Science & Tech Quote by Neil LaBute

LaBute’s joke lands because it flips the usual compliment. In a blockbuster age where “science fiction” can mean bold ideas and imaginative world-building, he treats the label as an accusation: that his work feels safely hypothetical, cordoned off behind genre glass. For a director whose films trade in everyday cruelty, social power games, and the quiet violence of intimacy, “sci-fi” would be a failure of proximity. It would let the audience relax.

The line is also a crafty bit of self-branding. LaBute has long been tagged as a provocateur, even a misanthrope, staging moral traps in ordinary rooms: a date, a workplace, a friendship. Saying he’d be “frightened as a writer” isn’t false modesty; it’s a claim about craft. His fear isn’t that viewers misunderstand him, but that they’ve translated his characters’ behavior into fantasy rather than recognizing it as plausible, maybe familiar. The subtext: If you can file it under “that would never happen,” you don’t have to examine your own capacity for it.

There’s an implied jab at how culture uses genre as a quarantine zone. We’re comfortable discussing dystopia because it’s “about the future.” LaBute wants the discomfort of the present tense. His movies don’t need spaceships; they need you to notice the small, mundane moments where people choose to be cruel and then call it normal.