It's very hard to keep well-adjusted when suddenly there's this wave of interest 
Neil LaBute burst onto the American indie scene with caustic drama In The Company Of Men, about two blokes who seek revenge against women by seducing and dumping a deaf girl. The acidic Your Friends & Neighbours followed, before the sly comedy Nurse Betty and period piece/love story Possession. With The Shape Of Things he returns to his roots, adapting his own stage play into an invigorating, provocative exploration of manipulation, sex, art and artifice.
The Shape Of Things examines the effect of becoming more superficially appealing. Did you become more desirable once you became professionally successful?
Sure, yes, absolutely. You're embraced in a way. You were the same person, you were always writing the same way, but suddenly there seemed to be a collective turning of the head, toward you. Like anything, too much of a thing can be unbalancing. It's very hard to keep well-adjusted when suddenly there's this wave of interest and desire and all of those things. So yeah, that's difficult.
For better or worse, In The Company Of Men was heavily scrutinised when it came out, and had I allowed myself to soak all of that up and think, "Oh, this is 'Important'. What else 'Important' do I have to say?", I could probably still be thinking about it now. I'm happy that I went right into something else, and then made another movie, and I haven't really taken time to ever let myself get caught up in what it can mean.
You don't sit back thinking, "I'm Neil LaBute..."
No. I say, "I'm Neil LaBute," but I think of it with very little import. I constantly feel the need to, not to prove myself, but just to keep working. The desire is there to work. I've hung in for a long time doing work that wasn't getting noticed anywhere outside of the theatre that it was being done in, so it's nice to have a wider platform on which to work. I'm just happy to be doing what I always wanted to do.
When In The Company Of Men came out, a lot of people said you must be a misogynist. That was because you were being mean to a woman. Now you have a woman being mean to a man, so people will label you as a misogynist again...
Yeah, it hasn't helped. If this was my campaign to turn things around, I went about it badly. Because it's just the other end of the spectrum. I've had a few of those words levelled at me, but it doesn't faze me in any noticeable way, because I disagree. I think that I write good parts for men and women, and I don't look at them in those kind of political or gender ways. I'm just trying to tell a good story.
Your Friends & Neighbours was well made but it was like watching a car accident. It's entertaining, but it's really painful. You think, Do I want to praise it when it brings out these feelings? You examine the question in The Shape Of Things: Is there moral or immoral art? Is that something you're interested in given your Mormon faith?
Yes, absolutely. My faith has a definite attitude and thought about what art should be. That it should be to beautify, to enlighten and all of those things. It doesn't see great value in showing the negative things, whereas I've always felt you can get to that by showing the negative. So there's been an obvious kind of rift between us, in just mindsets. But I think people are always guided ultimately by that inner thing. They say, "I've got the compass and I've got to follow that one, whether it's slightly skewed or not. That's the moral compass that I have to go by." So that's the one that ultimately I'll keep following.
