Neil LaBute Quotes

We live in a disposable society. It's easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name - we call it recycling.

Everybody has the ability to be manipulative, to be hateful and deceitful.

Everyone has a story.

The future is now. It's time to grow up and be strong. Tomorrow may well be too late.

But for me, it feels like a natural extension of what I've been doing: exploring relationships. Here you have two relationships and we can explore how difficult it is for people to be together.

In a relationship you have to open yourself up.

Sitting in an automobile was where I first remember understanding how drama works ... Hidden in the back seat of a sedan, I quickly realized how deep the chasm or intense the claustrophobia could be inside your average family car.

I'm more than open to hope, but I think men and women have a difficult time dealing with each other and often take the low road.

Without In The Company of Men, I could still be teaching, so who knows if this would've existed.

If we put the camera on ourselves, our friends and neighbors, we'll come up with some scary stuff.

We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch.

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.

My business is can I create a world that's possible and could happen? I think that's the only thing that I have to do, and I think that I have done that each time.

There were certain things that I watched, and I screened a series of period films as well, not because I wanted to copy those, because I wanted to be different. “Far from the Madding Crowd” was one I looked to because I thought it looked so good. “Doctor Zhivago.” Unrequited love is always a great thing. “Tess” was something I looked at, I thought Polanski got the period right.

People think my work is therapeutic. I don't see it that way. It's not like I'm saving money from a weekly therapy visit by writing down my life.

I make movies I want to see.

I see bits and pieces of me in all the characters in my films.

I think the more the actor lets you know what he thinks of the character, the less the audience cares - like a comedian who laughs at his own jokes.

With In the Company of Men, the misogynist label stuck early and firmly. In the end, it probably did hurt the film a bit, because getting women into the theaters was difficult.

My best male friend is my best friend until he crosses me. We're all protective of the self.

I will say that the idea of a woman being deceptive came from that original discussion with critics and reporters about if woman could do that kind of thing. Evelyn, herself, grew out of the discussions about how capable women are of deceit and lying and manipulation.

I was always looking for the most dramatic emphasis. One example would be the letter writing, or the reading of the letters. If you remember from the book, they find the letters and then in the most undramatic way they take them downstairs, they get approval, they sit at a table during the day with their own author, across from each other.

Movies are - all I've found is that they're just tougher and tougher to make.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.