The wicked man

Does Neil LaBute have it in for the British? He made the hero of Possession an American, now he's moving cult classic The Wicker Man to Maine. Matthew Sweet talks to a movie heretic

Neil LaBute. Two years ago, we knew him as a crafter of savage character pieces whose protagonists silenced the voice of their consciences like other people flip their mobiles to vibrate mode. Some loved him, some hated him, and many of the latter told him so. Then Warner Brothers announced that they had employed him to direct an adaptation of Possession – AS Byatt's much-loved Booker-winning romance of two time zones – and Neil LaBute acquired a whole new set of enemies. While he was location in the UK with Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart, the lunatic fringe of Byatt's readership bombarded him with abusive messages, denouncing him for meddling with the novel's plot and characters. Their deepest grievance? That he had transformed the novel's hero, Roland Michell, from a squat, socially inadequate Brit to a tall, buffed, muscular American with a Daz-white smile.

He must hate the quiet life: LaBute's next task is a remake of The Wicker Man (1973), Robin Hardy's classic tale of ritual immolation and nudie maypole-dancing off the coast of Scotland. It's about a community of fanatics, isolated from the outside world, who are happy to burn heretics alive in order to protect their way of life. Wicker fans may well be prepared to do the same: the film is as cultish as a film can be. When LaBute says that he and his star Nicolas Cage are going to shoot it in the States because "it'll be safer that way," he's not being entirely flippant. "It'll keep the angry e-mails at bay," he says wearily. "I've been through all that with Possession... people complaining that I've changed the colour of a character's hair!"

It was not LaBute's idea to remake The Wicker Man: Cage – in the role played in the original by Edward Woodward – was already part of the package when he was assigned to write and direct the film by Warner. But, as LaBute also says of Possession, he was an admirer long before he got the gig. He first saw the film at a Washington movie theatre in which he was employed to tear tickets. "I loved the story," he says, "but it was one of those films which I felt, legitimately, could be touched. It wasn't shot so perfectly that it couldn't be looked back at again. And I've come up with a legitimate way to update and shift the story. It's set on an island off the coast of Maine."

Like Roland Michell, Summerisle – Britain's last pagan outpost – will be moving westwards. And, it seems, the character played in the original by Christopher Lee may no longer be lording it over its inhabitants. "It's now more a matriarchal society than a patriarchal one," LaBute explains. "Which should get me into more trouble with people who accuse me of being a misogynist, no doubt." He looses a theatrical sigh. "But that just seems to be the well that I dip my head in."

Since he first began to write, LaBute has been forced to live with a certain degree of animosity from reviewers, audiences and peers. His adopted church "disfellowshipped" him as a consequence of a play he wrote about a gang of gay-bashing Mormons on the loose in Manhattan. (It's not quite excommunication, but a lesser ban that can be lifted after recuperative work – like Possession, perhaps.) Critics have often accused him of cruelty, cynicism and a questionable attitude to women. (Newsday said of In the Company of Men: "You walk away from it feeling as if you've witnessed a rape that you'd done nothing to stop.") And when LaBute's film of Byatt's novel opened last year, the reviews commented on the unlikely nature of their coupling, and enumerated its discomforts.

"I wasn't so huge with the English critics," reflects LaBute. "That was my drubbing. It had been a long time coming, and they took their opportunity and thought, 'We're going to roll up our sleeves on this one.'" My favourite was a headline from an online journal: "Misogynist Mormon Goes Soft". Biff. Bop. Pow. Splat.

LaBute admits that he was forced to "sing and dance" to persuade the executives at Warner Brothers to let him have Possession in the first place. "I was in the throes of making Nurse Betty, so the films they had to go on were In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors. So they looked at Possession and thought, 'Why would we want to give you all that money to do it?' I had to convince them I was ready for it."

You can see why Warner might have been puzzled by the announcement of his candidature. Continuities of sensibility between these films and Byatt's work are hard to detect. In the Company of Men (1997) starred Aaron Eckhart as Chad, a water-cooler Iago with a plan to pick some sad-eyed singleton from the office – "young thing, wallflower type, or disfigured in some way" – hook her with his looks and then humiliate her. ("Trust me," he breathes. "She'll be reaching for her sleeping pills within a week, and we'll laugh about this till we're very old men.") Your Friends & Neighbors (1998) swam with a whole school of middle-class sharks – Jason Patric's Cary proved the most vicious when he boasted of exacting revenge upon a lover by sending her a letter on hospital notepaper informing her that she had tested positive for Aids. Nurse Betty (2000), the least merciless picture of the three, sent its heroine – a delusional widow played by Renée Zellweger – from Kansas City to LA to slake her desire for a soap-opera doctor with whom she had developed an obsession. They are not calling cards for studio costume-dramas.

Moreover, other writers had already been defeated by the task of turning the book into a movie script. "I was going to do it with Sydney Pollack," the playwright Peter Shaffer told me recently. "I took Antonia Byatt to dinner and said to her, 'You are aware that this book contains 195 pages of fake Browning?' 'Yes,' she said, 'I am aware of that.' [Byatt's voice, you should know, was rendered in the style of Les Dawson.] 'What do you expect me to do with them?' I said. 'Cut them,' she said. So we were on the right wavelength." But, Shaffer reflected, he "dithered over it" and was distracted by work on his play The Gift of the Gorgon, and the job was eventually passed to David Hare. (Hare's draft was never filmed, but its time-shifting structure probably helped him to measure out The Hours.)

To the surprise of many, LaBute did not sharpen the spiky elements of the book. Roland's nasty landlady was replaced by the indulgent fairy godfather of Tom Hollander. Val, Roland's dreary millstone of a girlfriend, was quietly removed from the narrative – though the character of Blanche Glover, her counterweight in the Victorian arm of the plot, was retained. The film that emerged was smoother and gentler than the novel, and in comparison to LaBute's previous work, positively fluffy.

"All the negative reviews I saw commented on the fact that I'd changed Roland from a British character to an American," he recalls. "I could easily have asked Aaron to do the dialect. I could easily have cast somebody else. I wasn't concerned about getting my friend into the movie: he's fine without me. But the change makes dramatic sense to me, and I believe it makes sense to Byatt. I read notes of hers from 10 years ago which said that in the film, Roland would have to be a very different character from the one in the book."

Then something sneaky occurs to him: "It would be fun to go back and not mention the change in the press notes, like I did. To test whether people had actually read the book, and knew that Roland was English in the first place. I sort of set myself up with that one. Left myself open to the cannonfire." When the The Wicker Man opens next year, he may need to duck for cover.

'Possession' is out now on DVD and VHS from Warner Home Video