Where’s the Beef in Shia LaBeouf? For one thing, it’s pronounced La Buff.
By Gayl Murphy
HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 5/30/07 — Shia LaBeouf will be the first one to tell you he’s no one-hit wonder. Especially after the way his street-cred hijacked the box-office for three solid weeks for the recent release of the “Disturbia” – up against such big ticket matinee idols like Bruce Willis, Nicolas Cage and Anthony Hopkins – sucking in almost $84 million to date, for a picture budgeted at a measly $20 mil.
And as if that wasn’t cool enough, LaBeouf, a son of L.A. hipster suburb Echo Park, next stop is the fourth install of “Indy”…as in Jones. “It’s luck for me, it’s gotta be. There are so many talented people in this business who aren’t working that I don’t think it’s a talent thing. I think its timing and luck of the draw and picking the right projects. It’s gotta have a lot to do with it and the directors that you work with.”
One such director is Steven Spielberg who hired uber-lucky La Beouf to play Harrison Ford’s sidekick in “Indiana Jones IV” with a pre-requisite that he pump-up for the role. All genuflexing aside, LaBeouf insists there’s no truth to the rumor that he and Ford are in a ‘workout war’. “We’re not in a race, no. He’s a monster. He’s a beast right now. I mean he’s really cut up. My goal, and Steven said midway through the working out thing, ‘I don’t want you to get big. Just be ready for what we’re about to do and show me some of the stills and you gotta be ready.’ I’ve never been in better shape in my life and I’ve never been more athletic. I train every day.”
But what about working with legends? Luck is one thing and then there are the really Big Shots like Speilberg and Lucas. What then? La Beouf says when it comes to those real Kodak moments; you don’t fake it. “When the camera’s rolling the myth of Steven Spielberg has to fly out the window. You got to show up uninhibited. If you have these fears attached to working with Spielberg you’re gonna fail.”
Not one to be unnecessarily be humbled by his achievements, the often unfiltered La Beouf’s next two releases are back-to-back; “Surf’s Up” on June 6th and the much-anticipated Michael Bey extravaganza “Transformers” on July 4th. Spielberg is on staff at that movie as well; exec producing.
With Bey firmly rooted in the driver’s seat of “Transformers”, the luckiest soon to be 20-year old (June 11th) on the planet offers his take on being directed by the jump-cut king. “I know there’s a lot of hype on ‘Transformers’ but you never know about the movie Gods.
There are certain actors who want to be micro-managed, but Bay does not have the attention span or the time. You don’t want the guy who’s gonna blow up the Orpheum Theater – while you’re hanging off it by one hand, light seven guys on fire, dropping a helicopter five feet above your head, blow up six cars and be able to tell you what you should be feeling at this feeling. You want the guy that’s gonna go, ‘Strap up baby here we go’.
You want that energy, that General Patton. It makes you feel safe when you’re on fire. When you’re hair is on fire you can’t sit through the stuttering of, ‘I know your hair is on fire but let’s just talk about where your character is coming from, the emotion. ‚ The f**king cars are exploding and that’s what you should be feeling at that moment, it’s reactionary.”
Armed with an uncanny love for movies he inherited from his dad, an awesome friendship with Jon Voight that came about during the shooting of “Holes” LaBeouf says making the family-friendly animated Penguin mockumentry “Surf’s Up” was about the least calculated move he’s made in his career, calling it more of “an alignment of the stars” than a strategic plan to make this the year, to “set it all up and stack the chips.”
Paralleling his movie penguin counterpart, in that they both surf, or have surfed, LaBeouf says his penguin movie stands alone. “It’s shot like a ‘Real World’ episode. You get much closer to these penguins than in ‘Happy Feet’ or ‘March of The Penguins’. I don’t want to dis ‘Happy Feet’. It’s two different films. It’s like comparing ‘Rent’ to ‘Spinal Tap’. I just wasn’t into ‘Rent’, that’s it.”
And the surfing, or non-surfing aspect? “I used to surf a lot but you can’t do it because of insurance reasons and I don’t have time to do it. When you get caught up in the laundry thing where you’re swimming at the bottom and you don’t know where you’re going, that’s not fun. At that point I was still wearing contact lenses and that’s not fun to be in salt water with contacts and not be able to open your eyes. So I don’t do it anymore.” Fair enough.
And if you’re at all curious about how to actually pronounce his last name, La Beouf will clarity. “It’s ‘La Buff’. People pronounce my name wrong. It’s a constant day to day struggle. It’s spelled wrong.” This he blames on a family rebel. “My grandmother was a beatnik lesbian in the 50s who hated her family and decided to change the spelling of her name so it’s misspelled. If you go to France people are like ‘La beouf, you have an illiterate last name.’ Shia means shit in French and my last name means ‘the beef’ so the name means ‘shit the beef out’. Its kind of rock starry.”