The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

252 Neil LaBute
LaBute: Yeah, well, and not at all strange for the New Wave, but something
he didn’t do for the kind of freedom that someone like Godard did.
You look at like A Woman Is a Woman, and he has Jeanne Moreau walk
through and break character, and the character talks to her as herself, not
as a character who’s walking through the movie, not as a character who’s
walking through the movie saying, “Hey, Jeanne, how’s it going? What are
you working on?” She’s like, “Oh, I’m working on this film called Jules et
Jim, you know, isn’t that great?” And you know, very self-referential, that
whole movement may be. And I think he was either late to jump on the
bandwagon, or he just thought of it right then because he was making a
movie about making movies.
But it’s funny that I didn’t remember that it was from that particular film,
but yeah, that’s another great moment in that film, the cat climbing on top,
looking for something to eat or drink.
In his letters Truffaut wrote, “The Soft Skin was painful to make and
because of the story I now have a loathing of marital hypocrisy and on
that point I feel a total revulsion at present.” And again, it suggested
that much of this was at least thematically autobiographical. From
your perspective, what are the dangers of exorcising your demons on
the screen or on the stage?
LaBute: The dangers are pre-evident, that it’s hard to get any distance, to
get the aesthetic distance that one needs to. Because I always think—this
is an easy catchphrase—“It’s theater, not therapy.” And I love the one, “Just
because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s interesting.”
I think the danger is that you can’t get back far enough to really see if
you’ve got a dramatic story, one that works on-screen. You live out your
own life, and it happens whether you like it or not, but you have more
control over cinema. And I think that if you begin to use it as a sounding
board, as a therapist, then you run the danger of getting in too deep and
to not being able to tell a proper kind of dramatic story. I mean proper for
my taste.
That said, you can’t speak with any more authority than about something
that you know. He obviously had those qualities, when you look at his work
overall. You look at The Man Who Loved Women and then read anything