In a Similar Bane

If you’ve seen “In the Company of Men” and “Your Friends & Neighbors,” Neil LaBute’s previous two movies, you’d be forgiven for thinking you know what it must be like to watch him work. First off, you might imagine, he’d assemble his cast in a nondescript room. The actors--youngish white guys, the white-collar variety--are discussing women, because that’s what guys do in LaBute’s movies. Bitterness and bile flow from their lips. They want to hurt women. Or bed them. They’re not sure which. Maybe they want to do both. They say funny lines, but crew members avert their gazes, as uncomfortable hearing them as the audience will be when the movie reaches screens.

When LaBute yells “cut,” his actors, feeling dirty, slink off quietly to shower.

Maybe that’s what you’d expect, but the scene tonight at Union Station is nothing like that. Dressed in his trademark sneakers and plaid, untucked shirt, LaBute is directing a scene with Renee Zellweger, and it all seems as lighthearted and easy as Silly Putty.

The tone is perhaps set by the movie’s title: “Nurse Betty.” Nothing ominous there. No ironic edge. It’s rather bouncy, actually. And right now Zellweger, the Betty of the title, is the embodiment of bounce. She’s whooping it up with Tia Texada, her sidekick in the movie. Between takes, LaBute makes a beeline to the actresses to whisper direction and join in the yuks.

A road movie steeped in mordant humor, this is LaBute’s third feature film, and it is a departure for him in several ways. As unlikely as it seems, the portly bad boy of independent cinema is going mainstream. Not only has he hired on to direct a movie from somebody else’s script, but he’s also dreaming up a television series for ABC and has deals in the works for movies with Universal and Warner Bros., one of them an adaptation of a popular British novel.

The good news, though (or maybe bad, depending on your point of view), is that LaBute’s idea of mainstream looks to be as nasty, mean-spirited and wickedly funny as his inexpensive independent features. It’s just nasty in a different way.

None of that nastiness is on display tonight.

Zellweger looks and sounds like Betty Boop, wobbling around on high heels in a low-cut evening dress with her hair piled on her head. The director seems immune to the nighttime chill as he confers with technicians, but Zellweger--who came to the set, as she does daily, with her golden retriever, Dylan--is scrunched up in a heavy coat awaiting the call back to the set.

She portrays a small-town waitress who sees her husband killed by father-and-son hit men Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock. Traumatized, she lapses into a fugue state and starts believing that she is a character in her favorite daytime soap opera. The hit men follow her to Los Angeles, where she goes in search of Greg Kinnear, who plays the actor who portrays the character whom she thinks she’s involved with. Confused? It gets wackier. As he pursues her, the Freeman character falls in love with his prey.

In the scene LaBute is filming now, Betty and her friend, played by Texada, are zeroing in on Kinnear, approaching the hotel where he is expected to show up at a benefit. The story goes off in another unexpected direction when Zellweger and Kinnear meet.

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Because his movies are so caustic, because his characters express such vile thoughts and perhaps because he is a practicing Mormon dealing with such subjects, LaBute is thought of as, well, kind of weird.

When Zellweger told her friends about this movie, which is expected to be released in the fall, she says some of them wondered if she knew what she was doing. LaBute’s two previous films disturbed audiences with their blunt depiction of misogyny, and people seemed to confuse the filmmaker with his woman-hating characters. It didn’t help that, as in real life, bad acts in LaBute’s movies do not necessarily get you punished.

Zellweger didn’t understand the concern. She’d found 1997’s “In the Company of Men” disturbing but not necessarily offensive. “But I’m not one to notice who the writer or director is of a movie, so when I met him I didn’t know the movies he had done before,” she says. By the time she found out, she’d already formed an impression of him.

“People would be shocked to meet him,” she says. “He’s a nice guy.”

Philip Steuer, a co-producer of the movie, thinks “Nurse Betty” will go a long way toward correcting the impression a lot of people have that LaBute is a creepy guy who can only make little movies about mean-spirited men. “But at the same time,” Steuer says of the Propaganda Films movie, “it’s not so mainstream that people are going to say he sold out to do a sequel to ‘Star Wars.’ ”

Only the most warped of sensibilities would consider “Nurse Betty” mainstream. With this movie written by first-time screenwriters John C. Richards and James Flamberg, LaBute trades in the emotional violence that marks his earlier work for a brand of cruelty that mixes the emotional and the physical. So, instead of men plotting to hurt and humiliate an innocent woman (as they did in “Company”), the male pair in the new movie set out to kill her. And instead of treating audiences to a reverie about the sublime pleasure of committing homosexual rape (as Jason Patric delivered in “Friends” last year), “Nurse Betty” features a crazed Rock who finds enjoyment in scalping one adversary and setting fire to another.

In the way the movie mixes shocking violence with humor, it resembles a Coen Brothers or Quentin Tarantino script more than anything LaBute has ever done.

Still, whatever else LaBute’s other two movies were, they were both marked by wit, says Gail Mutrux, one of the producers. “I thought ‘Your Friends & Neighbors’ was very funny, as was ‘In the Company of Men.’ A lot of women didn’t like that,” she says of the first movie. “I didn’t take it personally.”

She turned to LaBute to direct “Nurse Betty,” she says, because she thought the sardonic humor he displayed in those movies would serve it well.

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“This is a movie of firsts,” LaBute says, pleasantly opaque behind his beard and thick glasses. “Morgan has his first on-screen kiss, it’s the first time I shot scenes in the Grand Canyon, and it’s the first movie of mine that has a shot fired from a gun.”

It also is the first time LaBute has made a movie from a script he didn’t write. The idea for “Nurse Betty” came from Richards, a struggling scriptwriter who teamed up with Flamberg, his next-door neighbor, to complete the screenplay. A music editor for movies, Flamberg and Mutrux knew each other.

“I knew he was interested in writing and I encouraged him to finish it,” she says. When the script was done she took it to producer Steve Golin, who had worked with LaBute on “Your Friends & Neighbors.”

LaBute made “Company” for $25,000 and “Friends” for $4 million, but she says she wanted him to direct “Nurse Betty”--which cost “in the 20s”--because he has a “strong sense of story.” The material, which is rather outlandish, needed a director who could keep it from going over the top.

“Also, I thought it would be good for him,” she says. “I thought it would appeal to his special talent, but at the same time it’s a bigger movie, it’s a bit of a road movie, and there’s a woman character at the center of it.”

LaBute says he got involved for a simple reason--he liked the story. And it’s not as much of a departure as it might at first appear, he says. “It’s got bad men and a woman running for her life,” the director jokes. “That’s a pretty clear link.”

Flamberg says the director improved the script by fleshing out and shaping even peripheral characters and tying up loose ends. LaBute was sensitive to the feelings of the writers and welcomed their presence on the set even while making it clear that it is his movie.

Another first for LaBute is the casting of African American actors in major roles. The race of the hit men is never mentioned in the script. “I was thinking of Robert Duvall,” Flamberg said of the older hit man.

But when Golin suggested Freeman, LaBute realized he’d be perfect. “He’s someone I admired a lot who has the kind of weight of a Gene Hackman,” he says of the actor, who is most often associated with dramatic roles.

“My tendency before has been, ‘I don’t care’ ” about casting, says the director. He expected audiences to be pulled through his movies by the story. But he thought it was important in this film to have an actor play the role with the kind of presence and believability that would hook a viewer.

Casting black men in these pivotal roles also added a charge to the story because the script makes references to race--Betty’s husband gets scalped because he says offensive things about American Indians--and one of the bad guys is a Southern bigot.

Flamberg says that Rock’s role was altered to suit his particular comedic talents, but virtually none of the dialogue was changed on account of the actors’ race.

“That was the beauty of it,” says LaBute. “You don’t have to change a word, yet it made all of the conflicts a little bit more potent.”

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“In the Company of Men” and “Your Friends & Neighbors” were corrosive comedies so singular in style, so distinctive in outlook, that the tag “a Neil LaBute film” became as meaningful a description as telling someone a movie was made by Hitchcock or, perhaps more appropriate in this case, David Mamet.

The movies show their stage origins not only by their indebtedness to early Mamet and to Restoration comedies but also in their reliance on dialogue and a static camera. “As a playwright I was accused of writing film scripts, and as a filmmaker I’m accused of writing plays,” he says. The films were also set apart by the way they daringly examined men’s attitudes toward women and ideas about masculinity and emotional violence.

But can “Nurse Betty” be called a Neil LaBute movie? Or has the indie hero sold out?

LaBute says he plans to alternate between directing his own scripts and those written by other people. “I started out doing plays,” he says. “It was natural to do other people’s work there. I’ve directed two movies that I’ve written, and all the time I was looking for other things, reading books and other people’s screenplays, looking for something interesting.”

Making “Nurse Betty” and the other films he plans to direct from other people’s scripts will stretch him and broaden his vocabulary as a filmmaker, he says, but he does not expect it to markedly affect the films he writes for himself. The reason he made two films from his own scripts back-to-back was to affirm his voice as a filmmaker, he says. He expects that voice will continue to emerge in his movies that are personal statements.

“I may never have written a script where people shoot guns or where there are things happening with cars or where there is a lot of outside scenery,” he says, “but it’s nice to do that sometime, to have that vocabulary. You show that you’re willing to do that and can do it if I so desire. It’s nice to stretch and see what’s out there in the world.”

What is out there in the world for him includes the dramatic television series, which he declined to discuss except to say that the pilot is scheduled to air next year.

“I hope to direct,” he says. “At this point I’m writing.”

He is doing television, he says, because he likes the tension of pushing against boundaries. “Just like my background of going to a church school, you’re taking something with established parameters and seeing how far within those parameters you can go,” says LaBute, a Mormon who converted while attending Brigham Young University in the mid-’80s, where his work dealing with homophobia and gender conflict scandalized the faculty and student body.

The role of provocateur suits him. After Brigham Young he attended the New York University Film School, where he thought the atmosphere would be more open to varied viewpoints. Instead, he said he found it just as repressive, only there the orthodoxies were different. Everyone was expected to subscribe to the same liberal political and social views.

Repression interests him as a subject. He thinks it is one reason he is attracted to Merchant Ivory films and other stories set in Victorian England. “I’ve always been a huge Anglophile,” he says. “I like all things English, anything that has to do with that country.”

After “Kramer vs. Kramer” came out in 1979, Paul Schrader--another distinctive writer-director whose work has often seemed more idea- rather than character-driven--was quoted as saying he envied writer Robert Benton’s ability to write wonderful, character-revealing scenes that contain small truths. He mentioned the famous scene in that film that started with the Dustin Hoffman character repeatedly warning his son, played by Justin Henry, not to eat ice cream, even as the boy brings the spoon ever closer to his open mouth. LaBute can identify with Schrader’s sentiments. While he says he isn’t likely to ever attempt it, there is a part of him that would love to make movies in the Merchant Ivory style.

He’s edging closer in that direction with one of the projects he is developing--an adaptation for Warner Bros. of the 1990 novel “Possession,” a literary mystery story in which two academics investigate a passionate love affair that took place between two unlikely Victorian-era writers.

Because he is developing several projects at the same time, he can’t say which he’ll do next.

The budget for those films, like the budget for “Nurse Betty,” will be far above what he is used to working with. But he chooses his project based on the material, he says, not the size of the paycheck. “It’s the work,” he says. “I’m not much of a plotter. If I’d been a plotter I would’ve been here [making studio movies with bigger budgets] before this.”