Otis: “I’m going to make a movie about you.”
James: “Make me look good, Honey Boy.”
I think we all know by now of the healing powers of cinema. I do not know what I would have done without it the past few months for it has definitely kept me sane and grounded. I often think about the artists as I watch movies, and how it must be liberating to deal with their past wounds through their work. This is particularly evident in last year’s “Honey Boy” (2019) – which plays out like one big exorcism for writer and star Shia LaBeouf – directly dealing with his mental health issues and the painful relationship with his alcoholic father when he was a child actor. This is a film that I greatly admired when it was released for its bravery. What could have easily misfired and become self-indulgent – instead is triumphant. Re-watching it again a couple of days ago, it’s only grown in stature. A second visit allowed me to get past the subject – and zero in on Alma Har’el’s directorial achievement. In her narrative film debut, she is a sensational storyteller – and her empathy as a filmmaker is only matched by the power of her voice. “Honey Boy” is a testament to the capacity of self-expression to lead us to forgiveness.
When actor LaBeouf found himself in rehab in 2017 and diagnosed with PTSD he was encouraged by a therapist to reenact his early childhood traumatic experiences as a form of recuperation. As the young star of the Disney Channel’s “Even Stevens” – he lived in a seedy motel with his alcoholic father who resented the fact that he was getting paid to look after the talented prodigy. This process led to the screenplay “Honey Boy” which fictionalizes his paradoxical ascent to fame and his vertiginous descent into rehab. It’s a lyrical and fiercely intimate portrayal of a competitive and dysfunctional father-son bond. There’s a specificity to the writing. It features Otis – (a stand-in for LaBeouf) as an adult going through therapy – and seeing and experiencing in a Fellini-like way his past. “The only thing my father gave me that was of any value is pain. And you want to take that away?” Otis tells his counselor. With steady hands, both LaBeouf and his director steer us through this mix of fiction and reality. LaBeouf portrays his own father – James – a former clown – and by playing him he owns up the parts within him that are inherited from his dad. “I’m an egomaniac with an inferiority complex,” James says. He builds up a surprising amount of empathy and understanding from us. His performance is eye-opening – and a total reinvention of the actor. The meta element of this story adds a layer of theatricality which the director emphasizes.
Ha’rel migrated to the United States over a decade ago from Israel. She began making music videos which led to the poetic and award-winning documentaries – “Bombay Beach” (2011) and “LoveTrue” (2016). She starts “Honey Boy” strikingly with a kinetic montage showing us Otis’ life unraveling as if it were a Michael Bay fast-paced action movie. The first image you see is the actor being pulled in a harness by a big crane doing a stunt – establishing him as a Pinnochio figure – his strings being controlled by Geppetto (his father) or things beyond his control. She will repeat this visual with the younger Otis on a sound stage for his TV show. At rehab Otis is required to do exercises in a pool – and she cross-cuts to the pool at the motel – connecting fiction and memory. The motel where young Otis and his father James reside has the pastel colors of a faded circus poster in the interiors as well as the exteriors. It adds a magical tone to what transpires. The score emphasizes all of this with small sounds – as if it was music for a marionette show. The scenes that take place in the motel unfold like a fable – which contrast with the themes of addiction and its effects on second generations. There’s an unforgettable scene in which the father is half-asleep watching his son on TV – and young Otis is in the doorway watching his dad doing this. The character on screen is having a loving interaction with his fictional father – and Otis wishes this fantasy could become a reality.
James: “How do you think it feels to me to have my son talk to me the way you talk to me , have my son paying me?”
Otis: “You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t pay you.”
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on Amazon Prime.
Written by Shia LaBeouf
Directed by Alma Har’el
Starring Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, Noah Jupe and FKA Twigs
94 minutes
Bringing “Honey Boy” to the Screen
LaBeouf — a teenage star on the Disney Channel series “Even Stevens” before rocketing to even greater fame with the “Transformers” franchise — started writing the script while in court-ordered rehab after his 2017 arrest in Georgia while shooting “The Peanut Butter Falcon.” Diagnosed with PTSD, LaBeouf confronted the traumas inflicted on him by his father and his career in the screenplay for “Honey Boy.” As he began writing, he did not intend to appear in the movie as his father or anyone else…LaBeouf said he thought at the time that it was “game over” for his acting career. From rehab, he sent pages to Har’el. LaBeouf and the filmmaker had grown close after he emailed her out of the blue upon seeing her 2011 documentary “Bombay Beach” on DVD. The pair subsequently collaborated on a music video for the group Sigur Rós, and LaBeouf executive produced Har’el’s second doc, 2016’s “LoveTrue.” “I thought this is the part that he’s been preparing for his whole life when I read it,” Ha’rel said of the “Honey Boy” script. “The character kind of jumped out of the page and really hit me hard. It just seemed like something that has to be on-screen and not stay in the therapy room. “And it just kind of hit me that he has to do the dad and how striking and how hard that would be. I’m always happy to hear that I’m wrong, but I’ve never seen anybody do that. I’ve never seen anybody play their father, who caused them so much of the trauma that they were dealing with, at the same time that they wrote it. So it just seemed like something that we would probably be able to do together, and it was really kind of scary in many ways to step into it, but Shia went for it.”
Adding to the daring, inside-out feeling of LaBeouf’s screenplay and unsparing performance were the complications of Jupe and Hedges trying to tailor their performances to credibly seem like the same person at different ages, both performed opposite the very real person their character was fictionalizing. “I thought before we started it’s a bit weird to be playing the person who’s actually right next to you, a younger version of them,” said Jupe, whose other credits include “A Quiet Place” and “Ford v Ferrari.” “But once we got there, Shia was very open to playing around and wasn’t at all stuck in a steady story. “I guess maybe it was weirder with me and Lucas playing the same character. We hung out a lot and we kind of grew this character together, which Alma really helped us with. You spend this much time, both [of us] learning about this character and talking about it. And by the first week, it wasn’t weird at all anymore. It just felt like we were working and growing and building this character together as a team.” Hedges, an Oscar nominee for “Manchester by the Sea,” said that although he and Jupe did try to come up with some physical elements they would both bring to the character, “Mostly, it was just sort of capitalizing on the genuine connection me and Noah feel towards each other and specifically, I think I’ve always wanted to feel like an older brother. And most of the kids growing up that I wanted to feel like an older brother to had no interest in feeling like a younger brother. So I think one of the things that I love about Noah is the fact that I think he genuinely loves me too.” “Debatable,” Jupe playfully interjected.
For Har’el, Jupe and Hedges, a big part of their challenge was how much the character of Otis should mimic LaBeouf directly and how much he should be his own person. While shooting, Hedges would sometimes wear LaBeouf’s actual clothes. “We had a lot of challenges with that, ‘How much do we stay loyal to Shia?’” said Har’el. “Shia as a person has so many people that think they know him or that have a view of him, so many photos or moments in his life have become like cultural memes. “I was really aware that the film has to exist on a different level when it comes to the archetype of the son and father that goes beyond Shia’s bio. And it was really important for all of us to kind of communicate with that and not ignore it, but also that you can kind of wink at it sometimes. And we would really look at things as references and decide what to celebrate and what to laugh about and what to ignore.” For LaBeouf, the process of shooting the movie was something entirely different from the rest of his collaborators, as he described many scenes as feeling like “flashbacks” to moments from his own life. Which made the actual shooting of the movie an isolating process. “I was very lonely shooting,” said LaBeouf. “I even remember some points where I would try to connect with either [Noah or Lucas], but then they would stay in it [between takes] and sort of leave me be. Noah’s a little bit better about it, cause he was needier, cause that’s just who he was at the time in the screenplay. But I remember coming up to Lucas at times and not having a way in. Which freaked me out. And also gave me this longing that my father had towards me. So in the same way that Noah had had this longing towards me that was genuine and we would play with it, I also had a longing towards Lucas that was genuine.” For Har’el, the making of the film has meant not only a fulfilling professional collaboration with LaBeouf but also an opportunity to see her friend grow and make genuine personal breakthroughs. “He is just the best partner ever to have on an artistic process. He knows what he wants to do and then he really lets you do your thing,” she said. “So he never came to the editing room or was micromanaging us. And he came and saw the cut at the end and when he left he was like, ‘We did it. I think they’re going to let us put our head in a guillotine again.’ And that really hit me when he said that. (latimes.com)
Director Alma Har’el on “Honey Boy”
“I have real interest in making work that breaks our expectations of cinema, and finds a way to capture what it means to be human. One of the things that I feel like we have a hard time doing is forgiving people for being human. I think that by Shia playing his father, there was an opportunity here to expand on what he started doing in therapy. The place that he went to in Upstate New York, it’s kind of a mental health/rehab facility, and the method that they had been using with him, called exposure therapy, includes role-play. So the way this was written, he was already writing scenes, and playing both his dad and himself, while reading them to his therapist. I spoke to his therapist and told her what we were attempting to do, and she [was] a big help to me. She, first of all, helped me figure out a lot of the rewrites in the script, in the therapy session. At first when Shia wrote this, his main focus was the motel room, and the conversations between little Otis and his dad. But as you see in the film, when he comes in and says things like, “I’m a professional schizophrenic. I’m a piece of sh*t,” these are actual things Shia said when he was committed, to his therapists. She basically gave me access and shared with me some of the things that he said to her, and we used some of them in the film.
In “LoveTrue,” the film I’d done a few years before this movie, the main method we used to tell these stories is a method called psychodrama, where we created on-set recreations of traumatic moments or memories, and had people play with their younger self. There’s no real way to measure, I think, the success of some of these things. I think the greatest thing it does is bring awareness to the dynamic, and bring awareness to what’s happening subconsciously, subjectively, in somebody’s mind, when he’s battling memories and trauma. In many ways, I’m almost certain that this movie would bring a lot more catharsis and therapeutic benefits to the people who watch it, [than] to the people who participated in making it. Often, that’s the case with art. But I think that I’ve had, myself, huge benefits from making ‘LoveTrue.’ In my childhood, on top of whatever was happening in my house, I was bullied in my school, both emotionally and physically, and I had, up to my 30s, recurring dreams about the two people that bullied me. They would reoccur almost every week, and they really only stopped after I did ‘LoveTrue.’ I’ve never really dreamt about them after that. I’m not a therapist, but that was my personal experience with it, and I wanted to allow Shia to maybe participate in something similar. That was probably one of the main reasons that I wanted to do it. (deadline.com)
About Actor and Screenwriter Shia LaBeouf
LaBeouf was born in Los Angeles to a fabric salesman mother and a “a drug-dealing clown” father who split up when he was just 5 years old. He was, by then, already a performer, having started dressing up as a clown himself at the age of 3 in order to help his parents sell hot dogs and snow cones. By 10, LaBeouf was performing “really foul” stand-up at a comedy club in Pasadena, which led to a gig warming up the audience and later performing skits on “The Tonight Show.” At 11, he met a child actor who had cool surfing gear and said he only attended school three hours per day. “I was really attracted to that,” chuckles LaBeouf, who, shortly thereafter, rang up an agent posing as his own manager and pitching himself to be her client. She saw through his charade, but liked his “chutzpah” and “hustle,” signed him, bought him headshots, paid his way into SAG and let him stay at her house. LaBeouf started going out on auditions, then acting in student films and ultimately appearing in episodes of TV shows like “E.R.” and “The X-Files.” LaBeouf’s first big break was being chosen over 2,600 other boys to star on Disney Channel’s “Even Stevens,” which he did for three years, winning a Daytime Emmy in 2003. It is this period — when, in order to be closer to set, he moved into a motel with his domineering father, who was paid by Disney to serve as his on-set guardian…”Even Stevens” ended after three seasons, at which point LaBeouf began landing film work. On his first movie project, Andy Davis’ “Holes” (2003), Oscar winner Jon Voight became a valued mentor. The first time LaBeouf was part of a commercial success was when he starred in D.J. Caruso’s Hitchcockian drama “Disturbia” (2007), which opened atop the box office and stayed there for three weeks. Steven Spielberg, who was an executive producer on the film, was impressed by LaBeouf’s performance as he watched the dailies, and wanted the actor to read for Michael Bay’s $150 million “Transformers.”
LaBeouf met with Bay’s casting agent, then with Bay, then with a DreamWorks talent rep and then with Spielberg himself, which he recalls as “terrifying.” But Spielberg offered his nod of approval, and so LaBeouf starred in “Transformers” (2007); then as Indiana Jones’ son in the Spielberg-directed “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008); and then in the Spielberg-produced “Eagle Eye” (2008). All three led the box office on their opening weekend, and LaBeouf became one of Hollywood’s most bankable young stars…After Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (2010), LaBeouf’s era of big films for major studios ended — a mutual parting of ways. By this point, LaBeouf was more interested in making gritty, character-driven indies into which he could pour body and soul into — which he did on 2012’s “Lawless” (he drank a lot of moonshine to prepare to play a bootlegger), 2013’s “Charlie Countryman” (he dropped acid to feel like his character who did the same), 2013’s “Nymphomaniac” (he auditioned with a sex tape) and 2014’s “Fury” (he sliced two scars into his face). LaBeouf reflects, “I was trying to earn my father. I was trying to shake off Disney. I was trying to shake off blockbusters. And I was trying to work with people who fucked with me.” It was around this time that he started earning a reputation offscreen as a troubled guy, getting fired from one Broadway show, drunkenly disrupting another, engaging in a wide variety of performance art that struck many as bizarre, and the list goes on. Through it all, LaBeouf continued to give standout performances in 2015’s “Man Down,” 2016’s “American Honey” (for which he received a Spirit Award nomination) and 2017’s “Borg vs. McEnroe.” But in 2017, while in Savannah, Georgia, filming “The Peanut Butter Falcon” — the story of an unlikely friendship that develops between two young men on the run, one of whom has Down syndrome (Zack Gottsagen) — LaBeouf’s life came crashing down around him. He was, he admits, “drunk out of my mind and not rational at all” when he had an altercation with an undercover police officer who refused to give him a cigarette. He was arrested…The judge allowed him to finish the film before facing sentencing, and when he returned to the set the next day, having vowed to never drink again, LaBeouf felt “a kind of shame, deep shame”…In short, he says, “This was my bottom.”
Gottsagen, with his innocence and faith, sustained LaBeouf for the rest of the shoot: “The best I could muster at the time was to look at Google maps of Zack’s address of his house in Florida, and I would pray to the GPS coordinates above Zack’s house, because I knew that Zack believed in God for real, and believed in me. And so I would pray to his God, and that’s what got me through a lot.” As soon as production wrapped, LaBeouf reported to court-ordered rehab in Connecticut for an open-ended stay — the alternative, the judge told him, was to go to jail for seven years. “It was the first time I was told I had PTSD,” he says. “I had just thought I was an alcoholic.” Part of his treatment was having to write down what he had been through in his life. And, he says, “The stuff that’s in ‘Honey Boy’ comes out of these exposure therapy sessions.” (Some 15 years ago, LaBeouf wrote a treatment called Rent-a-Dad, which was, he says, “Honey Boy, but with a whole different angle — it was like a sitcom.” It never came to fruition.) Three weeks into the sessions, LaBeouf decided to start getting his writing transcribed and sending it to a dear friend who had a number of shared experiences — Israeli filmmaker Alma Har’el. LaBeouf and Har’el had previously collaborated in 2012 on a haunting, poetic music video for Icelandic band Sigur Ros’ melody “Fjögur Píanó.”…LaBeouf says he hoped it “could be a route towards creativity again.” Har’el told him that it should be a narrative feature, and that she wanted to help make that happen — if he also agreed to play his father. He did. (“Only in playing my father did I empathize with him,” he explains. “It wasn’t empathetic on the page.”) After LaBeouf got out of rehab, he and Har’el finessed the script until he was ready to take it to Costa Rica to read it to his father, whom he had not seen in seven years, and get him to sign off on its depiction of their life together. His father complied, but, LaBeouf says, “He didn’t believe that I could pull it off.” However, his father has since seen the film and, LaBeouf says with a hint of a smile, “He knows that I see him,” adding, “He’s calmed. And I’ve calmed.” (hollywoodreporter.com)
About Director Alma Har’el
Born in Tel Aviv she began her film career as a photographer and video artist, mixing live video content for concerts which then led to directing music videos. Filmmaker Magazine said her music video for Sigur Rós ‘FJÖGER PIANO’ starring Shia LaBeouf contains a “Truthful fusion of fantasy and reality” after naming her one of their 25 new faces of cinema. Her documentary “Bombay Beach” took top prize at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2011 and was nominated for the Indie Spirit awards and has been taught in several universities, including Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab and NYU, as a genre redefining work. Her film, “LoveTrue,” saw her collaborating again with Shia LaBeouf, this time with him in the executive producer’s seat. The film premiered at Tribeca Film Festival to rapturous applause in April 2016, with Indiewire writing “LoveTrue” confirms that Alma Har’el makes movies like nothing else out there. Her commercial work for brands like Airbnb, Facebook and P&G captures real life from a magical yet realistic perspective, garnering numerous awards for her innovative style. Her short film “Jellywolf” for Chanel was described as “The trippiest fashion film ever made” by Elle Magazine and won The Clio, Tribeca X, D&AD and Ciclope awards. In 2016, Har’el has launched the initiative Free the Bid to address the gender imbalance among directors in the commercial industry. #FreeTheBid asks ad agencies, production companies, and brands to pledge a woman director bid on every commercial. Since its launch, over 40 of the world’s biggest ad agencies have taken the pledge along with 10 major brands including HP, Visa, eBay, Twitter, Levi’s and Airbnb. In the first year of Free The Bid’s implementation, pledged agencies BBDO and CP+B reported an increase of jobs directed by women of up to 400%. (www.almaharel.com) Her most recent film, “Honey Boy,” was released in 2019.