Playwright and filmmaker Neil LaBute marks a return to big-screen form in "Some Velvet Morning," an intimate and explosive story about an encounter between 50-year-old Fred (Stanley Tucci) and the much younger Velvet (Alice Eve), the former mistress whose door he suddenly darkens after four years. When Fred declares his love, and that he's just left his wife, Velvet is dispassionate and vaguely annoyed. She's got an assignation...with Fred's son, Chris.

Neil LaBute Sang Tan/Associated Press

And so the game begins. Shot in a Park Slope brownstone in eight days last June in a six-figure budget, the film has its premiere Sunday at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center as part of the Tribeca Film Festival.

This week, Mr. LaBute, who is 50, spoke to The Wall Street Journal as he began another day of rehearsals for his new play "Reasons to Be Happy," which opens May 16 at the MCC Theater.

After your big Hollywood productions of "Lakeview Terrace" and "The Wicker Man" remake, this movie feels like you've gone back to basics. Is that fair to say?

I wanted to work in miniature like I have in the past, with very few settings and a small cast and with material that was my own. I spent a lot of time after the first few films that I made being more for hire, and a lot of my original work was going to the theater. I felt like I needed to stop and assess that and do the same thing onscreen that I had done 10 or 15 years ago. This felt like a good piece to be able to focus those skills on.

Was there a particular trigger for this particular story, or was it an occasion for digging into that familiar terrain of men vs. women?

That always is an interesting starting point for me. And this is a piece that could easily have been shepherded toward the stage. It took all the best ideas of what I had been chipping away at in terms of creating something that takes the audience on a journey it might not expect, and lets me deal with relationships, and have my hand with two real powerhouse actors.

You used the word mercurial to describe Alice Eve. You can see so many things flash across her face in only a few seconds.

Yes, instantly. It's wonderful to watch someone like that, and does that in every take. There's no set pattern. Even when you watch them work. You shoot it five times and they do it differently five times. They give you a lot to work with.

Stanley Tucci has such physicality. He's cast in so many comedies, it's good to see him play an aggressive guy who can be a jerk.

And the leading man. He is still sexy, and I understand the pain and I understand the journey and he is really transformative at the end of the picture. It's a fun place to take an audience. Hopefully they'll take it in the spirit. I don't know how it will play. The best thing for me is when you can still take them to a surprising place but also a place that makes logical sense once you kind of think back through it.

Let's not reveal any spoilers.

No, I suppose not. The last 10 minutes is a bit of a ride—physically, where they take it and then, ultimately, there's that turnaround.

There are some ripping scatalogical twists of phrase in the dialogue, which won't disappoint your fans. Where do you come up with this stuff?

Sitting up with a bottle of Scotch? [Laughs] No. Once you get inside the heads of those characters, you try and be true to them but let them talk. I'm much more of a writer who creates framework and let the characters take it there. I had the set-up and I knew where I wanted to go. I knew what that ending was going to be. It was the getting there that I didn't fill in until I got there. Each step of the way it was 'How serpentine can I make this path?' How complex could the game be and still remain within the realm of possibility? Because if you sit back and look at it, these people are like the two best improv artists in the world.

Alice Eve and Stanley Tucci in a scene from Mr. LaBute's film 'Some Velvet Morning. Rogier Stoffers

So, here's the oldest question in the book: How much of this material comes out of your own experience and how much from everything else?

It's really everything. Every movie you've ever seen that you don't want to be the same as. You go back to the best exchanges in "Carnal Knowledge," and every screwball comedy. I want to be as good as that. You set the bar there. But my life is no closer to that as it is to "Death at a Funeral" or something else that I've written. I don't think it's worth it as a writer to examine yourself and your work in that way. I think that can be a little dangerous. You can choke yourself. I get very itchy around themes. I hope to God there is a theme there in the end, but it's the last thing I think about. Those characters felt like people that I wanted to spend some time with and people that I hadn't written about yet. That middle-aged experience of a man who wants to step outside of what we think of as normalcy and have this vibrant engagement with another person like that. Everybody has felt like they missed a moment and wished they could go back and try again.

It's also about this crackling power dynamic between them.

I've been writing about that ever since I've been writing, and how people use love as a currency. It's an actual commodity that they trade back and forth. The way in which we give and take and who has the balance is almost never equal. It shifts back and forth so delicately, radically, of course, at other times. It's a well I've gone to many times.

Though this all could easily play on the stage, you've gone to a lot of effort to make it into something that looks like a movie—even with just two characters and mostly confined to a house. It's as if you've signed up with the microbudget generation.

I've always liked small pictures and real delicate work that concentrates on character. Eric Rohmer has been one of the big influences on my filmgoing life, and I love the little portraits. His "Moral Tales" tell the same story of a man who has two women he has to choose between. He went back to those stories again and again and again. I love that I'm able to go off and do this little watercolor about two people. If you do that, you can really get in there and find out a lot about those people. And some reflection of that is the way real people live and the way that we treat each other. I have in my head this idea of 12 tales of love, of some kind of love, that will take place for every month of the year. We'll see if I'm around long enough to pull that off.

Do you have ideas for the other 11 months?

Of course I do! That's the problem with writers, our minds never stop working. There's no turning your computer off at 5 and going home.

You recently celebrated your 50th birthday. Was that a cause for contemplation?

Every day is a cause for reflection. Reflection, hope and longing and guilt are basically your breakfast food when you reach my age.