Tribeca Interview: Neil LaBute, Phil Burke, and Gia Crovatin of Dirty Weekend

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Neil LaBute returned the Tribeca Film Festival again, in another film starring Some Velvet Morning’s Alice Eve. But in his latest, the often controversial playwright and filmmaker hit the road and made his gentlest, and possibly most crowd-pleasing film. Eve co-stars with Matthew Broderick, as two business travelers stuck in Albuquerque, and find they are in the same city as Broderick’s last “dirty weekend” (out of town sexual affair). LaBute was joined at the festival by actress Gia Crovatin (who plays a mystery woman from Broderick’s past) and actor Phil Burke (as the cabbie Eve and Broderick can’t escape). Lesley Coffin sat down with Neil LaBute, Phil Burke and Gia Crovatin to talk about the new movie.

The IBang: Had you actually heard of the term “Dirty Weekend” in conversation before writing the film?

Neil LaBute: I have. I actually heard it in London once and asked what it meant, and I was intrigued. But just hearing it, I thought to myself, that is a great term, it would make a great title. But there actually is a movie with the same title I think that refers to some kind of motor race in mud or something. So the term means different things, but I built the film around the term after first learning what it meant.

The IBang:  Is that part of the reason you had Alice Eve play a British character?

Neil LaBute: It helped. I started to write it initially, thinking the layover in the film would be in London. But when I finally got financing, we started talking about places domestically which have tax incentives, like Michigan, Louisiana and Albuquerque. Albuquerque was high on the list of places I thought I wouldn’t want to have a layover, so I thought it would be the perfect place to set the story. But having worked with Alice before, and being English herself, I thought she would help sell the notion a bit more in the film, because it’s such a particularly British phrase.

The IBang: I’d never heard the term and thought you might have made it up.

Phil Burke: My girlfriend is from England and had mentioned it before, but I never knew what she meant until I made this movie.

The IBang:  Your character, the cabbie always stays outside the core action. What role does he serve in the film, and how did you interpret the role?

Neil LaBute: I like theater and film with small casts, but this film verged on being a road picture, even though the road they’re on is a pretty short distance. But a road picture needs those peculiar characters, and I loved the idea of having a character you just can’t get rid of. Having a cab driver they just can’t lose. And it turns out in Albuquerque, that is kind of accurate. There were only about five cab drivers, and they all kind of look like him. Even down to the rubber bands and beard.

Phil Burke: And they all know each other and when we’d go out for dinner, and we’d have the same drivers all the time. You’d see them at bars or hanging around the airport, yelling “hey, how’s the movie going!” It felt as if there were about 12 guys who worked 24 hours, everyday.

The IBang:  Did you tell them you were playing a cabbie.

Phil Burke: I did. And I never got a free ride or offer any advice. But my buddy Lucas was a cab driver for about three weeks….

Neil LaBute: That is an alarmingly short time.

Phil Burke: …He was an out of work actor who got a job. But I was asking him for some stuff and he went down the list. He told me about hacking and the test he had to take here in New York.

The IBang: But you get a lot of the big laughs in the movie, particularly at the beginning of the film before they get to the bar.

Neil LaBute: And a couple after.

The IBang:  But once they get to the bar, they meet your mystery woman. And there are moments when I wasn’t sure if you were real or not. You seem so out of place and so made up, considering it is the middle of the day.

Phil Burke: Yeah, she’s coming to that bar at noon!

Gia Crovatin: But I just think, when you are at a place in your life when you have to make hard choices, you do whatever you have to justify those choices. And because my character is in that line of work, she chooses to present herself as the most glamorous woman that does this work. So my character definitely wants to channel that kind of Catherine Deneuve image, and I think the movie also has that kind of retro vibe.

Neil LaBute: It was important for me to have a visual reference of a person completely unlike any of the other people in this southwestern world, so the audience would be struck by her. Like you said, he’s not even sure what’s real.

The IBang:  And her artifice almost reminds me of Nastassja Kinski’s character in Paris Texas, this woman who just doesn’t seem to visually fit into everything else we’re seeing.

Gia Crovatin: You’re right, and while that wasn’t necessarily something on the page when I got the script, those were definitely things we talked about. Matthew is asking himself “was it a man or a woman”, is justifiable because when you’re so made up, it seems unnatural and you feel like you can’t trust what you’re seeing. But like all the characters, she isn’t very comfortable in her own skin either and can come undone a little bit when the veneer comes off.

The IBang:  Totally superficial question, but were you wearing a wig?

Gia Crovatin No. I’m from the south, so it was like they say, higher the hair the closer to God.

Neil LaBute: I wanted her to seem as if she’s almost wandered right off the set of Mad Men.

Phil Burke: I hadn’t seen the whole things until last night and seeing her in it last night, I just thought “bang!” And the fact that it was noon too. She’s going out for a long day’s journey.

Neil LaBute: We talked a little bit about her being someone who kind of preys on people like Matthew. Men who go into a strange bar, might not even know it is a gay bar, and have to ask themselves, do I have the guts to go through with this? They don’t, but there is a woman over there they could go talk to.

Gia Crovatin: There is definitely a case of her being a heightened fantasy for men considering things.

Neil LaBute: She is this fantasy that is a little safer than the other one they are being presented with at that time.

Phil Burke: I find it so interesting that he needs to be in that kind of heightened state and environment before he considers doing what he does.

Neil LaBute: And then he does it again when he knows the truth.

TheIBang: How did you decide the specific sexual act Matthew’s character ultimately engages in?

Neil LaBute: Well, it is meant to be a comedy, and even though it is not the most uproarious comedy, it is more of a comedy than it is a drama. And the one thing I didn’t want to do was make fun of their sexuality or specific types of relationships. You see Alice have conversations with her girlfriend, one good and one bad, and we didn’t play those for laughs. This isn’t 10 with Dudley Moore, where we know he conveniently won’t sleep with Bo Derek. In this, he did it, and when faced with the truth, he does it again only this time he’s a bit more lucid. I didn’t want it to be farcical in the bedroom, and in fact, the movie actually gets a little sweeter at that point.


Dirty Weekend has distribution from K5 International, and is seeking a US distributor and so no release date as of yet.

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