CraveOnline: Who was the director before Daisy?
Neil LaBute: Jennifer Getzinger, she’s done a lot of television work. She did “Mad Men” and different things. She was the person who was originally involved and prepped it and everything. After the first day of shooting, her brother was killed in a car accident and she was not able to continue. She was friends with Daisy and Daisy knew the project and had been talking to her about it because it was Jennifer’s first movie. So she’d been talking to her quite a bit about her experience directing and all of that. They transitioned into Daisy taking over really quickly.
So it was a family emergency.
Death in the family, yeah.
I don’t know if you saw this last year in Empire, but Nicolas Cage wants to do a Wicker Man 2.
Does he?
Please write this for him.
I would have to be officially asked. Yeah, because that was certainly a ride. I’m probably just now ready to go back and see, although I guess it would have to be a prequel because there’s no really good out from where we left him.
The funny thing is he said he would want to be a ghost, like a Japanese ghost story.
Now I know Nicolas Cage said it for sure, if he’d already thought out what he would be.
How would you top the bear suit?
Why should it be topped? That’s the thing. If you’ve taken it there, how to top it? I mean, you could always find a way to top things. People always do but it seems to have created enough stir with viewers, both good and bad, that it’s something you would have to top. I don’t know what it could be. I suppose just a more outlandish animal. Then he would have to hit or kick more people per minute on the screen.
Maybe children too instead of just women.
Or older, like both sides of the spectrum. Older women or younger women. There were too many right in the sweet spot, in the 20s and 30s.
If that continued with another writer and director how would you feel about seeing a different interpretation?
Well, I know Robin Hardy did The Wicker Tree recently was of a similar ilk but not per se a sequel, and that was fun to see, to see what he did. I mean, so many years since he directed a movie, I was very curious to see what he would do. I would probably be happier watching that than some other things that I’ve worked on, having those taken and done by somebody else. I’m pretty good-natured so I would probably go along for the ride.
Do we have you to thank for Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent since In the Company of Men was his big break?
I don’t know. I would attribute that to Chris Nolan’s good taste. He’s good in terms of casting. I just saw a little bit of that on television again the other day and I was watching Aaron. I thought he was a great choice for it, but I think we both have each other to thank for wherever we ended up because we kind of in college said we’ll try to help each other out. When the opportunity arose, we were both good to our word and worked together a number of times, in close succession and would love to do it again, but haven’t found that thing. I would love to see him go back to stage. He hasn’t done stage for a long time and I’d love to do that, but one of these days I guess.
We think of Neil LaBute and relationship movies, but did you ever get typecast for movies like Possession or Nurse Betty?
No, no. Certainly relationships and certain things that I’ve written myself. I wish I’d been typecast for Possession. I could spend my whole career in England working on period films and I would be happy. It’s fantastic. I just did my first television show. I directed an episode of “Hell on Wheels” up in Canada and I couldn’t pass up the idea because it was a western and I love westerns so I was really excited to go do that. I love being around period shows. It’s great to just lose yourself in those words and I loved that. Possession was also in the present day but I loved the portions that were in the past.
Is that for season three of “Hell on Wheels?”
It’s for season three, yeah. They’re in the middle of it right now.
Does your episode come early or later in the season?
Right in the middle. I did 305 and I think they’re doing 10. They started in on six and then there were huge floods in Calgary, submerged part of their set and closed them down for about three weeks. They were going to go on a hiatus but now they’re on hiatus for three weeks or so. I just got out of there before. I thought it was punishing mud while I was there. Someone called it Monsoon June when I was there. I didn’t hear it before I went so I didn’t bring enough gear for it. That’s what I heard and then it came true. I was like, “Oh yeah, it is kind of wet. There’s been a lot of rain.” And then they had floods. I guess it was mountain flooding that finally starts to run off. It went into Calgary and they’re about an hour or 45 minutes outside of Calgary but near the Bow river so they got a lot of their stuff washed away.
What is your next movie, Some Velvet Morning, about?
Some Velvet Morning is a story of a guy, middle-aged guy who has had a relationship with a young woman a couple of years previous to when we see him. So it’s a movie in real time, ostensibly. There’s a couple of cuts that you would say they were downstairs and now they’re upstairs, that kind of thing but it’s essentially in 90 minutes of real time.
It’s a guy who started seeing the girlfriend of his son and was going to leave his family and all of that but didn’t, had a bad breakup with this person and now a couple of years later has finally left his wife, goes to her place and says, “I want to be with you” and she’s sort of past it. So it’s the next 90 minutes of she’s actually about to go out the door to see his son who she still is in touch with, and him trying to come to terms with that. Then it becomes this little dance of past and present and a kind of dangerous game of a man and a woman put together in an empty house and what’s going to happen to them.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
