Neil LaBute

“Just in the past few years - since I've been making movies, which isn't a very long time - you now have a culture that is fascinated and informed about the box office in a way that sometimes filmmakers weren't even.”

“We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I wanted to make these people real, not like they were in a painting. Like these are people who don't know they're in a period movie. Those concerns are incredibly immediate.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I make movies I want to see.”

“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.”

“Everyone has a little bit of Howard and Chad in them. I think there's Christine in all men as well.”

“But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife.”

“I have a healthy view of what one can do with art.”

“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.”

“I was always looking for the most dramatic emphasis.”

“I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction.”

“In a relationship you have to open yourself up.”

“People have perhaps gotten to the point where for the most part movies are a just bit of escape.”