Neil LaBute

Neil N. LaBute (born March 19, 1963) is an American playwright, film director, and screenwriter.

His interest in the film industry came with a viewing of The Soft Skin (La Peau Douce 1964), said the director to Robert K. Elder in a 2011 interview for The Film That Changed My Life.

"It exposed me, probably in the earliest way, to 'Hey, I could do that.' I've never been one to love the camera or even to be as drawn to it as I am to the human aspect of it, and I think it was a film that speaks in a very simple way of here's a way that you can tell a story on film in human terms. It was the kind of film that made me go, 'I could do this; I want to tell stories that are like this and told in this way.' And so it was altering for me in that way, in its simplicity or deceptive simplicity."

LaBute burst onto the theater scene in 1989 with his controversial debut Filthy Talk for Troubled Times.

He taught drama and film at IPFW in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the early 1990s where he adapted and filmed the play, shot over two weeks and costing $25,000, beginning his career as a film director.

The film won the Filmmakers Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, and major awards and nominations at the Deauville Film Festival, the Independent Spirit Awards, the Thessaloniki Film Festival, the Society of Texas Film Critics Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle.

In the Company of Men portrays two businessmen (one played by Eckhart) cruelly plotting to romance and emotionally destroy a deaf woman.

In 1993, he returned to BYU to premiere his play In the Company of Men, for which he received an award from the Association for Mormon Letters.

He is best known for a play that he wrote and later adapted for film, In the Company of Men (1997), which won awards from the Sundance Film Festival, the Independent Spirit Awards, and the New York Film Critics Circle.

He wrote and directed the films Your Friends & Neighbors (1998), Possession (2002) (based on the A. S. Byatt novel), The Shape of Things (2003) (based on his play of the same name), The Wicker Man (2006), Some Velvet Morning (2013), and Dirty Weekend (2015).

His next film Your Friends & Neighbors (1998), with an ensemble cast including Eckhart and Ben Stiller, earned an R-rating for its portrayal of the sex lives of three yuppie couples in the big city.

His play Bash: Latter-Day Plays is a set of three short plays (Iphigenia in Orem, A Gaggle of Saints, and Medea Redux) depicting essentially good Latter-day Saints doing disturbing and violent things.

It ran Off-Broadway at the Douglas Fairbanks Theatre in 1999.

Medea Redux is a one-person performance by Calista Flockhart.

This play resulted in his being disfellowshipped from the LDS Church (i.e., losing some privileges of church membership without being excommunicated).

He has since formally left the LDS Church.

He directed the films Nurse Betty (2000), Lakeview Terrace (2008), and the American adaptation of Death at a Funeral (2010).

LaBute created the TV series Billy & Billie, writing and directing all of the episodes.

He is also the creator of the TV series Van Helsing.

Recently, he executive produced, co-directed and co-wrote Netflix's The I-Land.

He also directed several episodes for shows such as Hell on Wheels and Billions.

LaBute was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Marian, a hospital receptionist, and Richard LaBute, a long-haul truck driver.

LaBute is of French Canadian, English, and Irish ancestry, and was raised in Spokane, Washington.

He studied theater at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).

At BYU, he also met actor Aaron Eckhart, who would later play leading roles in several of his films.

He produced a number of plays that pushed the envelope of what was acceptable at the conservative religious university, some of which were shut down after their premieres.

However, he also was honored as one of the "most promising undergraduate playwrights" at the BYU theater department's annual awards.

Labute did graduate work at the University of Kansas, New York University, and the Royal Academy of London, and he participated in a writing workshop at London's Royal Court Theatre.

In 2001, LaBute wrote and directed the play The Shape of Things, which premièred in London, featuring film actors Paul Rudd and Rachel Weisz.

In 2001, LaBute and producer Gail Mutrux founded the Pretty Pictures firm, with a first-look deal at USA Films.

LaBute's 2002 play The Mercy Seat was a theatrical response to the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Set on September 12, it concerns a man who worked at the World Trade Center but was away from the office during the infamous 2001 terrorist attack – with his mistress.

Expecting that his family believes that he was killed in the towers' collapse, he contemplates using the tragedy to run away and start a new life with his lover.

Starring Liev Schreiber and Sigourney Weaver, the play was a commercial and critical success.

While hesitant to term The Mercy Seat "political theater", Labute said, "I refer to this play in the printed introduction as a kind of emotional terrorism that we wage on those we profess to love."

He dedicated this edition to David Hare, in response to Hare's "straightforward, thoughtful, probing work".

It was turned into a film in 2003 with the same cast and director.

Set in a small university town in the American Midwest, it focuses on four young students who become emotionally and romantically involved with each other, questioning the nature of art and the lengths to which people will go for love.

Weisz's character manipulates Rudd's character into changing everything about himself and discarding his friends in order to become more attractive to her.

She even pretends to fall in love with him, prompting an offer of marriage, whereupon she cruelly exposes and humiliates him before an audience, announcing that he has simply been an "art project" for her MFA thesis.