PARK CITY, Utah -- For anyone out there wishing to woo Gretchen Mol for their next movie, listen to Neil LaBute about how he got her to sign onto his play-turned-film Shape of Things. It's another scathing look at the gender wars from LaBute, director of In The Company of Men and Friends and Neighbours.

"I know exactly what I said to her: 'I won't cut a thing.' "

Also helping were the scripts she was being offered. "I was reading a lot of crappy stuff," Mol laughs.

Think of Shape of Things as a perverse Pygmalion -- about how people slowly try to change each other in relationships. "'Maybe you shouldn't go in the rust-coloured shirt,' " LaBute explains. "We always guise it as benevolence, but really, I like the rust-coloured shirt. Somewhere in there is this duplicity."

After staging the play in London, LaBute and the cast -- including Mol, Paul Rudd and Rachel Weisz -- filmed the movie, which debuted here earlier this week.

Weisz, the talented British actress best known for the popcorn Mummy movies, says there's no way any actor can try to balance small films with box office hits. "The truth is, nobody knows what's going to be a blockbuster. The Mummy was just this fun mummy movie and the character was fun."


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