Neal LaBute takes on the issue of race in 'Lakeview Terrace'

The Orlando Sentinel (MCT) - Some people might say filmmaker Neal LaBute, of "In the Company of Men," "Nurse Betty" and "The Wicker Man," has a problem with women, or black people, judging by his work. But he insists he's not really the misogynist or misanthrope that many assume.

"People meet me and go, 'Ooo, you're not as mean as I thought you'd be,'" he says, laughing. "That's the danger of doing stuff that has an edge. People assume that's a part of me. They get the wrong idea."

LaBute, 47, is the ex-Mormon and Brigham Young University grad who created a stir even while in college with his controversial plays, and made an even bigger splash when he turned one of those plays into a film. "In the Company of Men," about two cruel salesmen who play a vicious game with a plain Jane deaf woman they court simply to humiliate her, was an indie sensation in 1997. It introduced what has become a running thread in LaBute's work, says critic David Thomson, an "unwillingness to scold malice, wickedness or unkindness."

To which LaBute shrugs. "I don't mind having to carry around a mantle of 'You must be this or that' as long as I know myself who I am."

He's not shy about pushing our buttons on gender, for instance, or race, the subtext of his new film, "Lakeview Terrace."

"I don't like to think that it's purposeful, that I'm just walking around looking for something I can poke with a stick _ 'What other trouble can I get into?'" he says. "But the things that interest me cross paths with the zeitgeist, at times."

In "Lakeview Terrace," an interracial couple moves into a neighborhood where they fall under the disapproving eye of a man with racist tendencies and the power to make their lives miserable, or worse. He's a cop played by Samuel L. Jackson.

"Race," LaBute says, "tends to be the divide that we talk about the most. We have a hard time accepting that people might be different and equal. And yet, in some way, we all end up being the same.

"My job as a storyteller is to find the most interesting angle to the movie and work from that. If you took Sam Jackson out of the movie and put Tommy Lee Jones in there you could essentially have the same sort of movie. But you add race to it, the movie becomes something deeper."

LaBute likes the timing of his film, which comes out during a historic presidential campaign with race very much on the nation's mind. "But that's not why I did it," he says. "This is a subject that we all admit is a big part of our makeup as a nation. You just don't hear it talked about in popular culture all that much."

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LaBute has a play up and running in London and another he's prepping for New York. He didn't write "Lakeview Terrace," but the fact that he had played around with race in a stage play ("This is How it Goes") got the attention of the film's producers and landed LaBute the job, he says. He took it not just because he liked that racial hot button. He's intrigued by the possibilities of a person with a gun and a badge who abuses the public trust, something that he sees as another thread through all his work, that notion of power _ who has it, in a given situation, and who doesn't.

"A cop is in that one group of people we actually put a gun in their hands and say 'Protect us.' It's ironic that 'To Protect and Serve' is emblazoned on the sides of police cars, but in this case, this one guy has a problem with people who move in next door. That's what makes 'Lakeview Terrace' cruelly unnerving as a thriller. The list, the very short list, of people you would call if you're threatened this way, is topped by the police. 'I'm calling the cops!' If a cop is the cause of your problem, what can you do? You can pack up and move!"

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© 2008, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).