Director Neil LaBute has built a career out of making people uncomfortable. Whether he’s exploring the seldom seen (and even more seldom acknowledged) nasty side of human relationships with In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or weirding out horror fans with a bizarre remake of Wicker Man, Labute has never been afraid to elicit a strong reaction from audiences and critics alike. With his latest film, Lakeview Terrace (in theaters Friday), he tries his practiced hand at dealing with controversial issues once again — but this opus also finds LaBute venturing into uncharted territory. The director’s never made a thriller before, and for all the hot-button subject matter in his filmography, he’s never dealt with this movie’s underlying theme: racism. With no shortage of questions, I sat down with the filmmaker recently to hear about how conscious the shift in focus really was, and whether his Detroit roots affected his choices.

The movie is named for the high-end LA community where yuppie couple Chris (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Kerry Washington) Mattson have just moved in next door to widowed single dad Abel (Samuel L. Jackson), who clearly doesn’t approve of the the newlywed’s mixed-race marriage. What starts as unspoken hostility soon escalates into neighbor-on-neighbor terrorism, and the matter is only complicated by the fact that Abel is a cop — so there’s no one on the other end of a 911 call that doesn’t owe him a favor.

LaBute was born in Michigan, and even though he moved to the Northwest as a toddler, one can’t help wondering if AMG’s home state might have informed his filmmaking – especially given Detroit’s fractured history of racial tensions. “I think, you know, in a backward way I definitely drew from that.” he says, “And the way I think it makes sense to me to discuss that is through my own father who, as I say, lived here in Michigan and grew up in Detroit. He definitely had certain views – he was a union guy, he was a truck driver. Would I say he was a racist? I don’t know, but I think he was a classic example of someone who would have a certain mistrust in other people, and if there was something different about that other person, that was certainly something he would step back from and try and see if it scared him. And that’s kind of at the heart of racism. I think that that’s the home you grow up in, that’s a generational thing, and hopefully it gets better each time out.”

The fact that LaBute took inspiration from his father and from his father’s generation is fairly apparent in the film. The white in Jackson’s beard is left on prominent display, and LaBute never fails to shoot him from the best angle to showcase how the LAPD police uniform highlights the actor’s late-middle-age belly. “Abel’s a generation older than the couple he’s terrorizing, and I think what’s rooted in him is not necessarily rooted in them. He’s able to get back at that instinctive sort of ‘You’re different than me and we’re going to clash.’ I think that my growing up around someone who probably had some of those tendencies made me aware of how to make Abel a real person. Because I wouldn’t look at my father and say he was a monster, I’d say he was a guy who had issues, a guy who was troubled in his own way.”

It’s true – for all the horrible stuff Abel does during the course of the film, he isn’t really portrayed as a villain. “We fought to make him a respectable cop and a stern but good father,” says LaBute, “a guy that the neighborhood seems to like, as opposed to a bad guy.” A large portion of this task fell on the shoulders of Jackson, whose bread and butter roles are usually tough talking, gun toting badasses. “I think he gave his best to make him a man, rather than a monster. So whatever he taps into, he tapped into something believable for me.”

“I think that’s what makes him a human being and that’s what Sam’s job was, to breathe life into him. I think he probably relished the chance to play it – often the bad guy gets the good lines – so I think Sam enjoyed playing the character, making him real, but pushing him as far as he could. With the most talented people, it’s hard to see how they do it, they can sort of just turn it off and on. He understands that world of film acting — for a second the clouds part and everybody goes ‘Okay, shoot now!’ — he knows he has to be on at any given moment. So it’s a tough job, but I think he knows how to do that, so he’s able to focus his energies. He didn’t go over to the corner of the set and cry a lot and say ‘This is so hard for me!’ but you know, it would have been a lot easier to play him in a more clichéd way.”

Still, as humanizing as Jackson’s portrayal is, Abel does inflict some really malicious damages on the Mattsons during their feud, like breaking their air conditioner and threatening them with chain saws. But LaBute is reluctant to levy any final verdicts against his flawed protagonist. “We imply in film,” he says, “We’re very manipulative. You’d never know if that air conditioner broke down, or if he did that. We really don’t know if he slashed the tires or not. He’s not like a Bond villain who says ‘Before I kill you, I’m going to leave the room so you can escape! But for one sec, let me tell you…of course I did the air conditioner!’ Ultimately what do we actually see him do? Only so many things. But we see them [the Mattsons] doing a certain number of things too — it just ends up being a clash of personality, and a clash of blue collar and white collar, and age, and perspective, and probably politics. So it’s a lot of stuff, it’s not just race. It’s a guy where you could have put Tommy Lee Jones in there and he can play an angry guy too, and I think you would have the same kind of movie, but I think maybe it would be a movie maybe we would have seen already.”

He makes a good point. Racism isn’t exactly on Hollywood’s shortlist of safe topics, but depicting a black character who’s racist is practically unheard of. And somewhat understandably; the idea of what constitutes racism and how it should be dealt with when it comes from the African American side is a far from settled issue. However, LaBute isn’t reluctant to voice his feelings on the matter, “People call it ‘reverse racism.’ I’m not sure that exists, that idea. I think if you’re racist, you are racist. It’s just whatever form it comes in. And ‘reverse racism’ implies there’s only two directions. When we talk about race, most people’s minds seem to click to black and white relations – there’s a lot of different folks living in this country. So I think it already marginalizes the issue by just thinking of it in those terms. Sometimes class is connected to race, because of what’s happened throughout the years. Today, it’s often based on what kind of money you’re carrying in your pocket, so that’s kind of the new racism. “

The themes about class seem to present themselves from the very premise of the film, as Abel is clearly sickened to see couple of latte sipping punks assume the lifestyle it took him years of dedicated civil service to attain. But LaBute’s history as a director has leaned a lot more heavily towards issues of gender relations; so was this a conscious shift? “Conscious because it was there in the script. I mean, Sam was attached to it, so I knew who was playing Abel and what the writer was trying to say. I think hopefully race is certainly there in the movie, and yet it’s one of a variety of things on the agenda. I think gender politics are still there. They [the film’s producers], I think, hiring me thought ‘You can bring something to this, you know what you’re doing here.’ They didn’t look at me and say ‘Love all your thrillers!’ because there’s none – so they were obviously looking at something else. They said, ‘You’ve done a play about race, you almost did another movie about race, we know that you’re obviously interested, we know how you feel about men and women and how that clash can be.’ I think they felt ‘We’ve got a thriller, how can we elevate this thriller into something else?’ Because race isn’t dealt with that much in film — in popular culture anyway– as much as we talk about it being part of our society. So the fact that it piggy backs itself into a thriller and finds a way to be discussed is worthwhile, I thought.”

It’s hard not to think that “elevating a thriller” is code for sneaking your socio-cultural commentary into a star-driven box-office contender – as opposed to making an intellectually driven film from the ground up. “It’s all really very economically driven,” he says, “So I think it’s harder probably in something which, again, wants to be a thriller. The company makes no bones about it, it’s like ‘Do what you want, make the characters great and strong, but I’d better have enough material to make that trailer look like it’s a thriller.’ So I think it’s harder to inject that into mainstream film and into studio film than it is to a film that you’ve spent $100,000 of your own money on, or a film made in another country. I think people still tend to think of movies as entertainment, they want to go and they want to be entertained, so sometimes it’s troubling for them if there’s too much issue it’s too sad or it’s not wrapped up at the end. I think the good movies keep asking questions. I think that’s the job, you’re supposed to ask questions and say hey, why are we the way we are? Why do people misuse power? Why do people have such a hard time getting along? That’s what you’re supposed to do and yet, you seem to have to always hide it somewhere in the pudding.”

But, of course, even armed with this bold new subject matter, LaBute ’s trademark skill at shining a light on the ugliest areas of romantic relationships is still at play in the portrayal of Chris and Lisa’s marriage – so much so that it sometimes feels like he might have had a hand in the script. “Some of it was me,” he concedes, “It was a combination. There was stuff that was there from David [Loughery] originally. When I came in, I brought in another writer, this guy named Howard Korder who’s a really fine playwright who also writes for the screen. He did a great job working on those themes and trying to not subvert the genre – not to say we’re not making a thriller, because we are – but how can we keep upping the ante, making it all come from character, from the dramatic conflict. A lot of those lines were things that Howard came up with, and I would make a comment or add to that. I finally put a final polish on the script and I added certain elements of that. So it’s a bit of a hash of different people and different ideas, but I think everybody was going in the same direction, saying ‘How do we constantly keep that tension?’ I mean that’s our job, to ruin good relationships. We go ‘They seem so happy! Too bad for you,’ because I’m here to ruin your day, to find one little problem and magnify it.”

With the goal of making the characters’ relationships more real? “Even more than real. I’m making a movie, it’s not a documentary. I have to split you up in half an hour — sometimes it takes a whole day for people to not like each other. You have to work quickly to start showing the strain that they’re feeling. That was the stuff that I enjoyed and I think that they [the producers] were happy to bring me onto. They knew that I would get the most of those actors in terms of that. Because, frankly, it’s only ‘thrilling’ if you care about those people. If they’re just faceless people running around in the woods and somebody’s killing them off 20 at a time, you don’t have time to really connect with them. But these people — even down to Sam’s character — you start to feel something for them.”

Lakeview Terrace opens September 19th.