Neil LaBute
The dramatist and director Neil LaBute spoke at the London film festival about his adaptation of his own play The Shape of Things, and the tricks actors use to get a close-up. Here's a full transcript
* Alan Morrison
* guardian.co.uk,
* Sunday November 02 2003
Alan Morrison: Hi there. It seems very appropriate to me that Neil LaBute is such an important part of this year's film festival because his writing bears links to British playwrights such as Edward Bond and Howard Brenton as much as to people like David Mamet. And certainly Neil's plays have, in the last three years at least, had a very important place in the Almeida Theatre. The Shape of Things, which had its UK premiere last night, started at the Almeida. And just a week or so ago, Neil's new play, The Mercy Seat, also opened at the Almeida. So that's an artistic double-whammy that London can be proud of. Great to have you here and it's almost like it's becoming a spiritual home for you.
Well, I don't know how many of you saw the film last night, but it started as a play at the Almeida, then crossed over to Broadway, and very soon after that, you went straight into filming it, with the same four main actors. And I was thinking, when doing that kind of adaptation, as a writer, there are certain things that you have to slightly open out in a play script to turn it into a screenplay. But from the point of view of directing the actors, and bearing in mind that they'd been doing the roles for eight months night in night out, how did you work with the actors to nail down their roles and how much did they have to change of their performance for the film?
Neil LaBute: It was different degrees for different people. I'm not one for complacency, so I'm a bit of a bastard. And because the actors had been working for eight months on the show and giving roughly the same performance with the variation that's allowed in the theatre; the beauty is that you don't see the same show every night, but it is virtually the same show. But I knew going into the film that they all had film experience so that wouldn't be a problem - that they would know that they won't have an audience to feed off and they don't have to project to the back row. Rachel [Weisz] was working with a dialect so that difficulty is compounded by the fact that I have to fill this entire space rather than talk to a person face to face.
So, those rather obvious things we dealt with rather quickly but Paul Rudd - he makes a transformation, loses 25 lbs and has some physical things happen to him. On stage, none of that can really be happening, unless you're really stupid and totally fell for it, but he's not shedding 25 lbs in the course of two hours. But through his posture, through costuming and just sheer invention of the script, we make that transition possible, you suspend your disbelief, we all go home happy. On film, we had the ability and the necessity of a camera that could come in very close. Even though the film is 10 scenes and four people talking, and we tried to remain true to the theatrical nature of it, there's a kind of reality that an audience requires in the cinema. So when we shot it in scope, it's a very wide frame even though there're very few people in the movie and there's a lot of empty space throughout the film. But when the camera's on Paul's face, you can see whether his nose is larger in the beginning before his nose job or after. So things were required - there were things that would go up his nose. We tried some crude tests at the Almeida, really to bug him more than anything else, involving simple things like the nipples of baby bottles, we'd cut them and they'd go up his nose and expand it slightly. But they were so annoying, which I didn't mind...
[Laughter]
... and the fact that the audience could never really see it from their fixed position, so it really wasn't worth it in the end to try and make that transition. But when the camera came in, however, that was needed. So he had appliances - he had things in his mouth and attachments to his neck - enough basically to make him look like he'd gone to seed. So people could look at him and go "Gosh, he used to be really cute". And I think that certainly helped him make that transition as an actor, that he could look in the mirror and see more of what he imagined the character was. But then he also had to deal with the difficulty of having something in his mouth and his nose and how to speak so that he still sounded like himself when he begins to lose those things in the next few scenes. So that was what he had to deal with.
Rachel was dealing with the dialect - and she was thrown into a lion's den. Anytime you take someone who's working with a dialect, like right now, with The Mercy Seat, Sinead Cusack and John Hanna are doing this play set in New York and they're both doing a dialect, but they're the only two people on stage with these American dialects. Rachel was dealing with three American actors who spoke that dialect and spoke that language in a way which was true to the States. So she was being compared all the time by the three people around her. So that's a difficult thing to ask someone to do. But that's in my nature, to ask people to do difficult things.
But she rose to the challenge and was fantastic and I think she altered the course of the film, in a way. I think she was a much cooler customer onstage. She is a very wise girl - she knows what the camera is capable of. All good film actors give you their best work in close-up, so that you're forced in the editing room to use that and they take the number two shot out of the options. So they hold back just enough and then light up when the camera hits the close-up.
Suddenly there's a switch in the story - I started to get a sense of what it had cost this young person, what she had perpetrated on this other guy. And Paul immediately spotted this and said "What is she doing? She's pulling the sympathy away from me". And I realised that but it actually balanced the argument in a way that we hadn't seen before, so I let her do this and she changed the course of something we'd been doing happily for eight months and made something new and, I think, equally valid and exciting.
AM: Did the actors or yourself feel that there's an excitement or trepidation or a sadness that, having evolved the play and the roles several times and with little variation every night, here's one that's locked down and this is the one that most of the world will look back on? How did it feel?
NLB: I think in this case there was a bittersweet quality, because they'd been with it a long time and it can only go on for so long, and in one way they're happy to have a testament or record of what they'd been doing for a year. They can hold it up to the IRS and say "This is where I was and no, I was not making any other money". But that's the beauty and the damning thing in theatre, is that what you see will never be seen by anybody else on another night. And when it closes, it's gone. On film you can go back and watch it over and over, but it doesn't change. So for them it was the last time that they, very likely, will ever play that part. So I think that was a hard thing to do, but also kind of nice to capture it in some way. I don't think that any of them looks at any one take or even the whole film as the definitive version or that was the perfect one. I'm sure that each had one of those nights - there's a story about Olivier doing Othello, he did it particularly well one night and was staring at himself afterwards in his dressing room, and people were asking "Why are you so upset? It was a great evening" and he said "Yes, but I don't know how I did it". So that happens to actors, just like in relationships, it's not always balanced. Why was I so good tonight - I mean the actors, not myself - it's like lightning in a bottle and you never know what it is but the beauty is, onstage you can always try it again and do it. So I think that they got the best of both worlds - they got the chance to do it onstage, onscreen and they should consider themselves damn lucky.
AM: We have a clip from The Shape of Things now - it's fairly early on in the film and shows the first meeting between the characters Adam and Evelyn, and kind of sets up a lot of the agenda for what the play is about.
[Runs clip]
AM: What a great line to start with: "You stepped over the line." How many critics have said that about you, with what you write?
NLB: Three today.
AM: The whole idea that's being set up here, the question of what is true art, and then towards the end of the film, there's a major scene with all the characters and there's a big banner in the background which says "Moralists have no place in an art gallery". Do they have a place in cinema, theatre? And what kind of intent do you have in terms of dealing with the truth of art through human beings in a film like this?
NLB: I think moralists have a place in an art gallery, I think everybody has a place in an art gallery, they just should keep their mouths shut. They're free to walk around as long as they pay the price, I just don't think they should be dictating policy. I'm big on what the argument the film proposes about subjectivity about art itself. This [picks up glass of water] can be art because you made it, or it can be a glass of water to me and I can think you're a loon for calling it art, and we could both be right. So I'm big on "I'm okay, you're okay" but if pushed, it turns quickly into "I'm okay, you're a piece of shit".
[Laughter]
Because ultimately... I'm happy to come out even, but if forced, I want to come out on top. And that's what was happening up there, two people who are having an argument about something, where one's having a breakup and one's having a discussion about art - we often just see things through our own lens and it's difficult to understand what somebody else is saying when we're so driven to take care of our own needs.
AM: That's certainly something that chimes with the reception for your first film, In the Company of Men. There were a lot of subjective readings - people who couldn't tell the difference between what they called a misogynistic film and a film about misogyny. And that subjective thing that you spark in people, so that the problem is not with the film-maker or the film but the fact that people come to a film with their own baggage and you seem very sharp at pulling that out of people. Thinking of In the Company of Men, as someone who was teaching and was building up a name as a playwright, how did that first come about. How did you make that first step into making a movie?
NLB: I had... I don't know if it was a bit of luck. I didn't study film-making, not that you can tell. I learned recently that the camera can move, which is pretty fascinating, actually. But I've always been a film-lover and a theatregoer but sort of imagined myself as a practitioner of theatre and teaching. I had an introduction to independent cinema, and more importantly independent film financing which was that someone had seen a play of mine and asked me to turn it into a screenplay, which at the time I'd just typed "Fade In" and handed it back to them, and most of my screenplays still sort of look like that.
[Laughter]
But they took it and tried to make a film of it. And I was very used to creating my own fun as a theatre person - like if I couldn't get a theatre I would look for plays that fit into spaces that I found. In college I couldn't get time in a theatre so I would go to the natural history museum and there was a stairwell where I'd stage something in that space and put the audience on the stairs. I staged Pinter's One for the Road, a political parable, down there. Not that he ever got paid, actually, but the idea was pure. But it was that kind of hunger - nothing was going to stop me from doing what I wanted to do. And so when I suddenly ran into this world of piecing together all this money to make a movie - I'd given them an option for a year, and a year later they weren't there. When you're $30,000 short, you can't make something. They wanted another option, but I thought "I can't wait around like this". In that interim period, I had seen a lot of stories coming out of Sundance of people who used their credit cards, or sold their blood, or sold their mother's blood...
[Laughter]
... or put all their money on red in Atlantic City. You know, they got some little jackpot and went off and made a movie. I thought I could probably do that. I've got a mother, she's got blood. And so, what actually happened before I had to drain my mother's blood, was that happily, two of my friends got into a car crash...
[Laughter]
... and survived - that's the happy part - and they got a settlement. So I went to see them, they were walking, they were fine, and I said "Would you like to take a little risk here? You're getting physical therapy and a little bit of money but maybe we can double that". And so they fell for it, and I took this $25,000 that they had, and contacted friends - Aaron Eckhart, Stacy Edwards, Matt Malloy - and we made In the Company of Men. It wasn't the script these other folks had wanted to make, but I looked at what I had written and thought "This is the one that I can probably do with the least amount of money and make it the way that I want to make it". I mean if I had more money I might have fed the crew, done things like that, but I wouldn't have shot it any differently. That was what I was shooting for, so that people wouldn't say "Well, if it'd had more money, it probably would have been more interesting". I wanted it to be at least looked at on its own merits. So we had 11 days in which we could shoot and I had never shot a short film or anything but I'd just watched a lot of movies. I sort of sat down with these actors and brought my stage skills to the table and said "As an audience member, I like this aesthetic of a very still camera and you people playing things out in front of it so that's what we're going to do". It's no cheaper, mind you. You try and do a five-minute take and someone screws it up in the fourth minute, that's a lot of film that you're never going to use because there's nothing to cut away to. So it wasn't more practical on an economic level, it was simply an aesthetic that I chose to use. But that's how the movie came about, just me looking up at what was the current climate of independent film-making in the States and thinking "I can do this".
AM: Well the next clip we're showing illustrates what you've just said about your aesthetic of using that long take and the long monologue. It's from Your Friends and Neighbours and it's one of the best examples of that in your work. It's the bit where Jason Patric is revealing something about himself that the guys he knows never knew about him.
[Runs clip]
AM: And the way you shot it, I think that's cinematic, that's good use of the camera. But a lot of the criticism that comes your way is "Dialogue's great, but it's not cinematic enough". Does that annoy you because you do have a precise, economic, cinema style?
NLB: [Points to chest] It hurts in here, but only right in the middle of this spot. No, there are so many ways to approach what a movie is and what's valid as entertainment or cinema. That represents my interest as a viewer - I have never balked at watching what you might call talking heads, as long as the talk is good and the person doing it is expert at it. It's only when it's less than that or stops being that that I notice that a long time's been spent on one shot. And that again is subjective and is a matter of taste, but it's where my taste tends to lie. I'm really interested in the placement in the frame and the movement within the frame and movement that's justified by story and character, not by "An audience will be tired after looking at this for a few moments". I think there's no reason for that to happen. So I can only try to push on with something that makes sense to me and hope that I'm not completely alone - several releases have proved that I am alone and I don't seem to learn quickly, so I keep doing what suits my fancy.
AM: I feel that in your films the imagery is verbal rather than visual, and what I find interesting about watching that clip, is that you can almost feel the sharp intake of breath. Even though there are films now like Baise Moi and Romance where they're trying to push sexual taboos in visual terms, but sometimes it feels like there's a bigger taboo in talking about sex and violence than in showing sex and violence in film.
NLB: I think it's as unnerving, if not more so, to people to hear about it. It's one thing to see someone disrobe and hear some saxophone music come on and then some sort of simulation of a sexual frolic in a golden light and then a slow pan off to a tree.
[Laughter]
It's as valid as the next thing, I suppose. But people do get unnerved when people start to talk about sexuality. And to me that kind of freezing of the frame and holding people - you can look away, you can go and buy something to eat, but you're not going to find any relief here. It's a very dictatorial medium, not only am I going to show you what story you're going to watch, but - for instance onstage, you can look anywhere you want to, check the reaction of the other actors - but by holding his side of it, I'm playing a bit of a trick. You're dying, hopefully, unless you've left, to see what their reaction to it was going to be. But we not only wanted to do that piece in one unbroken take but it saves the reaction - the worst thing is that it becomes a kind of punchline to see what one of the guys thinks of that. But it's constantly choosing for an audience where they're going to look, and I try to be judicious about that and give as much open frame to an audience to decide, and in the same way not to use too much music like what I hear in my head. Because that also dictates how a person might feel about what they're watching instead of letting them react to whether it's funny or sad. Or they can be bored but we'll have their money.
AM: The next clip I chose specifically because it's such a contrast to what we've just seen. It's from Nurse Betty and here you have lots of extras, stage stunts, shoot-outs. I guess this was the film where you chose to do the unexpected thing and make a film on a bigger budget.
[Runs clip]
AM: If you haven't seen the film, part of the black comedy that comes through in this scene is of course the fact that Betty is not a real nurse. I think people don't realise, until they sit in a cinema and hear other people laughing, just how funny this film is. Do you think people are hung up on the darker side and don't actually see that it's funny work?
NLB: Sometimes. I think it's hard for an audience to know when to laugh. It's such an immediate and spontaneous response, and sometimes we're dictated by who we're with and the general public, and if everybody else is not laughing, it can sometimes quell the feeling inside you and you put a damper on it. In yet another plug for the show at the Almeida, there is a certain quality like that at the moment. It's a play where people, if they know that it's about 9/11, they feel "I should have respect for that and I shouldn't laugh". But hopefully they'll quickly get past it because there's a lot of funny material in it. And so I think you should just go with the impulse, go with what you feel, rather than the dictates of society.
AM: When you first approached Nurse Betty on the first day, it must have been very different from the two films you made previously. What was the most immediate difference and was that a pro or con for you in making a film with that budget and that size of crew?
NLB: It was much different. I think that clip was of my first crane shot. There were a lot of firsts - I noticed just now that that was my first car thing, my first gun... And it's strange but I took it partly as a chance to try something different, try directing a script written by somebody else and see if I could make that experience work on its own terms. And not try to drag it over to my own sensibilities and have Betty's plane go down on the way to Rome at the end, but be true to the spirit of that movie. Even though there's a crazy duality to it - there're people scalping someone, there's violence and comedy and romance, but there's a sweet spirit guided mostly by her, and you can't drop that ball. So you have to keep that tone - the tone was the difficult part of that movie. That's one of my better qualities - I'll qualify that, it's my only good quality - that when I do go work on somebody else's material, I am quick to be true to what I see as the nature of it rather than try to make it more like my own stuff. So even though there's a car crash and a shootout in it, I knew the kind of film-making that was required, different from my own aesthetic. But I had a DP [director of photography] - you have to hire well - Jean Yves Escoffier, who also shot Possession, Good Will Hunting, The Human Stain which is coming out, and a bunch of lovely French films, and who passed away this year - but he thinks in pictures the way I think in words, so you complement yourself by hiring someone who knows what they're doing. So together we created the language of that movie. But I think that was the key, finding what in it intrigued me and then heightening it rather than make it something other than what it was.
AM: Before we go to questions from the audience, there's one final thing I'd like to ask. This was different, and then you made Possession, which was different again. Based on a Booker prize-winning book and has some period drama stuff. But with The Shape of Things and The Mercy Seat, there are more similarities between those two works and the films you started with, in terms of your looking at human beings, manipulation, truth. And I'm wondering, particularly with The Mercy Seat, how the whole 9/11 thing has affected how you see human beings? In The Mercy Seat, John Hanna's character is using the attacks on the Twin Towers as an excuse to stay in his mistress's apartment and not phone his wife to let her know whether he's alive or dead. And it sounds like the ultimate American hyprocrisy is to use this tragedy for an affair and we see it on a bigger, political level with things like the Patriot Act. Do you think that there's a strange attitude to 9/11 now in America and where do the "me, me, me" generation, who you chronicle in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbours, where are they standing, morally, now, two years after?
NLB: Just to be clear, you're talking about The Mercy Seat playing at the Almeida. That's an interesting question, because I think there's a moment when one looks at a tragedy like that and runs quickly through horror and aghast and "How could that happen?" while, in a way, in the rest of the world it happens everyday. Whether it happens on a scale of 3,000 or three, why is it so much more important when it happens to you? But that's the American answer, because it happened to us, that was the hitch, that it happened on our soil and we don't care for that. I think that the country, just by virtue of its geography, has the ability to be as intrusive or isolationist as it wants to. And so to have it happen at home was the really disquieting factor - not the number, not whatever.
I didn't write the play as a response to that attack - I'm not a New Yorker, I wasn't there at the time - the story came about six months later. But I knew just within myself that while it was packaged on television as a unified American response - CNN was always blurting "America Attacks", "America Responds", "America Rebuilds" - that it's made up of thousands of individual stories. And I knew that somewhere in those stories the possibility - and that's all I'm ever interested in working in, the realm of possibility, could it happen. Probability, I don't give a shit, but possibility is where the magic stuff is. And this was possible to me. Recently they dropped the tally of deaths at the World Trade Centre by 40 - of people that they had not been able to place for sure at the site, or couldn't even find out for sure if they even existed, and some of those cases were due to fraud, people either trying to change their lives or people trying to make money off someone who didn't really die in that catastrophe.
I wanted to extend the notion that someone may not be liberated by that moment, that heroism doesn't immediately just burst out of you. That a person who is prone to being "me, me, me" is prone to being more so on that day. And the people who might have a heroic side might in fact do that but also any variation in between. The person who would have grabbed a taxi in front of me two hours earlier might find himself later, not even sure why, scooping up someone and running downstairs with them in their arms. Those kinds of events create those kinds of moments. So I was just interested in a story that I hadn't seen yet and that hadn't been told, and knowing, of course, there was great selfishness on a day when many, many, many people were showing great selflessness. Other people were immediately taking care of those stories - the news, but also the first plays that came out of that were basically eulogies to fallen firemen. But it made sense to examine the other stories. And I think the character that John Hanna plays would be a co-worker of those guys who were sitting in that steam room [in Your Friends and Neighbours] and who knows what their reactions would have been. But he's in that window where anyone, on any given day, says "I wish I could change my life". While it's essentially a relationship play, it couldn't exist without that cloud hanging over it, that the opportunity for disappearing, because so many people did just do that. So that's the catalyst for that play.
AM: We have 10 minutes or so, so we'll open it up for audience questions now.
Q1: When you approach a new play, do you start with an idea, then story and character, or what?
NLB: It comes in all shapes and sizes, for me. Sometimes it'll be a character, sometimes it's a line of dialogue, sometimes I have an idea for an ending, more so than for a beginning. Or I know what the beginning of the story is, but I'm not sure where it's going. I don't have a rote way that I go about things. I'm not very good at working consistently. I tend to write - the actual desktime, I'm pretty good at and it's the only way I've found to write. God knows if I could find somebody else to write, I would do it. The actual planning out of something tends to go on in my head rather than me doing lines between things happening. I'm not good with a trail of Post-its to tell me what scene I need next. I like to finish a scene and then figure out what happens next and find my way to it. If it's not coming, then I walk away from it. I don't find great value in "I must write five pages everyday" because those five pages usually turn into placemats. There's nothing worse than staring at a blank screen and trying to be funny or profound or any of those things. It comes when it does.
Q2: After the screening last night, you said that there are sections of people who will try to change people's opinions by challenging them. I think your films and plays, by challenging people's opinions on what is modern art, are creating grounds for changing minds over time.
NLB: Thanks for that. I guess I see myself in a lofty, God-like position and therefore it's harder for their ideas to reach me.
[Laughter]
Whereas mine just sort of fall to Earth, because of the gravity that my peer God created. It's Newtonian theory. That's an interesting thing - I did actually ask specifically that no one from last night show up here today so I don't know where you get off, frankly.
[Laughter]
But I understand what you're saying. I do sort of feel both ways, not that I haven't had my opinion changed but I do sort of recoil when someone tries to fervently change my mind, like when I've gone to a movie with someone, and especially if I've paid for both of us, for them to have a different opinion about the ending of the movie and to forcibly try to change my mind about it, I don't take to that very well. I just think "That's your reaction to it, why don't you let me have my response to it, and in fact, why don't you just get a ride home, Mr Big Opinion".
[Laughter]
That is what I think about that. But in terms of my work, I think that mine is just so strong... I can't even hold that thought. I think it's wrong at least to imagine from your own point of view... for instance, I don't think that I'm creating art, but if you want to differ and you do think that, great. I don't think in those terms. And I also don't think that my work will change your life. I think that at its best, it will raise new questions, give you an alternative view of something and perhaps over time that might lead you to greater understanding about something. But in terms of changing someone's opinion, that's a tall order and I don't see how, in an hour and a half or two hours, that's likely to happen.
Q3: I read that the initial seeds for The Shape of Things was sown by the reaction to In the Company of Men. Is that true? And could Shape of Things have been done if you'd switched the gender of the two main characters?
NLB: Sure, it could have. I consider it the same gender, in fact. Given the raw material, you could hand it to any writer or director and they would come out with a different piece of work and probably be able to make it valid.
Q3: So was it a reaction to Company of Men?
NLB: I think what that was referring to there, was that I had been asked about the same sort of question. Could women have had the two parts of Chad and Howard and have the genders changed in that way? I thought that the men in that piece, what they were doing was particularly male. That pack mentality, and their interest was in the hunt rather than the kill, so it seemed a particularly male thing, what Chad and Howard were doing. That said, I think a woman can be just as duplicitous and clever as they are. I just imagine that they would do it in a different way. And so it was in thinking that through that the idea of someone like Evelyn came, that if it were to be about one woman, then it would be her playing these two men against each other. And it just sat there until I had the notion of someone using their relationship as an art project. Your raising this may bring about yet another play.
Q4: You're often compared to David Mamet - perhaps because of the similarity in your view of human behaviour. Are you influenced by him? And do you ever get mistaken for him?
NLB: He's usually the guy with the cigar, as a tip. Slightly older, more important, talks less.
[Laughter]
Yes, absolutely I'm influenced. I've liked his work for a long time and the comparison is happily taken on my side but he's probably sick of that shit. Here're some guys together and they work in an office and they say some naughty things - and this stuff is always compared to him. He's written a number of plays in American theatre that were kind of groundbreaking, with muscular language. So he was as big an influence as anybody, but there were any number of other influences and, as Alan pointed out earlier, as many from this country as from my own. He is definitely someone whose work I admire, and I know he knows of mine - because I was trying to make a film of one of his plays for a long time.
Audience member: Neil, we didn't hear who you're being compared with?
AM: David Mamet.
NLB: Oh, I'm sorry. Caryl Churchill. She's the one with the cigar. Yes, Mamet. I'm unabashedly a fan. I had a chance to meet Mamet but I didn't do it, he was sitting right in front of me but he was talking to someone. So it wasn't that I was too scared to go up and say "Hey I love your work" or "Ooh, I'm too cool for that now", it was because I have this thing instilled in me called manners and didn't break in. But I'm happy to tell anybody whose work I admire that I do. It can be just one film, it can be the first thing they've ever done. I don't have weird... like "My influences are Dreyer, of course; Lumiere, Edison, father of it all; DW Griffith, I guess that's about it." It doesn't matter what age you are or how many things you've done, if you've done one good thing it's better than most people will possibly do, so I think you should be heralded for your best work than your last work. Yeah, I'm quick to say who I like and not so quick to say who I dislike. Not to their face.
AM: I'm afraid we have to draw things to a close now. The Shape of Things opens in the UK on November 28, distributed by Momentum Pictures. And The Mercy Seat is playing at some theatre, I think it's called the Almeida? Thanks to Neil.
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