Apr/May 2003

Art and Commerce

Neil LaBute is as comfortable writing for the stage as for the screen, so it should come as no surprise that it took him about twenty minutes to write the adaptation of his latest, The Shape of Things.

By Alejandro Ferreyra

Neil LaBute’s films can do many things. They can inspire love as Possession does, or fantasy like Nurse Betty. But in the case of his first two films, In The Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, the effect was more of repulsion. Not for the director’s elegantly understated camerawork or his screenplays, but rather the characters within them.

Neighbors took the minds of the married masses and gave them LaBute’s trademark dialogue, which ranges from the endearingly snide to the shockingly perverse. The end result was an exploration of relationships that were as bleak as they were exploitive. Men, though, was the Neighbors times ten with a quarter of the cast. Boiled down, it’s about two men torturing a deaf woman with love as their flogging stick. The film garnered as
much outrage as it did praise, mostly from people who were put off by its unflinching look at a sadistic act, even labeling it misogynistic.
 

LaBute’s latest, The Shape of Things is a return to his earlier films. Originally a play, Things centers around two college couples who are not only trying to find themselves, but their places in life and between each other. It mixes the focus of Neighbors with the pain of Men. Ironically, writing Things was an escape for LaBute, who was busy working on Possession when he needed to take a break from his Victorian shoot.

“Writing is the thing that gives me the most pleasure:’ LaBute proudly claims. “I really enjoy working with actors and rehearsal, and I’m so new to film, relatively speaking. But there’s also a lot of pressure that comes with that. I had been working for so long that I needed to stop thinking about those characters. During a holiday break, I plunged into writing, because the only way I could leave the Possession characters behind was to

find another set of characters.”

It would be those four college kids that refreshed LaBute for the rest of the shoot. Even though he was working on a film, as he was writing found where the story truly belonged. LaBute, who comes from a theater background, graduated with a theater degree from Brigham Young University, along with his friend and longtime collaborator, actor Aaron Eckhardt. “It was completely a play I wrote it and just said, ‘This is a play,' he explains. “If it’s a job I’ve been hired to do, whether I’m adapting something or whatever for Universal, then I know the parameters of what I’m doing—the structure of it. But when I sit down and write my own material, I kind of just go. And if they keep on staying in that same room, I kind of say to myself, ‘That looks like a play.’ Everything I write tends to have a lot of dialogue, so it’s not like, ‘Ooooh, they’re talking a lot, so it’s a play.”

As unconventional as it sounds, you can’t argue with results. He’s won at Sundance and at Cannes even with unorthodox writing methods. “I don’t do a lot of outlining, that sort of thing:’ he admits. “I just tend to play it out in my head and try to connect the pieces. And then there’s a point where it’s just spilling out of me and I have to put it down on paper.”

It was April 2001 when The Shape of Things finished pouring out onto the paper and casting was finalized. Rachel Weisz, Paul Rudd, Gretchen Mol, and Fredrick Weller were cast as the four students whose lives would be turned upside down on stage, and eventually, on screen. Its first outing was in London, where it garnered rave reviews, and continued to New York with the original cast, where it was nominated for two Drama Desk
awards. The impetus for the film version, though, came in London, where LaBute was feeling his most safe, most comfortable.
 

“The film came to be through happenstance,” says LaBute. “We were enjoying the process of rehearsing the play, and all those people that were working on it had film experience. So, it wasn’t a crazy idea like, ‘Hey, let’s go make movie,' It was people who are known as much for their film work as their stage work. I think it was looking for an extension of the pleasure. I hadn’t directed on the stage for a while, and it was nice to be working with actors and not worrying about the weather or anything. I was in England at the time of course, and weather was one of the banes of my existence while I was trying to do Possession. So it was really nice to just suddenly pare it all down to the essentials that I like... actors, script. But even before it began its run, in rehearsal, we were like, ‘This is really nice. Maybe we can make a movie from this.'”
 

At first, they thought of making a digital video feature and creating something low key that leant itself to the few scenes of the play But around the time they were kicking the idea around of making it into a movie, they found themselves a fan that wanted to make something more than a digital video.

“Rachel had just finished working with [production company] Working Title on About A Boy;’ LaBute explains. “One of the partners of that company, Eric Fellner, saw the play and loved it. He said, ‘This can be a movie. How can I he involved?’ Working Title had an existing partnership with Focus Features, which had a production deal with LaBute. “So we had both the English and American sides who were interested in crafting films that made sense to them, he adds.”

“There wasn’t the dance of trying to persuade a studio that it was a studio movie, because it wasn’t. It was sort of unabashedly saying, ‘Yes, it’s from a play and still very theatrical in its presentation.' I was working with two companies who believed in what I was trying to create—hopefully a good film. The end result isn’t commerce, it’s artistry... and artistry can lead to commerce.”

The two production companies put in the money (which LaBute estimated at $3 million), and the stage cast came to California to shoot what may have been the easiest adaptation ever to make its way onto the screen. “[It took me] about twenty minutes,’ he confesses with a laugh when asked how long the adaptation from play to screenplay took. “Quite honestly I wrote ‘FADE IN:’ at the top, and went from there. [It] was sort of a literal lifting from the format it was in into my screenwriting software?’ The only thing that confounded LaBute was how he was going to make one particular scene, the most important in the play, work on screen.

“There’s a theatrical moment in the play where the piece takes a 90 degree turn, where we find out that it’s no longer about relationships. And what worked incredibly well in the theater was the idea of having the actor break the fourth wall while all of the other actors sat in the auditorium with the audience as she gave a speech. So there’s this great, sort of break the fourth wall and they’re [the audience] involved. Not only are they involved and
shocked by what they’ve heard, hopefully, but they’re watching the other actors react as well. It was a lovely thing, and [the actor] could play off the audience.”

“But what I realized as I thought it through, was the more the camera was directly addressed, there was no way for that same experience to take place. It was always going to be an audience watching an audience watch her, Therefore, it wasn’t as effective. You suddenly were a voyeur, and it wasn’t direct enough. It didn’t make sense to have her look at the camera all the time because she’s in the room full of people, you know? You'd have to keep on moving the camera everywhere. God forbid, I would move the camera."

LaBute found a way to make it work well, limiting the use of camera movements. Other than that, things weren’t difficult in comparison to his other adapted work. The Shape of Things wasn’t the first LaBute film to be taken from another source. Possession was based on a novel by AS. Byatt, but this was different. First, Things was his play, and his adaptation. Secondly, although he received credit on the Possession screenplay, he got help
from Laura Jones, who had also adapted Angela’s Ashes and Oscar and Lucinda.

“It’s a whole other beast,” states LaBute about bringing the Booker Prize winning novel to the screen. “I learned a lot from Laura Jones, who adapted so many interesting novels, and I thought very well. I learned a lot watching her work, because she laid all the groundwork as we were going along. I was busy working on Nurse Betty and we were talking and running things past each other. But she was really finding ways to break that book down into useable chunks. You go in, hopefully at least, a fan of the material, and I was a big fan of the material. So I didn’t want to walk in saying, ‘God I love Possession,’ and at the other end of it, people saying, ‘What exactly did you love? None of it’s there? To take that novel and distill it into less than two hours, took an incredible amount of work, and I couldn’t have been happier doing it because it was a pleasure to work on. But there were times when I was like, ‘What have I done? This is why it’s been sitting around for ten years, because it’s really hard, and people aren’t just running towards work. Not just in Hollywood, but anywhere. You don’t just look at it and say, ‘Oh, ditches. Perfect, where’s my shovel?’ You say, ‘Hmrn, okay, a ditch,' then off you go. But it was a great deal of work, a very hard task. I found no correlation in adapting The Shape of Things and Possession.”

That was because, thanks to the freedoms given to him by the producers to make his play into his film, there were only a few changes made to the structure of the story Although written in play format, the stage version had no intermissions so it played seamlessly and easily Maybe too easily “There were some nasty little cuts throughout the piece,” confesses LaBute, “and not so much for time, but for the actors who’ve been doing it for [so long]. They had to go back and relearn it a little bit because their cues weren’t the same. I took lines out randomly... I’d make it work. It wasn’t like suddenly they didn’t make sense. But I made it so that they would refigure it because I knew they were going over to film. I didn’t want them to just fall back on any old habits.”

The changes didn’t faze the actors. After spending nine months with their characters, they took on the challenge and, in turn, helped LaBute make the film in record time. “The Shape of Things was filmed in 19 shooting days, basically in sequence. That could never have been done if they didn’t know their parts so intimately. We had the same kind of vibrancy and good will at the end of shooting that we had when we all first met.”

The Shape of Things is LaBute’s fifth feature film, but the prolific writer does so much more. Although he’s not one to write everyday (“I find it counterproductive,” he says), it’s hard to imagine how he continually pens such amazing material for both mediums. Does he prefer one over the other?

“Because of the way I write, I don’t feel like I love one more than the other. In terms of actually film or theater, I’d probably lean more towards theater because it just affords me — in terms of directing — to work with the elements I like the most. And that like probably comes from feeling most comfortable with, feeling more assured of myself working with. But in terms of writing, I’d probably say down the middle.”

As long as he keeps on doing both, we can be assured American film we'll continue to surprise, outrage, and shake every emotion within us. Because that’s what Neil LaBute movies do.