While Shia LaBeouf didn’t star in a film premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, he is a producer on a work-in-progress documentary that was screened there Thursday night. During the post-screening Q&A, LaBeouf still took center stage, blasting Hollywood and even sharing his thoughts on Al Pacino.
LaBeouf was at Tribeca to support documentary filmmaker Alma Har’el’s new film, Love True. He is an executive producer on the film and said he didn’t do anything other than write a check to support Har’el. He liked her previous film, Bombay Beach, which won Best Documentary Feature at Tribeca in 2011. The new film is about couples in Alaska, New York and Hawaii, with reenactments of events in their lives.
“I wrote a check,” LaBeouf said during the Q&A, notes Forbes. He said he didn’t want to be an intrusive producer who tries to give his opinion on a director’s work. “I literally was just facilitating the pragmatic s**t.”
Har’el said her point was to show how love changes during our lives, as we grow older. LaBeouf, who starred in the Sigur Ros and Sia music videos she directed, noted that the director was “in a really terrible place,” adding, “The best art comes out of pain.”
LaBeouf did take questions from the audience that were about himself and not Har’el’s film. As Deadline reports that he was asked to compare his acting in the Sia and Sigur Ros videos. That gave him a chance to share his opinion on Pacino’s acting.
“It’s performance gymnastics, it’s dance movies,” he said of the Sia video. “It’s like Scarface. Al Pacino’s acting – nothing against him but there’s a big difference between something that’s presentational and something that’s representational. I think even Pacino would agree that his work is representational, whereas someone like Joaquin Phoenix is presentational.”
The actor was also open about his rehab stint and therapy, comparing it to method acting. People will play your family to help you work through your issues.
“The only way you can actually have something like that go on is when everyone agrees that that’s what the reality is. You rarely get that on a large film set,” he said.
This made him think of his time as the human face of the Transformers series. He noted how the characters, particularly Bumblebee, never felt real.
“Bumblebee never sounds real, it’s just a f**king name,” he continued. “The name alone you can never make real, no matter how much you put into it, because on the other side, you have a director who doesn’t believe it either. So when you work with certain directors who give over and do something that’s presentational and you both believe it, then there is no f**king around, and you really are in this alternate universe.”
LaBeouf is clearly still struggling with his relationship with Hollywood. While he appeared in Fury with Brad Pitt last year, he’s mostly stuck with smaller indie films. His next movie is Man Down, which opens in October.
image courtesy of INFphoto.com