TIMEClassroom spoke with director Moises Kaufman to learn why and how he created The Laramie Project and how he hopes the HBO film will inspire viewers. Kaufman is founder and artistic director of the Tectonic Theater Project, a New York City-based theater company. He brought The Laramie Project to the stage in Denver, Colorado and New York City before directing the film adaptation for HBO.

TIMEClassroom: You've said that you wanted to use theater to contribute to the national dialogue on current events. Can you elaborate on that?

Moises Kaufman: There are moments in history when an event occurs, and the event is of such power that it operates as a lightning rod. It brings to the surface all the ideas, the beliefs, and the philosophies that are permeating people's lives. I feel that the murder of Matthew Shepard was an event of that nature. Every year, more than 20 anti-gay homicides are reported; that means there are at least two or three times that many that are not reported. But for some reason, this one resonated. This one was a moment where we as a culture said, "Wait a minute. What's going on?"

One of the reasons was that Matthew was a young student with his life ahead of him; Matthew was white; he was very beautiful. So we could all identify with him, and say, "My God, they stopped his life at the most beautiful moment of it. He could be everybody's brother. He could be everybody's friend."

TC: What did you hope to achieve by going to Laramie?

MK: My idea was that if we went to Laramie and we interviewed the people of the town, we might be able to create a document not only about how Laramie was feeling at the end of the millennium, but about how the whole country was feeling and thinking and talking -- not only about homosexuality, but also about class and education and violence. So the impetus behind going to Laramie had to do with trying to gather a document that was an X-ray of where we were at the end of the millennium, and that's what The Laramie Project was about.

TC: What challenges did you face in adapting the play into a film?

MK: With The Laramie Project, the idea was, What about a theater company going somewhere, asking questions, coming back and from those questions, the company as a whole writing a play? One of the big questions that we posed in the theater was: What is it that theater can do to contribute to this dialogue? And when it came time to make the movie, we asked the same question of the film medium: What is it that film can do to help articulate this dialogue? And some of the answers were: We can shoot on location. We can have 64 actors instead of 8 actors. We can show much more of the culture that is in the town.

TC: What do you hope students will take away from viewing this film?

MK: Most importantly, The Laramie Project tries to put us in touch with our common humanity. Past the issues, past the ideas, it tries to focus attention on how we are all different and how we are all the same. When Matthew's murder happened, the students at the high school in Laramie were really shaken by it. And I think this is an opportunity for students all around the country to meditate on what that meant, and on how they can take steps to prevent another Matthew Shepard from being murdered in their communities and in their schools.