Evolution of LaBute

When Hollywood comes calling, offering interviews with filmmakers, you seldom say no – even when you know the interviewees are interested mostly in hyping their own work.

And you certainly don’t turn down the chance to talk to a big-time filmmaker who has local ties.

Neil LaBute is the writer-director of such art-house hits as “In the Company of Men” and “Your Friends and Neighbors.” He also is a 1979 graduate of Central Valley High School.

More important in terms of what he does professionally, LaBute cut his moviegoing teeth at the Magic Lantern Theatre when it existed on the third floor of the Atrium Building (above what is now Europa Restaurant).

And he hasn’t forgotten what he saw there.

“ ‘Breaker Morant,’ you know, and ‘The Wicker Man,’ ” he said. “I also saw ‘Rocky II’ there, but mostly it was ‘Manhattan’ and things like that.”

LaBute, whose mother still lives in Spokane Valley, was on the phone in support of his new film, “Lakeview Terrace,” which opens today. It stars Patrick Wilson (“The Phantom of the Opera”) and Kerry Washington (“I Think I Love My Wife”) as a mixed-race couple who move into a Los Angeles neighborhood and encounter problems with their next-door neighbor, a bully-boy L.A. cop played by Samuel L. Jackson.

The movie represents a continuing evolution for LaBute, who began as a playwright. In fact, his first films – which he wrote as well as directed – feel like plays. They both explore intimate, uncomfortable themes – sexual politics, for example – and are filled with dialogue-heavy scenes.

Action-packed they certainly are not.

In recent years, though, LaBute has branched out. Not only has he taken on the role as movie-director-for-hire, but he’s done back-to-back genre films.

After directing the stage and film versions of his 2003 play/screenplay “The Shape of Things,” LaBute took the job of updating one of the films that he saw in Spokane: Robin Hardy’s 1973 horror thriller “The Wicker Man.” The reviews were, to be charitable, mixed.

Now comes “Lakeview Terrace,” which the trailers make look like mere exploitation. LaBute, though, spotted something worthwhile at the story’s center.

“At the core of it you see a really interesting idea – the universal notion of ‘how do we get along with each other?’ and having a bad neighbor,” he said. “And when that neighbor is a policeman, that was a really interesting idea.”

LaBute hopes that viewers will experience something more.

“You certainly don’t get a feel from the trailer of the extensive ‘B’ story of Patrick and Kerry and the strain that their marriage is taking from this onslaught by Sam,” he said. “That’s a whole domestic side the picture that you don’t necessarily push as a marketing (device).”

As he added, marketing is a key Hollywood concept.

“You know, we can’t say it’s ‘Unlawful Entry’ meets ‘Ordinary People,’ ” LaBute said. “I don’t know if people are going to clamor to that. But if you go, hopefully, you then will say, ‘Oh, there’s something additionally satisfying’ – that ‘I get the thriller part, but I also get something else.’ ”

Ultimately, he’s come to realize something that may well be the secret to Hollywood success.

“If you love it, you love it, and it’s art and all that stuff,” he said. “But it’s also commerce. What I’ve learned about what I’m doing here is that you have to understand the business side, practically, to have people sitting in those theaters watching those films.”

That’s advice that, he said, he would offer to the board that manages the Magic Lantern, which closed in June. (The board hopes to reopen the theater sometime in October.)

“As soon as video or DVD came into its own, the repertory cinema took an enormous hit,” LaBute said.

But, he added, “I would love to let them know that I would be happy to help out anyone that I could as well. Because that place meant a lot to me.”

Told you he had local ties. Concerns, too.