Two Shia LaBeouf Interviews

Shia LaBeouf is doing the media tour to promote his new movie Disturbia and during this, Transformers comes up every now and then. One interview is with AICN and the other for MoviesOnline. No new information is revealed.

Relevant part from the AICN interview:

C: I should ask one TRANSFORMERS question. When Quint talked to you, you were in the middle of it. So, now you’re done making it. How did you survive? Did you have to take a month off and go to the islands, or were you energized? How did you fare? A little battered and bruised?
SL: It was an insane shoot, and Quint was there, and he saw how insane, and that was every day. But, again, you never experience anything like this--to see a functioning robot, you know…To see a bumblebee in person, as a fan, is nuts. To meet Colin [Fickes], you know, to meet him, to watch Mike [Bay, director] go through the editing. I took, I think, a week off and then went into press, went into promotion, then enduring ADR and a bunch of post-production for these three films. So, I really haven’t had time off, yet.

I still haven’t wound down from it. It’s still this insanity. It’s still this crazy…it’s still nuts, but I’ve had a chance to read scripts and take meetings and things like that. But, haven’t wound down off TRANSFORMERS. It’s aneurysm inducing. That’s how nuts it is. We went to get our MPAA rating. They didn’t want to give us an R. They said ‘You want to be PG13? You can’t have an R’.

C: Wait, were you going for R?
SL: No, we were going for PG13. But, they wouldn’t give us the R rating. They said it was too intense to release, and they said Mike had to cut it down. Of course, Mike’s not going to cut it down. And, we have Spielberg go fight the good fight and get our rating down, but it’s just an intense movie. It’s the type of movie where you watch, and you’re holding yourself and your heart’s going crazy to the point where it doesn’t feel right. It’s just nuts.

And, to have ILM say things like, ‘It’s the most ridiculous movie we've ever worked on. It’s the best graphics we’ve ever made.’ And, this is a company that’s been around. So, when you start getting feedback like that, and the excitement from…You read these Talk-backers, and they’re… ‘The flames, [yelling] THE FLAMES. Just the level of…the intricacies and the importance, it just makes it all feel like you worked on something important, really important, to the point where it’s beyond you. You’re part of something magical. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in it or not.

C: Just to be a part of the machine, literally?SL: That’s it. Just to see Optimist Prime Transformer is enough to bring people in theaters. So, we’ll see where it goes. It’s been a fun ride so far, though.

From the Movie Online interview:

Q: So what was it like working on Transformers?
Shia LaBeouf: Transformers was crazy. It’s just a different type of movie, a different form of it.

Q: A lot of green screens and blue screens?
Shia LaBeouf: Not a lot.
Q: Oh really?
Shia LaBeouf: No. We build the robots, we blew stuff up. This all really happened. There’s stuff we could’ve done on green screen but the way that [Michael] Bay works, and the way he works with actors, which is why it’s funny to me he goes to such lengths to put his actors in situations that are safety (??) and dangerous for their reaction and their response. He’s actually an actor’s director. It’s conducive to the performance because then you are responding. And he goes out of his way to do that. If you’re shooting a movie in 80 days, you can easily go to green screen and fake me being on the Orpheum Theatre, blowing the roof up, hanging by one hand while my feet are on fire.

You know that stuff you can do on green screen. But he took us to the Orpheum Theatre, blew the Orpheum Theatre up, lit my feet on fire. You don’t have to go mind F yourself, you know. You show up to set and the works done for you. You just have to respond. And so it’s funny to me that people say he’s not an actor’s director. If I didn’t have Bay, I wouldn’t have gotten through Transformers. There’s only one dude who could’ve made that movie. You couldn’t have DJ make Transformers and Michael Bay couldn’t have made Disturbia. They’re two different textures, two different paints. You know the difference between a Warhol and a Picasso, and I’m not saying that they’re either one of those or that they’re at that level, but they’re just two different textures.

Q: Were you a Transformers fan before you even signed up?
Shia LaBeouf: Huge.
Q: Really?
Shia LaBeouf: Star Wars was a bit early for me so I didn’t fall into the fanatical Star Wars thing. But Transformers was the male Barbie. I mean Transformers was at everyone’s house, not just at yours, but you’d go to a piñata party or something or a Quinceañera, everybody had them.

Q: So it was a dream come true in a way?
Shia LaBeouf: Yeah, but again, it was a cheesy cartoon. It was never what it is now and it’s turning into like… it’s becoming very serious. They’re making a whole storyline. Now they have a prequel book that I just read that just came out and it explains all the stuff that I had never even thought about. There’s the whole lingo that goes along with it. It’s very similar to Star Wars and the fan base and the passion of it. I don’t know about the mass and how big that fan base is, but the people who are into it are into it. They have Decepticon back logos, tattoos all over the place, Transformers, arm pieces.

You don’t see people getting Pirates of the Caribbean Jack Sparrow on their back. They don’t get those back pieces, they get Decepticon logos. They take the Ford symbol off their car and replace it with an Autobot symbol. People are fanatical about it. You go on Ain’t It Cool News or any of these websites and Chud or any of these and it’s all Transformers. Again, now I don’t know what the Internet amounts to, but I know we’re the most downloaded trailer in Yahoo’s history. But again, you can’t count on things like that. Snakes on a Plane had a huge Internet following and then what happened.

Q: It sounds like you have gone on line and read some of the things.
Shia LaBeouf: Oh, non-stop. Of course.

Q: As it gets closer to the release and it’s going to get more and more intense, are you going to be like ‘Okay, I can’t deal with this anymore’?
Shia LaBeouf: No. You have to be aware of it, because when you get questioned about it, especially if you’ve got a guy who’s on those sites and there’s passion behind it, you’ve got to be informed about the discussions and the topics, especially when you’re the head speaker for the Transformers movie and there’s so much behind it, you need to be educated to all of it – the lingo, the robots, the back talk, the combos, the rumors, all of it.

Q: Does that stress you out a little bit?
Shia LaBeouf: No, I’m a Transformers fan. I’d be doing this even if I wasn’t in the movie.