Shia LaBeouf’s Crystal Skull Adventure

Posted by admin on May 22nd, 2008 |

Shia LaBeouf is the hardest working young man in Hollywood. Except for a few unfortunate arrests, he’s kept himself out of the tabloids and off the red carpet, choosing to focus on the work instead. And he’s been in a ridiculous string of hits, appearing in Disturbia, Surf’s Up, and Transformers last year alone and the most anticipated film of 2008, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Shia is a confident and interesting young actor who appears to be afraid of nothing and has one of the best recent resumes in Hollywood for an actor of any age. He sat down recently to speak about meeting Harrison Ford for the first time, growing up poor in Echo Park, negotiating stardom at a young age, his family, judging friends and women, earning oodles of dollars, and even George Lucas’ “dissatisfaction” with the film.

Shia LaBeouf on Harrison Ford being one of his idols:

Yeah, my house was John Wayne and Harrison Ford. It was spaghetti westerns and Indiana Jones. He’s the modern day cowboy. He’s the John Wayne of my lifetime. He’s the quintessential movie star. I’m a huge Harrison ford fan. He’s the biggest movie star in the world, undoubtedly. That’s not an opinion - it’s just a fact. You can’t say a lot of facts about a lot of people in this industry, but that is a fact. He is the biggest movie star in the world that we’ve ever had, and so anybody who is ever interested in film has to be a Harrison Ford fan. It’s just a hand-in-hand type of thing.

LaBeouf on his nervousness over meeting Harrison Ford:

Extremely nervous, not just meeting him but in the way that I met him. We were doing vehicle weapons training at an air force base and I had never met him before. We were about four months into training and he came to set and he’d been doing training separately, and we’re on this air force base and doing weapons training and you hear this ‘ptptptpt’ and you look up in this sky and there’s this helicopter. Everybody had been awaiting his arrival and nobody had met him yet. The helicopter lands and this whole situation - although explaining it now - took about ten minutes to happen, but it felt like three hours. He gets out of the helicopter and he’s got, like, a button downed shirt and he looks jacked. He walks around the helicopter and closes the door, blades stop and walks around the helicopter to the passenger side, opens the door, goes in the glove box, pulls out a whip, uncoils it, raises his hand, waves at everybody, just movie star stuff in life. And we were all very excited to meet him and very nervous of his opinion. That meant everything, more than Steven’s opinion of me, Harrison’s opinion of me meant everything to me. It was the whole movie to me. So it was very important for me meeting him and being with him and our relationship, for me, was very nurtured.

On his relationship with Harrison Ford:

I think me and Harrison got along pretty well, really well. We really like each other. It worked out. He just likes people who show up and do their job and maintain a level of humanity in this insane situation. Just stay humble and do their job, show up and don’t get sick and don’t complain, and that’s big for Harrison. The guy who calls for the medic all the time is not gonna be liked by Harrison much.

On what made him accept the role:

Logic. It wasn’t a matter of, like, me juggling an idea of whether or not I should do it. It was like, ‘What do I have to do?’ In any facet – I’ll cook food for everybody, I’ll be a grip, it’s ‘Indiana Jones’! I mean if you’re a film fan, this is it. So it was never like me juggling with an idea of whether or not I would do it ever.

Shia LaBeouf on his confidence about being able to handle all of the action in the film:

No, no no no, no, not confident about any of it. You’re always very uncomfortable. I mean, for me, the first three weeks were very hard, getting into the swing of things. I knew a bit about the action coming off of “Disturbia” and “Transformers” so I knew a bit of it. I know that ‘Indiana Jones’ action is just a step up, it’s a different type of action. It’s not quite ‘Bourne Identity’, and it’s not quite slip on a banana peel. I’ts somewhere in the middle. It’s a certain tone, its being able to fall off a building and smile, it’s a different type of action. I also knew that after reading the script and talking to Steven, you go down on the bike and Harrison Ford’s on the back of your bike, and you get injured, that’s the end of the movie, it’s your fault. So you wanna make sure you know how to ride a motorcycle. If you’re doing a sword fight with Cate Blanchett and she’s pregnant and you put the sword in the wrong spot, it’s your fault. So it’s just about making sure that you acquire these skills, and you’re not faking them and that you really acquired them. So we spent a lot of time doing that.

LaBeouf on watching the first three films and preparing for his role:

Oh yeah, I religiously watched all of the movies constantly, um throughout the entire shoot. I also watched a number of other movies, like “Blackboard Jungle” and “Red River”, and ‘Wild One’, “Rebel Without A Cause”, and for my character, it was sort of homework, and a lot of physical prep. I put on a lot of weight and a lot of the vehicle training, weapons training. I spent a good number of months preparing. I’ve never prepared for anything more than I’ve prepared for this.

On why he decided to become and actor:

Why? I was very poor, and I was living in Echo Park, in a really rough situation. My parents were, you know, didn’t have conventional jobs, and I didn’t enjoy that. A big reason my family split up was finances, and I figured, ‘Well, how do I mend the situation? Finances.’ And I figured this was an easy way to start making money. It wasn’t until I met Jon Voight, when I was doing “Holes”, that I didn’t know anything about craft. And once I learned about craft, and I saw these magicians, it’s what I thought they were, superheroes, I saw Gary Oldman, doing 4 – 15 different characters, and you didn’t know who he was, you know. You watch “Papillion” and then you watch “Midnight Cowboy” and you’re going, ‘this is the same person.’ And it just became magical to me. People like Daniel Day-Lewis, it’s just inspiring to see people like that - that’s even possible. So I fell in love with the craft, and he gave me books to read and people to study, and it became an obsession.

On his perception of money today:

It’s very different now, because I have it. But once you have it, it is different. When you never get to see your parents because all they’re doing is working, my perception of money is venomous. When you never get to be around your entire family because one has a job at this time and another has a job at this time, it’s venomous. When it’s tearing your family apart, it’s venomous. When you have it, great, you know, you don’t think too much about it. But when you don’t have it, it’s very different. I’m very frugal with my money because this could end at any point, and my family, my parents don’t work.

On George Lucas saying that critics and fans probably won’t like the movie:

It’s crazy. I think, me personally, I mean my personal opinion of it, I understand where it’s coming from, from him, but if you put it into context, if the same amount of hype had happened for ‘Raiders’ prior to the release of ‘Raiders’, where people have accepted ‘Raiders’ the same way, there’s so much hype around the film that you almost can’t meet that level of hype. So I think he’s just trying to level it out. I don’t think he’s saying this movie is unenjoyable, or bad, or not as good. I think he’s just trying to level the hype. There’s so much hype it’s almost– if there was this type of hype before “Citizen Kane” came out, it might not have been “Citizen Kane”. Perceptions sometimes are more important than the product. And so it’s just about leveling that perception out and making it as though people can enjoy a movie, instead of critiquing a movie, you know, cause you do go into it with a different mindset. If you walk into a film and you’re in critique mood, you may not be enjoying the movie as a movie watcher.

LaBeouf on the movie that changed his life:

“A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints,” which is a very small movie, but my life changed after that movie. I was a Disney kid for a long time and I was perceived that way. I was this really lighthearted…. you know there was only a certain type of role that I would be in contention for, and after that movie, it was sort of a calling card of I can branch out. There’s other things I can do, which led, I mean they’re all turning points really, every movie you do is sort of a turning point. You’re only as good as your last film, it’s just the way Hollywood works. So every movie is a turning point. I don’t know if there’s one specific– I think “Disturbia” was very big, only because it introduced me to audiences that wouldn’t normally have seen any of my work.

Shia on what scares him the most:

Critics and perception, reporters and paparazzi, and, you know, negative things that can mess with affording my family a certain life and myself. I scare myself a lot, man, my actions sometimes are very scary to me, but I’m human. I’m also fearful of giraffes.

On how Steven Spielberg impresses him:

He’s a genius. He’s just brilliant. It’s rare that you hang out with someone and you feel like you’re growing, like every time that you’re around Steven, you walk away with it with growth. You feel like you’ve grown. There’s something that’s happened that you’ve progressed in life. It’s rare that you hang out with people like that. There’s not many equal to Steven Spielberg.

Shia LaBeouf on doing his own stunts:

I’d say about 70% of it, you know there are certain things they aren’t gonna allow you to do, but you have a bike double who does certain things that, you know, on the motorcycle. You still have to learn how to ride the motorcycle, but there are certain things that they would never allow you to do, like flying off the top of a 3-storey building with a motorcycle is not something that your probably gonna be doing, only because it jeopardizes the film, not because, necessarily, they don’t trust you or that you wouldn’t want to do that, because I would love to do that, you know, but it jeopardizes the film.