Men? - interview with motion picture director Neil LaBute - Interview

Interview, Feb, 1999 by Lucinda Rosenfeld

Some people admire Neil LaBute's films. Others are horrified by the kinds of men he makes movies about, saying that it's a reactionary, sensationalist, careless vision. Is it? Here Lucida Rosenfeld talks to the controversial director about the male maelstrom

LUCINDA ROSENFELD: Your films paint modern masculinity as heinous, particularly through the characters of Chad [played by Aaron Eckhart] in In the Company of Men [1997] and Cary [Jason Patric] in Your Friends & Neighbors [1998]. Is it that assholes make good movie characters, or do you see yourself telling it the way it is?

NEIL LABUTE: The depictions aren't necessarily definitive, but I think they're pretty accurate. At the same time, assholes do make good dramatic characters. You're always walking that line between "I'm trying to say something" and "I've got to amaze the audience or make them giggle." It's that stand-on-one-foot-at-the-chalkboard sort of thing.

LR: Fair enough. But bach to the asshole factor. Is this the way men have always been and always will be? Of are they reacting to thirty-odd years of feminism?

NL: First I would probably place men at the bottom of the food chain. On a grander scale, I would say they're reacting to change. Feminism has got to be part of that. What's absolutely frightening to men like Chad and Cary is loss of control. The American businessman - the Chad figure - has been a certain way for fifty years, and so have a lot of his dinosaur thoughts. But the last thirty years have been very volatile. We went through a period of giving lip service [to feminism] and saying, "Yes, that's fine." There was a shorter period, around the time In the Company of Men came out, when I had the sense that people were saying, "I really don't care what's correct. I'm tired of you telling me what I should think and I'm not going to take it. And if I can't do that overtly, I'm going to find some other way to let that feeling out." That's how Jerry [Ben Stiller] in Your Friends & Neighbors thinks.

LR: How is it that the two male characters in your films who manifest the most anger and sadism toward women - Chad and Cary again - are also the ones who are good-looking and have high-powered professional jobs and no apparent difficulty getting laid?

NL: I was very careful to cast guys who were very good-looking and very fit and who had a certain sense of privilege about them, because with that sense of privilege comes contempt. It isn't enough for Chad to do the things he's doing. He has to then go to his boss's office to humiliate an intern [Jason Dixie]. He doesn't just have to bed Christine [Stacy Edwards], he has to do it in his boss's hotel room. He's always pushing the envelope a little further. Inevitably, the odds are going to go against a person like that. I don't show it in the film, but I could see where the trail was leading: Ten years later, Chad is in prison.

LR: Speaking as a red-blooded heterosexual female, I found Cary beyond revolting. But I definitely understood the appeal of Chad. He's the cocky frat boy who gets all the girls. Any comments?

NL: It's been interesting to me to see how many women have been attracted to both those characters, in spite of what they're seeing. Very bright women have said, "I know I shouldn't like them. But there's still something innately physically attractive about them. And I want them to be better than they are."

LR: By far the most upsetting scene for me in Your Friends & Neighbors is when Cary freaks out on the woman who gets her menstrual blood on his sheets. What's behind that specific explosion?

NL: That's Cary's one moment of control-loss. The great "unmasking" is that after being with this character for an hour or so, you then realize he works in a hospital, in a care-giving profession. For me, that was a shocking idea.

LR: I sometimes wonder if the so-called differences between men and women aren't overstressed - as in the case of that inane book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. At the end of the day, don't men and women basically want the same things - i.e., someone to eat dinner with, someone to listen to their boring stories about the office, a warm body in their bed?

NL: It's different paths to the same kingdom. I'm a firm believer in the "different but equal" philosophy. Right now, it may be easier for us to say communication breaks down on gender lines. I'm not sure. My best male friend is my best friend until he crosses me. We're all protective of the self.

LR: How are your movies informed by personal experiences?

NL: I see bits and pieces of me in all the characters in my films. You make some sort of goulash of fact and fiction. The rest is inferred and invented, There's one true story in Your Friends & Neighbors. Someone I knew through a friend actually did receive a letter from a disgruntled girlfriend on hospital stationary that said, "You're on a list . . ." [of people diagnosed HIV-positive]. And he went around being tested for a year.

LR: Are your films hopeful?

NL: I wouldn't call them cynical. If anything, I find them skeptical. Maybe they're pitiful representations of real life. But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife. Besides, it's not like you're supposed to embrace these characters and want to see them in sequels. I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction. Or if they looked at them and thought, "I don't recognize any human traits there." When people have come out of the theater and said to me, "God, I didn't like anybody in that movie," I've thought, "Well, then you're relatively healthy."