May 16, 2010 by Paul Curtin
Just a couple days ago in an interview from the Cannes Film Festival, Shia LaBeouf admitted that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was garbage and promised that they wouldn’t make the same mistakes in the upcoming Transformers 3 film.
Before we could even hear Michael Bay’s response to LaBeouf’s criticism of the second Transformers film, LaBeouf has fessed up to another poor performance from Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In a second interview from Cannes, LaBeouf had some interesting things to say about the forth installment in the Indiana Jones series that many felt ruined Indy’s legacy:
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.
I think the audience is pretty intelligent. I think they know when you’ve made (slop). 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.
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, who directed]. 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.
When asked about how Spielberg may react to these comments, LaBeouf responded:
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.
I have to admit, I enjoy LaBeouf’s acting and most of the films he’s in, but couldn’t agree more that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull were by far his worst films that unfortunately had the biggest budgets and the most riding on them. You have to respect the fact that he has the balls to admit when one of his films is awful, no matter how big the budget may have been or what big name producers were in charge. I’m not sure if it’s the smartest career move to publicly admit that some of your biggest films dropped the ball and didn’t live up to the hype, but I’m sure LaBeouf will gain a lot of fans by admitting his mistakes and trying to improve upon them.
