Spring Break
Q&A with Shia LaBeouf
Kip Mooney Contributing Writer
Issue date: 6/18/09 Section: ARTS & LIFE
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Q: Since the first movie got so many great reviews how is the second movie going to top it off?
Shia: It's bigger, stronger, faster, better-it has to be. You got to realize you know this movie is being made by a lot dudes who have a lot of pride.
It's definitely the most explosive thing that you can possibly buy tickets to this year. We broke like four or five Guinness World Records making it.
This guy named John Frazier is like the oldest practical effects guy in the business. He rigged an explosion for seven months, which is basically a 1,000 gallon gasoline bomb. For seven months, they were rigging the bomb for longer than we took to make the entire film. And that bomb wound up being the biggest bomb ever filmed with actors in it in the history of cinema.
Q: How does your character change or evolve from the first one?
Shia: Well, Sam saved the world the first time, right? So just imagine Brad Pitt going to Trader Joe's to go get a granola bar. If you save the world you have a real problem trying to buy a granola bar, you know? Anywhere you go, you're the guy who saved the world.
So you're trying to go to college and have a normal life. And as you know college is a humongous, humongous deal for kids who didn't enjoy their life in high school because it's a chance to start over.
The movie starts two years later from where the last one left off. He's on his way to school to start a new life, to get away from his parents, to get as far away from his parents as he can because he's stifled and feels like most kids do who have extremely protective parents.
And on top of that he's got Bumblebee living in his garage who is his guardian.
He's trying to create his own world and create his own personality free from other people's input.
Q: Can you relate to the whole college theme then?
Shia: I wanted to go to college so bad and I was going to go. And at the last minute a guy named Steven Spielberg called up and had a plan for other things.
I mean even though I've done these movies and I'm very fortunate and blessed to have done them. I always feel like anytime I'm around anybody who's gone to school that they have a superiority you know about them. It's just one of those insecurities I'll deal with for the rest of my life unless I go to school.
Q: So who from the first film did you most look forward to working with again on Transformers?
Shia: I think honestly Turturro was so insane, man. Turturro is like one of the craziest people I've ever come across in my life. He's really out of his mind.
And so the beauty of that is he uses sanity, whatever he has left sanity-wise, at the hotel room and then he comes to work every day.
Sometimes he's like Marlon Brando in "Apocalypse Now" and then sometimes he's like Gene Wilder in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."
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