Many film buffs can recall the precise moment when they saw the poster or the trailer for the recent Nicolas Cage remake of The Wicker Man and realized, with a shock, that it had been written and directed by none other than Neil LaBute, the playwright-auteur who has turned the battle of the sexes into a striking body of sharply written, caustic independent films. What prompted American film's reigning poet laureate of gender angst — the director of In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty and The Shape of Things — to make a Hollywood horror flick?

    Well, the real problem is in the question itself: The Wicker Man, though marketed as such, was most certainly not a Hollywood horror flick. Rather, LaBute, a fan of Robin Hardy's tripped-out original who was approached by Cage's production company to write and helm the remake, used the opportunity to bring his brand of dark humor and gender conflict to the action genre. Unfortunately, he also got burned for it. The Wicker Man, a decidedly irreverent and tonally outré work, opened to pretty brutal reviews — reviews which the garrulous and insightful LaBute appears to have taken in stride. He spoke to Nerve from Los Angeles, where he is rehearsing a new play. — Bilge Ebiri

A number of your films have gotten divisive reactions from critics in the past. But you got particularly beaten up over The Wicker Man.

Well, "beaten up" is the nice way to put it. That's what you go home and tell your parents. What really happened is that you got the shit kicked out of you. And I've definitely gotten polarized reactions to my films in the past. But certainly, even when you go on something simple like Rotten Tomatoes, where they gather these ratings, all my previous films had been generally well-received, even though you'd still find a few heinous reviews. So, I'm no stranger to mean-spirited stuff. I don't let reviews get to me in that way, generally: I don't fret over the bad ones and I don't carry the good ones around in my pocket. But the preponderance of them being so vitriolic made me really think.

What did you think about?

The response to this made me wonder, "Did I do something wrong here? Did I make a misstep?" But I also just screened the film at the Venice Film Festival, where I got to see it again, and we had a pretty good response there — the audience was more open to a different experience, they were a bit more bold and sophisticated. Seeing it again, with an audience that sees things a little differently, I was happy with it. We tried to make something that was tonally a real balancing act. You run a lot of risks.

The film has a very offbeat and surreal sense of humor, much as the original did, and it was kind of surprising to see that a lot of critics didn't get that.

The hardest thing is reading reviews and having people tell you what you were thinking — like people saying, "This is unintentional." How does someone know what I meant? I do think we made a bit of a misstep in marketing. Folks said, "I don't know what you have here, but I know it makes me nervous." So it was basically sold as a horror film. Not that horror films can't have humor in them, but not usually of the nature that we have. I mean, I'm not crazy. When I put Nic Cage in a bear suit, I know there's some potential for humor there! [Laughs.] I know that when he says, "Step away from the vehicle," and he's talking about a bike, that's okay. That allows the temperature to drop a little bit. I'm aware of what's going on. It's hard to have people say that you didn't know that. That somehow it's all supposed to be taken totally seriously. You'd think people would remember the gallows humor from the original.

It's kind of a lose-lose situation, isn't it? Fans of the original film might be the ones best suited to appreciating the film's sense of humor, but they're also the ones who might be least receptive to a remake.

It's pretty hard to watch the Britt Ekland bare-ass dance scene from the first film without having a smile on your face, but apparently people expected our version to be much more serious. Maybe part of it is having a straight horror score. But it was an interesting time for me. As a filmmaker, you want to be taken seriously, no matter what the tone of the movie is. I think also that the original has a bit of a special place for people, and rightfully so. But they remember it a little like childhood, with a little more golden hue around it than it maybe actually had.

And the viewers who don't know the original will just expect a straight horror film.

We never felt like we were making a horror film. I think in terms of the safety of distribution, that was the best way to go. I think with a poster like that, and with a trailer like that, maybe we set up expectations of a different sort. And frankly, if I was looking to make money, I would probably have put my money on a different race horse. There's a more audience-friendly film to be made horror-wise than this one right here. I don't know what to call this movie, to be honest with you.

I enjoyed the film, but I did have some issues with the score, which seemed to push it more toward straight genre than maybe you intended.

That's something that I visited myself after reading the reviews. But I think Angelo Badalamenti has done an exceptionally good job. He's very good at mood and tone and dealing with romantic elements. And I didn't feel like the humor elements needed to be highlighted by the score — I didn't think I needed someone like, say, Rolf Kent, with whom I've also worked, and who is very good at creating a comedic, lighter score. I didn't feel the need to layer that in. Music is a very manipulative medium, in one of the most manipulative media there is. That may have been a misstep more on my part.

Despite those differences, what was very interesting to me was the extent to which The Wicker Man felt of a piece with your other films. You seem to take the male-female gender clash from your other films into a very literal realm here.

As I worked on this, the clash of religions in the original film did not feel as immediate to me, and I decided to go more into gender politics, which were of more interest to me. I could feel the wheels turning in my head once I decided to take it in that direction. But it was definitely one way that I could continue my dissection of the simple, classical version of this male-female clash — to take a quintessential male figure and slowly strip that power away.

The trajectory of his predicament actually felt very Greek to me, like something from Euripides or Aeschylus.

It's interesting that you say that. That was definitely one of the models for me. While I was working on the script, along with Anthony Shaffer's original, I went back to other sources. I reread Euripides's The Bacchae. Now there's a story about a group of women who, while essentially worshipping a male god, are actually very powerful and are whipped into this murderous frenzy. When the king gets too close — he's dressed in a lion's suit and they don't recognize him — he is torn apart. That had absolute resonance. Even though I had to take out most of the echoes from the final film. That's a hard sell, though, when you're talking to executives. [Laughs.] I also looked again at Don Siegel's film, The Beguiled, starring Clint Eastwood, which was another influence.

Did you ever worry about the gender politics in the film? Misogynist is a word that's been thrown at some of your work in the past.

I certainly wasn't looking at it thinking, "Here's a great way to fan the flames." That kind of criticism seems to follow me wherever I go. There was no need to push the envelope. Some flags did come up along the way, though. Certainly, near the end, when Nic becomes physically violent with some of the women in the film, we had to ask, "Have we fully covered ourselves? Has this person really deserved what they're about to get? Because we're about to hit a woman in the face!" By the time it happens, it's less about gender and more about how far he's been pushed —that he's now seen the full extent of what they're capable of. You have to be careful, because you're definitely taking the metaphors right by the throat — that women are just murderous harpies that will kill anything when left to their own devices. I figured, well, at least it'll make for some interesting chats.



The last time we spoke it was for an interview about the films of Eric Rohmer, and you said that ever since you saw Love in the Afternoon, you've tried to put a guy in a turtleneck in every one of your films.

That's right. [Laughs.] We are never so vulnerable as when we're wearing a turtleneck. We think we're protected, but we're not.

But I couldn't spot it in The Wicker Man. Did I miss it?

You did indeed. It was my little tribute to Christopher Lee. The guy on the box of the self-help tape Nic Cage listens to at the beginning of the film, called "Everything's Okay." He's got virtually the same outfit Christopher Lee does in the original film — turtleneck, tweed jacket, the whole thing.