Playboy's 20Q Neil LaBute

the maverick filmmaker defends the dark, worries about excommunication and derides easy dialogue

In the Company of Men (1997), Neil LaBute's first film, struck Hollywood with force. A movie that deals with male cruelty and corporate viciousness, the low-budget drama stars LaBute's college buddy Aaron Eckhart as one of two midlevel businessmen stuck for six weeks in an anonymous town. Frustrated at the state of their love lives, the two devise a plan to seduce---and then abandon---a secretary who is hearing-impaired. The film's dialogue and plot, as sour as they are, thrilled critics. LaBute was given awards by the Sundance Film Festival, the New York Film Critics Circle and the Society of Texas Film Critics. The movie made the top 10 lists of more than 50 critics.

LaBute's next movie, Your Friends and Neighbors (1998), was equally dark, a twisted comedy about marriage and deceit among yuppies. The men in the film (Ben Stiller, Jason Patric and Eckhart) are weasels, and they're chilling in their nastiness.

LaBute's newest film, Nurse Betty, marks a break from the creepiness of his earlier movies. A strange comedy about a woman's determination to turn her fantasies into reality, the film stars Renée Zellweger as a small-town waitress in Kansas who is obsessed with a soap opera, set in a hospital. Convinced that the characters are real people, she falls in love with the "doctor" (Greg Kinnear) and leaves Kansas for Hollywood after two hit men (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) dispatch her no-good husband (played by LaBute's favorite actor, Eckhart).

His next movie, Possession, from the A.S. Byatt novel, is to be made in England and will star Gwyneth Paltrow. It's about two academics who become lovers when they research the illicit affair between two 19th century poets.

The 37-year-old LaBute is a practicing Mormon who lives near Chicago with his wife, Lisa, and their two young children. He was born in Detroit, the son of a truck driver, and attended high school in Spokane, Washington. He majored in theater at Brigham Young University, where his provocative plays caused upheaval on that conservative Utah campus. He did graduate work in theater at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and at New York University, and then received a scholarship to London's Royal Court Theater. By the late Eighties, his plays were being staged in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. In 1992 LaBute and his family moved to Indiana. Four years later, with $25,000, he began making In the Company of Men.

Bernard Weinraub caught up with the filmmaker at a hotel in Beverly Hills. He reports: "LaBute is a bear of a man with a quiet, almost self-effacing manner and a gentle voice. He seems unfailingly polite and smiles easily. And yet his words, though spoken softly, are sharp."

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[Q] Playboy: Where has Hollywood's depiction of men and women gone wrong?

[A] Labute: Hollywood is so based on the perception of what people want to see. It caters to the audience to a fault. But Hollywood is as confused as the American public. I'm not sure it knows what the audience wants to see. And dealing with relationships in films makes people uncomfortable. I've had actors say to me, "I'm in a bad relationship. I don't want to be in a movie about one." During the making of Your Friends and Neighbors, I came to realize that people are much more comfortable watching sex than talking about it. They prefer a couple of people rolling around in bed, with a saxophone playing, to people sitting on the bed talking about what they're going through. Maybe it's peculiarly American. In international films that deal with sexuality, there's a more adventurous spirit that deals with the mental as well as the physical tumult.

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[Q] Playboy: How prudish is Hollywood?

[A] Labute: Showing sex without music---that frightens them. An uninterrupted shot of people having sex---it's like, Wait a minute, what are you doing? Well, let's just show it and be done with it. It's really not that frightening. But don't show it in a haze with filters.

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[Q] Playboy: What in your upbringing led you to the kinds of plays and movies that interest you now?

[A] Labute: I think I had a difficult father. I had a father who was very strong, an aggressive sort of personality. And I can see that trait in a lot of the characters in what I've done. He was tough and he was often away. There's often as much fear when someone's away as when he's home because the return is imminent. He was just a very strong personality. Not verbally so. But there was always an unease.

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[Q] Playboy: Does your father take pride in your success?

[A] Labute: I don't think so, not really.

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[Q] Playboy: In your plays and movies, why are women the victims and men the predators?

[A] Labute: It's the pattern. That's a reflection of my observations. The strong prey on the weak, if only because they have that ability. Victims and victimizers---that's at the core of everything. Look at The Wizard of Oz. Drama is often about someone wanting something, and somebody else wanting something else. And someone has to pay for it.

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[Q] Playboy: You seem to be a perfectly normal guy. A wife, two kids, you live in the suburbs, you do the gardening and the laundry. And yet your plays and movies are frequently disturbing and violent. Is that a contradiction?

[A] Labute: Well, I (continued on page 164)Neil LaBute(continued from page 135) suppose one could see that. But for me, it just seems like work. I have so much history against me. Not personal history, but the history of writing and film. You have to come up with something that is watchable, you know. Like when I took on relationships in Your Friends and Neighbors: Do you know how many films and plays and books have been written about marital relationships and infidelity? If I don't have something new to say about it, I'm crazy to even wander into that territory. I don't know if it's therapeutic. Sure, there's a freedom in writing. But it's just the job I have. It's a job I happen to really like and I waited out a lot of other bad jobs to get it.

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[Q] Playboy: How does your wife take to the writing that you do?

[A] Labute: Depends on the writing. Depends on the piece. She's been an advocate and a detractor. She was a fan of In the Company of Men. She thought Your Friends and Neighbors kind of went over a line that she was not comfortable with. Nurse Betty was written by someone else. Bash bothered her because, again, it was about the church, and she thinks it's both dangerous to me and dangerous to the church. She's pretty vocal on how she feels about my work.

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[Q] Playboy: How have men reacted to whatever progress women have achieved?

[A] Labute: There's a grudge held secretly by men for having lost a bit of footing. When they get in the right crowd they throw a straight elbow or two to flex their muscles. They say, "We're still here." It's just in the air. People stick their finger in the air and find it's safe to say things they wouldn't have said a few years ago. There are more men now in softball leagues and amateur hockey clubs. It's a way of getting their aggressions out.

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[Q] Playboy: When you were a student writing on-the-edge plays at Brigham Young University, how did the school administration take to your work?

[A] Labute: It's a conservative school. I welcomed that conservatism. As a student, your mandate is to test things. You find the highest wall and try to climb it. And it was a religious school, too. But then I went to a liberal school, N.Y.U., which had its own set of rules, its own strictures. People were militant. You had militant gays, militant feminists, militant Republicans. They had as much difficulty accepting other people as the religious school did.

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[Q] Playboy: You're a converted Mormon. How upset is the Mormon Church with your writings?

[A] Labute: For Mormons, art should be positive. You should try to show goodness and have a positive message. But I have always felt that one can have a positive message and can show the bad as well. The faith does stand the test. My play Bash was the thing that had them most worried. Three out of four characters were Mormon, and that unnerved them.

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[Q] Playboy: The play includes murder, and the Mormon kids beat a gay guy to a pulp. Did the people of the church let you know they were unhappy?

[A] Labute: Yes, I've been talked to about it. It's gone as far as the offices in Salt Lake and has come back through the local offices. We're continuing to talk about it. They're very interested in how much longer that play will have a life and whether I plan to continue writing about Mormon characters.

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[Q] Playboy: Are you worried about the church's taking some drastic action, like excommunication?

[A] Labute: There's always that possibility. Does that concern me? Yes, not only because it would seem unfounded but because it is possibile.

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[Q] Playboy: How different are men and women in terms of the hunt, in terms of what they really want?

[A] Labute: Someone once asked me if two women could do what the men did in Company of Men. Probably not. Not that I don't think women can be devious, but they tend to be more solitary. There's something about that pack mentality. You can take two women and drive them to the mall and say, "Can you go get me some batteries?" And they'll go in and wander around and come back with the batteries. If you put two guys in the mall---it's an adventure. They're suddenly racing each other and walking around the fountain and looking at all the girls and making noise. There's a certain thrill to the hunt that I think that movie talked about. They enjoyed that end of the day assessment of what they'd done. And that's what Bash was about too. They were just Mormon kids who suddenly let that Lord of the Flies side of themselves go. They saw someone who was different from them and they hunted him down and took care of him. Then they went right back to being with their girlfriends and did not think about it again.

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[Q] Playboy: In your plays you seem to like women more than men. Which are more confused?

[A] Labute: People are quietly confused, without question. I heard there was a poll which concluded that many women of the new generation who had made achievements in the workplace would rather be at home, watching their kids. And, of course, for men it's been confusing for the last 30 or 40 years. There's not room for everybody in the elevator and there's this general pushing and shoving to redefine one's place. I think people are having an incredibly difficult time dealing with themselves.

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[Q] Playboy: Why are the men in your plays so shitty?

[A] Labute: I'm on to them. Being one and living around them, I know their capacity for that sort of brute nonchalance. And I try not to give them too much rope because I don't think they deserve it. They need it around their wrists more than anything. I think we're an interesting bunch.

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[Q] Playboy: How do guys---and women---use sex these days?

[A] Labute: Most people hope there would be some solace in it. But it's often used as another commodity. It's a bargaining tool, it replaces a card or a greeting. It's something to be used. It's something everyone has at his or her disposal and it's powerful---and there's always a possibility of abusing that power. Sex requires great care because it's such a profound gift if you use it well. And people so often take the slightly easier road: It's just a little easier for me not to report this, or to cheat a little bit here, or to tell this lie so I don't have to explain what I've done. And I think that goes right into sexuality. It's easier just to do the act and be done with it and move on than it is to try to calculate within yourself and your partner all those immutable feelings you have before, during and after.

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[Q] Playboy: But, from your point of view, is it the same for women and men?

[A] Labute: It's such an individual thing, but I think sex is as pursued by women as it is by men. What it can bring, you know, the pleasure it can bring, is pursued by everyone. E.M. Forster got it right when he said, "Only connect." It's such simple advice, but it's so vastly difficult for people to find a place in themselves that's free enough to connect nakedly with another person. At the heart of it, people want to connect, but we have such barriers, such fears. Some of them are what we learned and grew up with. There's a lot going against us in terms of keeping us from one another. It's incredibly hard. But people connecting is a wonderful thing.

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[Q] Playboy: The Internet is a meeting ground for sex and relationships. Is that a positive or negative development?

[A] Labute: It's a barrier. It feeds people's hunger to connect. But it omits everything else---the early surprise in a relationship, the thrill of meeting someone, the hunger to learn more about someone, the excitement of the unknown. Having that rush of "Hi, who are you, what's your name, what's your sign?" On the other hand, the Internet is a powerful seducer. You can avoid real human contact and the glorious mess that can come with it.

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[Q] Playboy: Your college classmate Aaron Eckhart seems to be your alter ego. He's in every movie of yours. Is he to you what De Niro seems to be to Scorsese?

[A] Labute: I just find him endearing. He's willing to go where I want to go. Aaron's willing to say, "I'm not here to get the audience to like me; I don't want to be an action figure. I'm going to really dig in and free the character, and people will either come or they won't. But I'm going there." And I enjoy turning on the camera and watching him go.

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[Q] Playboy: What frustrates you most about working in Hollywood?

[A] Labute: A distrust of the gray areas in people. Hollywood wants to define people too easily, too quickly. A studio I was dealing with recently was like, "The information you need about characters is sprinkled throughout a script, but can we drag it all to the front so no one is confused in the first five minutes?" There's this great fear that you're going to lose them somehow in the first five or 10 minutes, so everybody's introduction should include who they are and how they got there. And that's not the way life goes. We've been sitting here, but we've never mentioned each other's names. And that's the way people talk. Except in a movie. If we were in a movie, I'd be saying, "Well, Bernie, I was talking to Tom, who's a biochemist." I detest that sort of exposition, explaining everything. But there's this fear of the uncertain, of the gray, that people can be many things, that a character can be good and bad and in-between. But that's the way most people are.

It's so vastly difficult for people to connect nakedly with another person. We have such fears.