Neil LaBute director of Wrecks
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

We don’t do much New York City theatre coverage on SuicideGirls but an exception must be made for the daring brilliance of Neil LaBute. Wrecks, written and directed by LaBute, is currently up at the world famous Public Theater in Manhattan. Wrecks is a one man show which stars Ed Harris and had a run at the Everyman Palace Theatre in Cork. It recently opened in the United States, where Harris again has taken the stage.

Wrecks is a very powerful and disturbing work, which is par for the course for LaBute. Harris plays Ed Carr a man at the funeral for his wife talking directly to the audience. Carr is a wonderful character who at times stalks the stage like a panther smoking cigarettes. When memories of his wife flow through his mind he exhibits contemplation, but never regret. Harris does an amazing job of making a man that would be considered insane in any other context feel as human as the rest of us.

Check out the official site for Wrecks

Daniel Robert Epstein: I remember that your play This Is How It Goes was inspired by a letter you received [LaBute got a letter from someone stating that the part in Nurse Betty where Renée Zellweger kisses Morgan Freeman was unacceptable because she is white and he is black].

Neil LaBute: Yeah that was one of the catalysts. I think the play This Is How It Goes was rumbling around in my head but the racial angle came from having this letter and wanting to do something about that and finding a fit with that play and the element of racism.

DRE: Was Wrecks inspired by anything from real life like that?

Neil: Not real life, no. The reason I’m hesitating is if I consider that letter real life. That is because it is not really connected to anything, it’s connected to a movie [Nurse Betty] which isn’t real life. Wrecks came from my desire to work again in some context with a Greek tragedy. In two of the three plays that make up Bash, I used Greek tragedies as a jumping off point. So I was curious about doing it again and I liked the monologue form and I’d always been interested in doing an Oedipus. So I started writing that without any real connection other than thinking, “Oh one day this might make a nice evening.” I guess nice is a subjective word. That was about as far as I got. I really just started writing on my own as I often still do and that’s what came of it.

DRE: Why was Wrecks first shown in Ireland?

Neil: I had the opportunity to do a piece of work in Cork. Someone that I knew in Dublin had taken over a theater in Cork and we made a loose agreement that it’d be nice to work together sometime. Once Cork was chosen as the capital of culture last year he said, “Well, we’ll be doing theater throughout the year as part of this festival. Would you have anything you want to do?” That’s when I hooked onto the idea of taking Wrecks there because that was something I felt I could legitimately rehearse and have it be far from where I was going to be.

DRE: I walked into Wrecks not having any idea what the show was about.

Neil: That’s great. As it is for all audiences, after reviews come out it tends to not be the case. People always want to say they figured it out or spill the beans or something. But it does legitimately make it hard to talk about sometimes but one can’t always speak in non-specific terms. But you have to leave it up to the taste and the abilities of the critics.

DRE: I interviewed Chuck Palahniuk a few years ago and he’s used a number of twist endings in his novels. I asked him “What makes you keep going for the twist ending?” He said, “Well everything is a twist ending nowadays. You find out that Columbus didn’t really discover America. Thomas Jefferson slept with slaves.” I thought that was an interesting point. Why you like the twists so much?

Neil: Maybe I’m related to O. Henry. I’ve always enjoyed them as an audience member. A lot of times you write what you enjoy or what you wish you saw more of. That statement by Chuck is interesting because it’s probably true that in the arts and in life itself we’re surprised by what we see or what happens to us or how things end up. Even outside of that I think life itself is a twist ending. We never know where things are going to end up. Some may seem to set the building blocks but I think that most people are surprised by where they end up working and how things come to be. Even for myself as a younger person you think “This is something I want to do” but how you got there was certainly a surprise. But I like the idea of keeping ahead of the audience or reversing on them and going in a different direction. I think it’s part of my desire to make the audience work and keep up and enjoy the ride. It’s one of the tools of telling a tale but it’s also something you can get in a bit of a rut with. Now if I don’t have one people will say that’s the surprise.

DRE: Yeah, exactly [laughs].

Neil: “The twist is gone, he didn’t have the twist.” You go, “Ok, this is the can’t win portion of our show.” So to me it has to be something that ultimately can support itself no matter how the thing ends up. Particularly in this case, it’s nice for the audience to come fresh to something but something also has to hold up if someone does hear about it or if they just guess. It has to work after leaving the theater. The performance and the text have to give you some pleasure beyond that and again the Greeks were dealing with stories that were mythical even at the time they were they were telling these stories. So I think very few people came to a production of Medea and went “Holy shit! She killed the kids!” They knew this was going to happen and it was in the telling of it that really brought about the difference in the stories. So for me if someone comes in and goes, “Wrecks, I wonder if this is Oedipus story.” It should slowly bring a pleasure to them rather than it being something you have to figure out.

DRE: Did you allow Ed Harris to change anything?

Neil: Well in theater, the writer is still given a great deal of respect. I don’t think to a fault but some people can misuse that. Some people are “It’s perfect, don’t touch it.” For me it’s always the jumping off point but that should not suggest that I’m not careful about what I write. I spend plenty of time worrying about it and trying to get it just right for my taste. But it’s amazing what somebody else brings to it. Also an actor who’s devouring the part and becoming that person very quickly scoots past you and starts knowing more about it than you do. In the case of Wrecks, the character of Ed Carr is the entire piece. I also trust Ed [Harris] not just as an actor specifically in this but as an actor in general and as a director. So I was open to whatever, even down to the last couple days when we were still tinkering. Since the character breaks the fourth wall, it also depends on how an audience is reacting to him and that will make him play things a certain way. That’s a little different interpretation as opposed to changing text. We certainly added stuff between Ireland and here. I leaned on him a great deal in terms of shaping that and I think he did the same thing for me because for the most part the director is the person who is watching the nuance of what he’s doing and saying, “You know, the modulation of this is better tonight than it was before. I think you shot too early to this emotion.” So it’s a very collaborative thing at its best and I’m quick to want to do that and I think he was someone who’s very straightforward and good about collaborating.

DRE: There is a lot of real cigarette smoking in the play and at the performance people were uncomfortable, coughing and moving in their seats. Did you want to do that or did this character just smoke?

Neil: It came out of the natural quality of this guy being a smoker and you can’t help but play that a little bit, even with some of the dialogue that’s written in there. He asks questions of the audience saying, “I won’t smoke if you don’t want me to.” But you’re banking on that invisible fence that audiences have laid down around them that most of them aren’t going to pipe up and say anything.

DRE: Right, I almost did but I wasn’t sure if I’m supposed to or not.

Neil: Well that’s the thing and that’s why most people won’t. Occasionally somebody will but Ed has the ammunition there. The dialogue works if somebody happens to say something. Ed is like “I don’t know if anyone in their right mind is going to say something to a widower.” He can just go right on and play with it and often he’ll zero in on the person that said something and say, “I can wait. I have willpower.” He’ll feed off that audience in a way. So for me it was more of a character thing. It was representative in another way of a man who has heard “the truth” but he takes another path. He’s heard all the “you shouldn’t smoke, it’s bad for you.” But he continues. He has obviously taken a path in life in morality that was different than most people. It was metaphoric but also again rooted in a 21st century way in the oedipal idea. I wanted some sense of a plague that he had brought into the home and the idea is suggested that his wife may have gotten cancer from his smoking. So the idea that they both are suffering from this thing that he’s brought in, being smoking in this case, and that he continues to do it gave me some sense at least of that plague that ravages or hangs over him.

DRE: This character seems like one of your happier characters. Just as a bad example, if a serial killer is never caught, I think that serial killer would be pretty happy. He has those things that he always wanted to do and he may still be crazy but he’s happy.

Neil: I think that you’re right. I don’t liken this guy into a serial killer but I understand your analogy. The great question of the play is “Is it true or not? Did he really love her or not? Can you in fact love somebody that you lied to essentially?” and in a sense, betrayed all of your life. That’s an interesting question to raise but I believe that he believes that he loves her. It sounds like love, the way he describes it through most of the play. I think he’s coming from a very different place than a lot of the characters that I’ve written. He’s not someone who’s driven to best someone at work or to make themselves feel better by hurting somebody else. He is not driven by negativity. It is all positive but the only hitch is that nobody else will agree that this is a great way to spend your life. He makes that argument again at the end, “I don’t feel that I’ve hurt anyone.” Yet he’s telling us that there’s a possibility he never told the woman he was with. So obviously he was smart enough to know that most societies would say, “Hey, this just is not going to fly.” But Ed is very compelling and he makes a fair case for it.

DRE: Did you direct this play just because you had the time or did you specifically say “I want to direct this one”?

Neil: I said, “Hey, it’s Ed Harris.” I thought it would be cool to hang out with him. But also it was something that I felt I could legitimately be doing even if I was doing something else. During that period I was working on Wicker Man and yet because of the nature of a one person show you just can’t rehearse that long because you just tire the actor out. So the rehearsal period was relatively short and those days within the rehearsal period were relatively short. Usually when I don’t direct it’s a case of just not being able to be in that city or I’m not free at that time, that sort of thing. So I’ve tried to split it up pretty much between availability and desire.

DRE: You’ve had some amazing directors direct your other plays. But even so, do they do things that you wouldn’t do if you were directing it on stage?

Neil: Of course. Everybody’s going to interpret something different. Someone would take this play and do it differently. No doubt. I can’t imagine they would come up with the same production. They would have a different designer or even with the same designer and the same set they would have blocked it differently. I think, for better or worse, I always have some production in my head. It is a production that I carry around and can see and can imagine. So it’s always interesting to me to see what somebody else comes up with. As you say, I’ve had very good people and I’ve had very good luck with those people. I tend to rewrite more with other directors because again you have another set of eyes who are examining the material and they have their own needs for the thing. So you end up having another person that you’re serving. For the most part, the times I’ve directed I’ve probably rewritten less but again I think that comes down to having more intelligent sets of eyes around who are keeping you honest.

DRE: As a director that started off in independent films and still does a lot of theatre, what did you think when Warner Bros decided to not screen The Wicker Man for critics?

Neil: I thought it was dangerous and more and more people are doing that with their films. At this point people think there’s something wrong with the movie if you don’t screen it. I bought into the notion because I hate it when people find out the ending in advance. I felt that it was ok to keep that from people for as long as possible but ultimately I think it was a mistake to not screen it for the critics because they turn on things in a certain way or are highly suspicious of it and believe there must be a problem.

DRE: You got beat up a little bit this summer with the movie.

Neil: That’s generous of you to say “a little bit.” I got a good old fashioned ass whipping.

DRE: Your films always polarize people but it seemed that Wicker Man didn’t polarize people.

Neil: Not this time, this was the great unifier. Everybody got on the same boat this time. Save me a seat on the good ferry smash LaBute in the face.

DRE: Obviously the film was an experiment for you. That was obvious to everyone, especially your fans. Do you feel the experiment was successful even though the movie wasn’t?

Neil: Yeah, I do. I went to Venice and screened it and international critics were, not kinder, they just found more in it. They seemed to find the humor and not think it was unintentional. That was one of the great catches, when people thought I must not realize that some of this stuff is funny. That’s part of it being sold as a straight horror movie. In straight horror movies you tend to find less irony and humor so that was weird for me. But screening it over in Venice I was like, “You know, I’m absolutely fine with it because I like what we did.” Nic [Cage] called me from Thailand where he was filming and said, “You know, we did something very different and people either don’t like it or they take time to catch up with it or whatever. I’m glad we didn’t do it any differently.” That was nice to hear. We took a risk and that’s always a good thing and you learn a lot but you wish that the art form wasn’t so damn expensive. That you could just pick up a sketch pad and say, “Well, fuck I’m going to try and look at a lady from 30 different points of view here and we’ll call it cubism. Oh well that didn’t work. Fuck, I’ll throw that piece of paper out.”

DRE: People were quick to bring out the misogynistic brush with Wicker Man.

Neil: They were happy to do that again, which I fully expected. I was sort of playing into that. I thought, “I should go right to the heart of the matter, go right to the most classic struggle of men and women in a context like this.” I knew that that would be there. But again there’s a certain provoking, a twinkle in my eye that I don’t think people always caught.

DRE: That it’s interesting because it seems like filmmakers always say that they would like to be free of the critics. But it seems like Scorsese might put more violence into a film just to tweak people. Is that biting your own tail to take what people are saying and put it into your film?

Neil: I think that was how I found a way into the story. I didn’t want to tell the same story again. It’s amazing how suddenly people are so protective and in love with the original Wicker Man. I screened it several times before I made this one and people are smoking if they think it is a great movie. It’s absolutely fun and a singular experience and all of that but it wasn’t a horror movie either. This was an odd duck and I set out to make an odd duck and I think I did, perhaps too odd, but that was part of the game.

DRE: The script for Wicker Man didn’t seem to show that you were just jumping into making a studio picture. It seemed like everyone must have understood that as well.

Neil: Well for a long while it certainly felt like it. But then after a while people tend to get cold feet. They spend too much money and then in the first weekend they want it to be Saw and then the next weekend they want it to be The Sixth Sense. In the end you’re making neither one of those. You’re making your own thing so people have to be true to what they made and it was a long haul on that picture. But it doesn’t scare me off of making movies. Movies take at least a year of your life so make sure you’re doing exactly what you want to be doing and it reinforced how much I love doing theater as well. So all good things came out of it, though you always hope an audience will connect with me and it was less so this time but that doesn’t stop me from thinking I can still make that connection.

DRE: Some of the films you’ve done like Nurse Betty and definitely Wicker Man feel more experimental for you than your plays. Do you feel that way about them?

Neil: I don’t know if that’s the case. Yeah, if you stacked the films next to the theater you’d probably get a greater sense of the breadth of my interests as a director but as a writer I’ve got a very particular canon that I feel I am trying to build. Contemporary writing has been where I’ve wanted to focus although I’ve done an adaptation of Woyzeck and Dracula but for the most part it’s not been, “Now I’m going to do a period thing.” It’s just been very much these contemporary stories that I have to tell.

DRE: Do you know what you’re doing next?

Neil: Well my plan was to do Wrecks and then I was going to do [the play] Fat Pig in London, which we’re still trying to cast. But I hadn’t done a movie for a couple years previous to Wicker Man and doing that I realized I forgot that it takes such a long time to do a movie. I’ve got a couple little projects that are their own weird beasts as well. I don’t think what happened with Wicker Man will make it any easier to make those films, but I don’t want to say, “Oh fuck, I better go make a good solid studio picture now to get back in the graces of whomever.” You only can make so many and you have to be able to look at them all at the end of the day and say, “I did that for a reason, not for a house.”

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Neil+LaBute+director+of+Wrecks/