Shia LaBeouf also acknowledges INDY 4′s flaws

Shia LaBeouf also acknowledges INDY 4′s flaws

May 17

First Nintendo, then Transformers, and now Steven Spielberg himself: Shia LaBeouf has balls of steel. And not those awkward dangly things that were in Transformers 2. No other celebrity has the guts to stand up and point out the faults in their own work. But that’s exactly what LaBeouf has done. Isn’t that awesome?

Quoth he (regarding Indiana Jones 4 and his latest, Wall Street 2, both of long and cherished legacies):

I feel like I dropped the ball on the legacy that people loved and cherished … If I was going to do it twice, my career was over. So this was fight-or-flight for me.

Which means he hopes to have pulled out all the stops for Wall Street 2. That’s a nice thought, but I rather wish fewer stops had been pulled out for Indy 4. He goes on:

I think the audience is pretty intelligent. I think they know when you’ve made [insert preferred expletive here]. And I think if you don’t acknowledge it, then why do they trust you the next time you’re promoting a movie… We [Harrison Ford and LaBeouf] had major discussions. He wasn’t happy with it either. Look, the movie could have been updated. There was a reason it wasn’t universally accepted… We need to be able to satiate the appetite. I think we just misinterpreted what we were trying to satiate.

That sounds about right, doesn’t it? A nice way to rationalise the perceived failings of Crystal Skull. But you’re probably thinking “Oh but he didn’t address the monkey scene, and that was the worst of it all!” Read on, dear reader:

You get to monkey-swinging and things like that and you can blame it on the writer and you can blame it on Steven [Spielberg]. But the actor’s job is to make it come alive and make it work, and I couldn’t do it. So that’s my fault. Simple.

Chivalrous of him to say so, but even the best actors can’t save a broken script or a stupid directorial vision — not to say George Lucas or Steven Spielberg are in any way broken or stupid. I think simultaneously everybody and nobody are to blame for the inanity of the monkey scene. But wait! There’s more. When asked how Spielberg himself might react to LaBeouf’s comments, the young bloke (he’s only 23!) said:

I’ll probably get a call. But he needs to hear this. I love him. I love Steven. I have a relationship with Steven that supersedes our business work. And believe me, I talk to him often enough to know that I’m not out of line. And I would never disrespect the man. I think he’s a genius, and he’s given me my whole life. He’s done so much great work that there’s no need for him to feel vulnerable about one film. But when you drop the ball you drop the ball.

In a world where spin and PR are more important than artistic integrity and genuine humanity, Shia LaBeouf is a god among insects. Celebrities aren’t allowed to bad-mouth their own projects, whether or not they’re good or bad — it’s bad for business. But if everyone did it (remember when the director of Babylon AD spoke in interviews about how shit the film was? That’s a good start) and the focus was put more on people than on posters, maybe filmmaking will some day become an honest business.