With its roots in Chicago theater, the story of Eric LaRue is set in an anonymous suburban community in the aftermath of a shocking crime committed by the high school-age son of parents Janice (Judy Greer) and Ron (Alexander Skarsgård), who have yet to fully come to terms with what their son Eric has done and how they’re going to handle the traumatic consequences.
The original play was written by A Red Orchid Theatre ensemble member Brett Neveu (who also wrote the screenplay) and first staged at the tail end of 2002. Fellow Red Orchid member Michael Shannon did not star in or direct that particular production, but he was so taken with it that when he got word that Neveu was adapting it into a screenplay, he was inspired to take a crack at directing it, marking his feature debut.
Drifting further apart from her husband, Janice seeks comfort in her church, led by a young pastor (Paul Sparks) who is eager to set up a meeting between the mothers of Eric’s victims and Janice—easier said than done. Janice seems willing to push through the process in order to deal with what her son has done and the overwhelming guilt and shame she feels as a result. Shannon called in every favor from acting friends and former collaborators to get the film made, and the work features appearances from the likes of Tracy Letts, Alison Pill, and even Shannon’s wife, the fearless acting great Kate Arrington.
The resulting work is part societal critique, part meditation on loneliness, both in a marriage and in a community that has turned against you. But it’s also about the desperate need to understand why someone commits such heinous acts, leaving Janice little choice but to seek answers from the only person who could possibly provide them, providing Eric LaRue with a deeply profound ending and final shot.
I recently sat down to interview Shannon and Neveu, just a few hours before we did a post-screening Q&A in front of a packed house at an early preview of the film at the Gene Siskel Film Center; the movie opens for a full run at the Film Center beginning Friday, April 4. Please enjoy our conversation…
Hi Mike, good to see you again.
Micheal Shannon: Hey, and we’ll see you tonight, right?
Yes, correct. Hi Brett, I’ll be moderating tonight.
Brett Neveu: Oh great.
I actually saw this film the first time when the Chicago International Film Festival played it at the Music Box. But the play debuted at Red Orchid in 2002. So whose idea was it to adapt this into a film?
BN: That would be my manager. I wrote it in 1998-99, and then wrote the screenplay around 2016-17. My manager had been on me to adapt that script for all sorts of reasons, and I’ve known her since I was a freshman at the University of Iowa, and she was like “You need to adapt this,” and I was like “Yeah yeah, I’ll do that.” But I was really thinking “How do you do that?”
But I’d been teaching screenwriting at Northwestern for a few years by then, and I had a two-week window, my daughter was at camp at the time, and I thought “If not now, I don’t know when.” I love to sit on the couch in the summertime and not go outside, because I’m a writer, so I wrote it then. And Mike and I were doing a play together called Traitor, which Mike directed, and on closing night, I said “Do you mind if I give you this?” I love to give him stuff whether he wants it or not , and I gave it to him to read.
I know the temptation when you’re adapting a play into a film is to expand it beyond the confines of the stage, but what was your approach to this story.
BN: Just what you said.
So how much did you want to keep it insular, and how much did you want to grow it?
BN: It depended on the scene. There were a few scenes I wanted to keep because of the tension, and I feel like staying in certain spaces for slightly extended periods of time is important to the point of the scene, for the tension and awkwardness, and also, that’s how it would happen. But I also wanted to go to different places in the town. That was a big one for me. If we’re going to set it here, I want to go to the store, the church, the care facility, so that Janice has to actually do something. It can’t just be things happening to Janice; she has to actively pursue things. As a lead character, that’s what you want. You need to try and get what you want, and that means you have to be active. Those locations were all based on things that she wanted to do. She can’t just go there and show up; she has to go to this church, she has to go to work or the store, she has to do those things because she wants her life back, she wants to understand what she has to do next. So the expansion was built on that, and I think that’s one of the reasons it works. It isn’t just “I’m going to expand this because I need to,” there has to be a purpose behind it.
Mike, why was this the first time you were going to direct something? Why was this the one?
MS: When I read this screenplay, I was pretty dumbstruck by it. I’d already been a huge fan of the play from seeing it all those years ago; I saw it many times when we produced it actually. I kept going back. And then when I saw that Brett had transformed it into a screenplay, it really took my breath away. I just really cared very deeply about all the characters, all of them, and I wanted to create the world that Brett had made the blueprint for. I had just directed Traitor, which was also about community and the latent threat that communities deal with and how they deal with them. In Traitor, it was environmental concerns.
(Editor's note: Traitor is an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.)
I’m deeply worried about how we take care of each other. It’s a very violent, ominous world that we live in, and we rely on each other to try and come up with some modicum of safety or coherence in the midst of extraordinary chaos and uncertainty. I’d say more than any other theme, that’s one that I find very meaningful and important to explore.
It’s true that these are things we’re concerned about in the times we’re living in, but this play was written more than 20 years ago, and I don’t think they’ve gotten much better.
MS: No, no.
Speaking of taking care of each other, on the surface, this is about the aftermath of this school shooting, but you really dig into this idea of these predatory helpers, these people who happen to be church people in your story, but they’re not always faith-based in the real world. They seem to care more about setting up a meeting than actually helping someone.
BN: Well, you have to ask yourself “Who else is going to step in and do this?” Also, the competition between the two churches to have this meeting comes out of this idea that “If I don’t do this, then they end up over there, and that person may get the wrong information.” The wound will continue to be infected, and they need to heal this, and healing is about fixing it and moving on, as opposed to just talking about it. And Ron does get some healing from his church. But there’s no real healing here; it’s more about talking it through, because there’s no fixing this.
Does it help Ron, or is he just covering up his pain with religion?
BN: It’s contextual. Helping is helping. Certainly when I was a kid in the evangelical church, the things that helped me… I remember going to Jesus Camp and I was filled with the Lord there, but I also made out with a lot of girls. Those two things happened, and it filled me with joy, so it fixed something in me. It made me feel less self-conscious, I didn’t know girls liked me. So there’s fixing in there, so it can be another mode of working that is good for them, but for Janice, it’s not the path.
MS: Any time I hear the word “inept” get thrown around as applied to any of the characters in my film, I counter “Well I haven’t seen anybody do any better in society.”
I think the failure of the meeting process at her church pushes Janice to do what she needed to do anyway.
BN: Yeah. There’s me writing this, but there’s also knowing the technical aspects of telling stories, because that’s what I teach. I know that there are things that Janice wants, but I also know what she needs to do. That’s what everybody is right about: she needs to go visit her son. Everybody has told her this. “You need to do this.”
MS: I also understand why she doesn’t do it.
BN: Of course. But I do believe she’s facing a lot, getting a lot of information, and everybody has their own ideas about how to heal, and they’re offering that. She wants to know how to feel. “Well, here’s how you should feel.” It’s never exactly right because she needs to find the thing that works for her, and I feel like that reflects a lot of people in society, whether it’s therapy, churches, or relationships. We need to find our own way in. That’s playwriting too. Part of the reason for writing this script, or any script, is that there’s something bugging me—a piece of sand in my oyster shell—and I need to examine it, and I can’t hear the answer from somebody else; I have to do it myself.
So much of this doesn’t work without Judy just absolutely killing it. And I know you worked with her on both a Christmas movie, Pottersville…
MS: I did that film with Judy, and I also did an episode of Room 104 with her.
I think that’s the one I saw first. Was that experience with her the thing that opened you up to her possibilities as a actor, beyond the comedy that she’s better known for?
MS: I’ve been enamored with Judy from the jump. When we did Pottersville together, I wanted everything I do to have Judy Greer in it. It’s a no-brainer for me. I think she’s a treasure, and we’re lucky to have her.
The cast is a lot of people you’ve worked with before, either on stage or films or series.
MS: For the record, I didn’t have auditions. I just said, “I want you and you and you.”
Just looked around at who your friends with or who was in your immediate vicinity?
MS: Not even friends. I had very specific ideas about who I wanted. The first person I knew was Paul Sparks, who had to play Steve; there’s nobody else who could do it; it’s an extraordinarily difficult part and I think he knocks it out of the park. And then I was fortunate to get some of our Red Orchid compatriots, which brought me great joy. I was very blessed to get Tracy in there.
BN: This hadn’t occurred to me until now, part of the appeal of the script was that it was a Red Orchid production first, but also you could imagine who could play these parts. You could fill that in, and I love working like that. And now that it’s cast in my head, and casting is everything.
MS: It was the same thing when we did Traitor; I didn’t have auditions for that. Mierka Girten, who’s in the movie, was my casting director for Traitor. I think I was in Princeton doing Simpatico, and I got on the phone with Mierka and said “I want this person, this person, and this person.” And she said, “You don’t want to have auditions?” “No, no, no.”
While casting came together fairly easily for you, but prepping to make a movie is a whole other set of issues. How did you even begin getting ready to direct? I don’t think you went to film school, did you?
MS: I went to Columbia College for three months and then dropped out.
So how did you prep and gather your production team?
MS: It’s interesting, there was this DP I worked with named Bobby Bukowski, who shot 99 Homes and The Iceman, and he had signed on to shoot the film, pending his availability. But when it all came together, he wasn’t available, so I was shooting in the dark and got on a Zoom call with Andrew Wheeler, talked to him for 20 minutes, saw a feature he made, and thought “Yeah, this guy is the guy.” I went to Wilmington (North Carolina) and started scouting locations, which was really exciting, much more so than I had anticipated it being. I think a lot of people assume that if an actor directs a film, they’re going to primarily focus on performance, but I was extraordinarily focused on every aspect of the filmmaking, even in post-production. I never just gave my editor notes and saw what he came up with; I was there every day, at all the mixes, color correction, everything. I get a kick out of every aspect of filmmaking.
BN: I’ll add this, Mike had me there every day. I sat right next to him, we went to dinner every night, got up in the morning, got coffee together every morning, got a group of us together, including Judy and Andrew, and I was there all the time. And it was before the strike happened, and that was one of the big conversations around that. I felt like this was exactly the way to do this. It was so much fun, such hard work, and we got to talk things through that made everything feel good. I think it helps with the film, for sure, and it made it more of a team effort.
Having seen it twice, I focused more on your directing and less on performance the second time, and it’s a genuinely beautiful work. Even that ending shot, what a great shot; it’s like somebody punched me.
MS: Thank you, Steve.
BN: I don’t know how he got those birds to fly right on cue .
Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you tonight.
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