room with Britney up in Cedars-Sinai. Rather, he had to sit in a small, white, stifling room with a bunch of fellow offenders, while they were guilt bombed into sobriety.

But at least he got a movie out of it: Trust Me. And trust me, it's got everything: a lawyer on the lam, car chases and a female cast composed entirely of strippers!

The movie centers around a lawyer who gets set up, John Grisham-style, and has to attend treatment, while hiring a bounty hunter to exact vengeance on the Minneapolis underworld that framed him.

"I'm totally not trying to rip on treatment," Van Vliet said. "It was depressing, but educational. It always took a couple of hours to get in a good mood afterward."

The car chase was shot up North, in the backroads of Nisswa, Van Vliet's home town. He used a van and his mother's car, which apparently looks just like an undercover cop car. This was real hairy stuff. For one thing, they didn't have a permit, stunt drivers and they were speeding.

Hey, what's a ticket or two when you've braved the Puritanical spanking gauntlet that's treatment?

"It was a very timely process," Van Vliet said. "We worked for 6-8 hours for one minute of useable footage."

There was a camera going at all times in both vehicles and they also used a sticky cam, which allowed the crew to get perspective shots.

"And we got an absolutely killer song to go over it," Van Vliet said.

The casting was, to put it mildly, eccentric: Real actors, fellow filmmakers, high school buddies, local artists, Indy rockers and heavy metal musicians, and, of course, strippers.

Pretty much all of the female cast is made up of sensuous lovelies who work at The Seville, Sinners and King of Diamonds, pleasure palaces all.

"All of my wife's stripper friends are always going, 'Hey, Brandon, when are you going to put me in a movie? So I finally caved,'" Van Vliet said. "A lot of what they do is act, anyway. They're good-looking girls. The only hard parts were getting them there on time and waiting for them to put on their make-up.

"They're high maintenance, but worth it," Van Vliet said.

The cast is mostly amateurs, with Van Vliet writing around their personalities, so they could pretty much play themselves.

And while we're on the subject of characters, Van Vliet borrowed extensively from real life when writing Trust Me, especially for the treatment scenes.

"There was this one guy I met in high school who was a paranoid conspiracist who thought the government was evil and another guy I worked with down here who liked to get drunk and torment people," Van Vliet said. "And there was another kid from my hometown who liked to break into people's houses and try on their lingerie."

As for the treatment scenes, there's some pretty nasty stuff, but nothing exploitative. The scenes feature all the classic archetypes.

"There's the meth guy and the heroin guy," Van Vliet said. "Then there's the emo kid who's in there because he's cutting himself and his parents put him there and he's on antidepressants and he's got a chemical imbalance."

There are some 22 artists on the soundtrack, with contributors ranging from Europeans, locals and out-of-staters.

"This is a musically-driven film," Van Vliet said. "It has a nice, big, scorching soundtrack."

The movie was shot with the same camera used for reality tv shows. For the saner scenes, a tripod was used; for the more animated scenes or flashbacks, the crew went to handheld.

Trust Me is not a satire of treatment, but rather a character-heavy dramedy.

Listening to Van Vliet describe treatment, he makes it sound like teaching one's dog obedience by taking him to a dog fight and putting him in the pit.

"Someone will bring up their situation and instead of helping him, other people chime in and just make fun of him," Van Vliet said. "Like in the movie, I have one character talking about how he's very sorry for what he's done and another character says, 'You're just saying that because you're facing jailtime.'"

Van Vliet also said people who attend treatment are often coddled, instead of learning to admit they've made bad choices.

On one of the last days of his treatment session, Van Vliet was listening to one guy going on and on about how his wife had dumped him and taken custody of his kids and how remorseful he was.

"He had me fooled," Van Vliet said. "Then, on the way home, my wife stopped at a gas station to get us something to drink and we saw the guy going into an Irish pub."

In the end, though, Van Vliet says going to treatment was worth it, just so he could make this movie. After all, there's no greater therapy than a stripper-filled, autobiographical revenge flick.

With a ripping soundtrack!