The Moralist

In the end, the best way to look at Nurse Betty is as one of the many projects that constitute the ongoing project that is Neil LaBute. "I think he's being very smart about his career right now," says Steven Soderbergh, who first met LaBute in 1997. "I thought In the Company of Menwas really, really interesting, and I remember watching it thinking, 'He can't possibly sustain this. How is he going to land it?' And that last scene of the guy yelling at her in that bank was so powerful, it really caught me in a way that was unexpected. I thought Your Friends & Neighborsexpanded on that idea a little, and I liked that he was opening things up. I remember seeing it and thinking, 'Aw, I wish I'd made that.' And then Nurse Betty, which I like a lot, I feel is just a great way to expand his horizons and spend time in somebody else's house. This idea that a lot of young filmmakers get caught up in, of 'I've got to write everything I direct,' is really self-defeating. I think it's really smart to go out and just shoot and shoot -- it's the only way you get better. He should do whatever he feels he needs to do to keep himself excited."

Based on the number and variety of projects he has, LaBute should be able to. He has several films planned with Mutrux, who became his producing partner around the release of Your Friends & Neighbors. Together, they have The Child in Time, based on the Ian McEwan novel, to which Ralph Fiennes is attached and which LaBute would like to direct, and The Danish Girl, David Ebershoff's fact-based account of the first sex-change operation, which LaBute would like to adapt and direct. (Mutrux and LaBute still haven't named their new venture. Her company is called ab-strakt pictures and his is Contemptible Entertainment, named in honor of the Jean-Luc Godard film that he fetishizes. "I think we've agreed," jokes Mutrux, "that it shouldn't be Contemptibly ab-strakt.") In addition, LaBute has a deal with Fox to remake the deranged 1945 Technicolor noir Leave Her to Heaven -- "I have no business reworking it, but I loved that movie so much when I was a kid" -- and then there's something called Geography of Hope, which he cryptically describes as "my own little original piece about, oddly enough, bad men in Mexico who meet some schoolteachers."

If intrigue in Mexico seems a long way from the domestic blahs of Kansas, where Nurse Betty begins, and the lush English romance that is currently preoccupying LaBute on the set of Possession, it both is and isn't. In America, we have become so used to directors doing the same thing again and again, grinding out movies like sausages, that it's something of a jolt when someone veers off expectation. Cineastes may be nostalgic for the halcyon days of the 1960s and '70s, but all too often we -- critics, audiences, the industry itself -- punish independents for setting their sights on the mainstream, and ridicule the mainstream for its occasional flights of vision. Is it any surprise that journalists have already asked Neil LaBute if he has sold out? "I was more worried that Nurse Bettywas going to be too soft for me," he says, "that it did not have enough punch. I think the story does require both a sweetness and an absolute sick, sour side as well. I wasn't really worried about selling out. I'm sure, had I worked at it hard enough, I could have sold out in a much stronger, bigger way -- I could have gotten more cash in the bank and had more cash to work with if I was really looking to exploit any chance of selling out. On the set, people would throw out names like 'Cute LaBute,' saying that people will speculate that this is my cuter side. I'm here to tell you that I'm just setting them up for the next blow."