Writer/director Neil LaBute. NEIL LABUTE: NURSING BETTY
By
Alex Simon
Editor’s Note: The following article appeared in the September 2000 issue of Venice Magazine.
Some go through life and find controversy heaped upon them, while others seem to seek it out. Writer-director Neil LaBute seems to have been born into the latter category. With the release of his freshman feature In the Company of Men in 1997, LaBute drew the ire of feminists, humanists and all stalwarts of the world of political correctness in his tale of two yuppies who, while on assignment in another city, make a pact to date the same woman, then dump her, as a sort of sociological experiment. While one critic vehemently labeled it "the verbal equivalent of a snuff film," In the Company of Men went on to become not only highly thought of in certain circles, it won the Filmmaker's Trophy at Sundance, as well as the New York Film Critics' Circle Award for Best First Feature and an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. LaBute had arrived on the cinematic map.
Born in Detroit March 19, 1963, LaBute has been grabbing the bull by the horns almost from day one. After receiving a full scholarship to the Mormon church owned and run Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, LaBute converted to Mormonism while a student. In spite of his newfound faith, LaBute found himself still attracted to pushing people's buttons, writing and directing plays and short films which the faculty, and many of the students, at the conservative university found highly inflammatory.
LaBute went on to study in the Graduate Dramatic Writing Program at NYU, during which time he was awarded a fellowship to study at the Royal Court Theater in London. He also attended the Sundance Institute's Playwrights Lab. LaBute's plays include "Filthy Talk for Troubled Times," "Rounder," "Sanguinarians & Sycophants," and "Ravages." He also penned adaptations of "Dracula" and "Woyzeck," which have been produced at venues in this country, and abroad. Three of LaBute's one act plays were recently staged by director Joe Mantello under the title "bash, latterday plays." The Beverly Hills production of "bash" was recently aired on Showtime. LaBute's second film, 1998's Your Friends and Neighbors covered similar territory as Men, dealing with a group of yuppies struggling with infidelity and skeletons in their closets.
LaBute's latest film is his first that he has not penned (it was written by John C. Richards and James Flamberg). Nurse Betty tells the Candide-like journey of a small town waitress (Reneé Zellweger) who, after witnessing the contract killing of her husband (LaBute regular Aaron Eckhart) at the hands of two hitmen (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) goes into delusional shock, believing herself to be a character in her favorite soap "A Reason to Live," who is engaged to hunky Dr. David Ravell (Greg Kinnear). Betty makes the cross-country trek to California to claim her beau, with the two hitmen, who realized they've left a live witness, in hot pursuit. Nurse Betty is a clever black comedy full of LaBute's trademark laughter combined with jaw-dropping horror.
Neil LaBute sat down with Venice recently in a spacious hotel suite overlooking the Manhattan skyline. Contrary to being the wild-eyed anarchist you might picture, LaBute more closely resembles a giant teddy bear come to life. He is relatively soft-spoken, choosing his words succinctly and carefully, and exudes a real sweetness and gentility, unlike many of the people about whom he writes.
Was it difficult for you not working from your own script this time?
Neil LaBute: Not difficult, it was actually very freeing in a way because I'd done it in the theater before. It's actually much easier to be clear-headed about something that another person has written. There was an objectivity that doesn't necessarily exist when you write something yourself. So the first time I read the script, I read it like an audience member.
Your other two films also have amazing ensemble casts. Can you talk about some of your casting choices in this?
They were all good people. Reneé I went after in a big way, because I thought we had to have someone who seems to be very sweet and nice, which she really is in reality. Morgan and Chris were actually someone else's idea. That was the part of the script I was a little leery of at first. I mean, hitmen, we've seen a lot of hitmen in movies the past few years. I didn't quite know how to make that fresh until someone suggested the two of them. Then I thought, okay, that's a group I haven't seen before, in terms of two black hitmen. I thought that was clever. Aaron, I knew I wanted him in there somewhere, and he always seems to gravitate towards the most goofy, outlandish part he can get. Greg Kinnear...I knew that both the soap opera and that character could be made fun of if we weren't careful, and then you'd loose sympathy for Betty if she were to fall for this arrogant jerk and be sucked into this horrible TV show. So I wanted someone who we could trade on their good will, good nature in the same way that you do for Betty, and I think that was there for Greg, as well. He projects this image of being a really nice guy, and he's nice-looking, and he's funny, and he understood how to make all that work. But he also brought an extra dimension to the part where you really sort of feel sorry for the guy.
A lot of it was really scary, the fact that Betty was completely delusional and basically stalking Greg Kinnear. That felt very realistic.
We wanted it to be, so going into it we met with folks who were on "General Hospital" and "Port Charles," and they told us some stories about experiences they had with delusional fans. Also we really tried to copy their style into "A Reason to Live" so it felt like a real soap.
Also, in spite of a lot of brutality on-screen, you never linger on it, and the film still retains an overall sweetness because of that.
Right, I'm glad you felt that way, because that was our intention, as well. Even the shoot-out outside the hospital, we shot and cut it in such an elliptical way, so the scene wasn't about the shooting. It doesn't feel like a big, fluid action scene, and therefore becomes about something else. Violence usually erupts so quickly anyway that before you know it, it's over.
I have to say that this is the only film I've seen Chris Rock in where I liked his work. I love his stand-up, but as an actor, I always thought he was too over-the-top.
It was a big leap, because there's always the possibility that people will be underwhelmed. I mean, when you're standing next to Morgan Freeman, who can underplay any actor around, that's very tough. When Morgan's on the screen, you can't help but watch him. So there's the possibility of people walking out of the movie having some vague disappointment with Chris, saying "He wasn't as funny as I thought he'd be." But what I think Chris wanted was to play a character who, on paper, is nothing like that persona he's created as a comedian, which really isn't Chris anyway. He's incredibly clever, but like every comedian I've met, he doesn't always want to be "on."
How was it working with Morgan Freeman?
Fantastic. Like Reneé, what you imagine is what you get. He comes in, there's authority there. He knows screen acting. He knows what works for him. There were many times when I was completely deferential to him, just saying that he was absolutely right and that he knew what worked for him. It's a fairly egoless thing for me to do that. It's all about making a good movie. It's not about being afraid that you'll look like you won't know what's going on. He just comes in, knows his lines, bangs it out in two or three takes and is ready to move on.
Do you like to work fairly quickly as well?
Yeah, I like to keep things moving. In the same way I'm not a slave to the camera, I also don't want to sit around and take three hours to light something. One of the biggest frustrations for me, because I love actors and I love working with them, is when people have lit for a while and the actors come on and they're not hitting it. After three or four takes people start rolling their eyes in frustration because they've been working for 3-4 hours, where the actors have been working for 15 minutes. You have to give them some time. I go until I know I've got it. I'm not afraid to shoot a lot of stuff. But I also like to shoot in long takes and hope I can get a five minute stretch where you don't have to cut, because I like watching that kind of thing.
Are you a Robert Altman fan? Your style reminds me of his.
Yeah, I love Altman, although I don't know him. I just saw McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) again the other night and was just blown away. You can't put your finger on what makes it so good, you just know that all the elements are there working. I never saw Warren Beatty, who I like a great deal, feel so free, sitting there grumbling with his gold tooth. I like all that ensemble stuff that Altman does, and the smaller films like Vincent and Theo.
Let's talk about your background.
I was born in Detroit, but moved to Spokane, Washington when I was about 4 or 5.
What were you like as a kid?
I was a watcher of movies and a doer of plays. I wasn't like one of those Spielbergian guys running around with a super 8 camera. It was more theater and theater acting, because that was the stuff that was available to me. I lived near a lake, worked on a farm, and had a great, sort of My Dog Skip upbringing. (laughs)
Were either of your parents artistic?
My mom's a big lover of films and theater, and is a big Anglophile. Her father is from London. I wasn't pushed in that direction by what I'd seen them do. It was just one of those things where you wake up one day and bang, I really like the experience of watching movies. I was student body President in high school, and probably the only one in the school's history that never showed up to football games because I was always at the movies on Friday night!
What were some of the movies you fell in love with during that time?
It was the tail end of the 70's, so things like Apocalypse Now, Manhattan, Reds, which I probably saw more times than Beatty did! (laughs) I must've seen it 15 times in the theater. I was always trying to find foreign films as well, like Soldier of Orange, The Fourth Man, I just thought Paul Verhoeven did some amazing stuff. My mom was the same way. PBS would run foreign films every week, so she'd sit me down and one week we'd watch Rashomon, the next Wild Strawberries...not that I always got everything, but I knew early on that these films did not have the same rhythm as the films I'd go and see and the local cineplex.
For college you went to BYU and you were not, at that time, a Mormon. It seems like a curious choice.
Well, it's a curious choice but it was a logical choice because they offered the most money and the best scholarship. Going there I met fantastic actors and they had great facilities, but in terms of the kind of work I wound up writing and doing, it seems completely different from the ideals of the school. Their idea of art is to use it as an instructional tool, and something to glorify...they don't even understand this whole idea to use bad to show good. I think as a student, wherever you go, you're there to sort of rock the place. So I think wherever I'd gone, I would have been like "What do you mean I can't walk on that grass? What do you mean I can't take that class?" I just think that's what you do when you're young. And a lot of people keep that streak in them, like Altman. I think he's still like a college kid in many ways. "You can't tell me not to do that," and then he'll go off and do it really well and sort of rub it in their face. I found a very tight box at BYU that made me want to find out how tight the lid was on, and how far up the sides I could go.
What was it like making the jump from theater to film?
Well the jump was very gradual, because I actually had a group of people come to me and ask if I could adapt one of my plays for the screen. I said "Sure, just put FADE IN in the beginning," right? (laughs) I got so frustrated waiting around for them to raise money, I thought 'This is crazy. I can't spend a year on one project. I could have done four plays by now!" Eventually I learned that that's just the way it is. It takes that long sometimes. So I got the rights back to the play, and Sundance had sort of exploded onto the scene at that time and you'd hear the story about the $25,000 movie that swept the festival and I thought, 'I can do that.' Now if I had actually investigated it, I probably never would have attempted to make a movie because behind all those romantic stories are things like "Well, we also had to get another $100,000 to get it on the screen." That was very much the same thing with In the Company of Men. I shot it for $23,000 and then there it sat. And I had to get the money to take it from there to the screen...At the end, the final budget was probably around $200,000 which is a far cry from the fairy tale of $25,000!
Were there any films you studied prior to making In the Company of Men?
Yeah, the films of Eric Rohmer. He just lets his camera sit on people while they talk. He doesn't use a lot of music. They really appealed to me as a person. I didn't feel the need to have a score or cut a lot. I just liked watching these actors. I felt compelled to make Friends and Neighbors the same way, so people wouldn't think that it was a fluke due to the low budget. But I knew that Betty was a different type of film and that you couldn't shoot it the same way and it had to have a fluidity to it. But, if you took Nurse Betty and ran it next to Gone in 60 Seconds, you wouldn't say that Betty is a movie that flies! (laughs) It's comparatively very still.
Any advice for first time directors?
Make your own fun. It's never been easier to have a movie you shot in your back yard with your parents' video camera go up on the screen. While there is something special about shooting on film, never let yourself wait until you have the money to shoot it on film. You have to get it in your head that it's a matter of "when," not "if." I waited out a lot of people who were incredibly talented and became lawyers or CPA's, because they wanted more ready cash and didn't want to go out and wait tables and work third shift jobs to get there. I literally just persevered where a lot of people said "This isn't worth it." You have to get it in your head that it's going to happen, and you have to make it happen. That's all that worked for me. It always appears that you came from nowhere, but as always, it's a 12 year overnight success story.
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