There’s a reason why Steven Spielberg doesn’t want shit to do with Shia LaBeouf anymore. I’m sure we can all agree that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was no Citizen Kane (or is it Vertigo now?), but for the star of your lackluster film to go out and publicly trash the production after you helped him gain a foothold in an industry that’s almost impossible to maintain a certain level of success in, well, that makes one hell of a douche-bag out of that inconsiderate punk, now, doesn’t it?
Well, apparently Shia hasn’t learned his lesson despite his Crystal Skull comments costing his relationship with former mentor Spielberg. Now the former big-budget leading man to less than sub-par popcorn fare, is claiming he’s done with studio films—they “stick a finger up your ass” he proclaimed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter recently.
Citing names like Terrence Malick, Robert Redford, and Lars von Trier—whose film Nymphomanic he begins shooting after the Venice Film Festival—LaBeouf swears that he’ll only work with lower-budgeted films where creative decisions are handled at the creator-level, and not by executives who “give you the money, then get on a plane and come to the set and stick a finger up your ass and chase you around for five months.”
But here’s the thing with Shia’s claim that he’ll only work on low budget, creatively-free films: he’s full of shit. There’s no such thing as low budget feature films anymore. The indie system is a myth. Big studios have created smaller film companies (think Fox Searchlight) that release these films under the guise of “independently created pieces”, but these films are bought and paid for by large studios (MGM, Warner, Universal) just the same.
Have you seen the Lawless trailer? Does it look like a low-budget, indie film to you? Of course it doesn’t, because it isn’t. What Shia should have said is that his choices in scripts have been horrible, and that from now on, he’ll make sure that he reads entire manuscripts before absconding on boozy adventures filled with knives and bar fights. Then he would have been telling the truth.