Page 2
Have you ever been on a set with a director who works like Emilio Estevez?
Shia LaBeouf: “No, not as free as he is.”
What did you expect from him as a director?
Shia LaBeouf: “Well, he’s an actor. And an actor’s an actor, but he was in the Brat Pack. He was like legendary.”
Brian Geraghty: “People may discount that.”
Shia LaBeouf: “He’s a legendary actor.”
Brian Geraghty: “Shia’s worked with some really great actors and filmmakers, and I have in my short time doing this. I’ve worked with some filmmakers. I think Emilio, he deserves the respect from those kind of people because you know what? I bet every one of those people wish they had a part in this film. I think it’s that kind of movie. I think it’s a great movie. I don’t think it’s perfect but listen, we had $5 million to get all these people together.”
Shia LaBeouf: “And 36 days…”
Brian Geraghty: “$5 million. That’s what we started with. I know it’s below 10, maybe 12, but that’s just one person’s salary in a movie.”
Shia LaBeouf: “Demi’s a $20 million dollar player.”
Brian Geraghty: “Is she?”
Shia LaBeouf: “Yeah, she’s a $20 million dollar player.”
Brian Geraghty: “Wow. We should have let her pay for lunch that day.”
You’re in this with a lot of big names and good actors, yet you really don’t get to interact with many of them. Did you at least get to hang out with them during your free time?
Brian Geraghty: “You know what? I have that happen a lot. Like you get on a good movie and you have a great role and you work with like most of the people and there will be that one person. And until they see the premiere, they don’t know what you did. Then they’re like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know you’re doing it.’ You know, you’ve read in the script but it’s like, ‘Wow! You rocked it.’ I think during this particular situation, people knew what we were up to, and we felt really good about it.”
Shia LaBeouf: “Plus Emilio would pass dailies around to the actors. Like, ‘Watch this. You got to see what Brian and Shia just did.’ Or, ‘Here, you’ve got to see what Fishburne just did.’ We’d sit and watch and it would be pretty sick. He’d be doing that with all the cast. All the cast was included in this whole thing. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna watch dailies now, get away from me.’”
Brian Geraghty: “You were stealing feed from Fishburne right in your trailer. Remember that?”
Shia LaBeouf: “Oh that’s right. I was stealing feed off the steady cam in my trailer while Fishburne was doing his s**t. I’d be reading my side with Brian and I’d be watching Fishburne doing his thing in his trailer. It was wild.”
Did you worry watching the others would affect your performance?
Shia LaBeouf: “No, it’s kind of disconnected. It’s two different stories.”
Brian Geraghty: “And the thing is, we knew what we were doing was real.”
Shia LaBeouf: “We were the first to shoot. We were the most comfortable out of anybody. By the time everybody came we’d been around.”
Brian Geraghty: (Laughing) “I told Hopkins how to hit his mark. I was like, ‘Hey A Hop, welcome to the set.’”
Yeah… I’d like to have seen that exchange.
Brian Geraghty: “No, I taught him a little something about chess... No, I didn’t teach him anything. I was actually scared of him.”
Shia LaBeouf: “He was the only one that I had reverence for. That was not a guy you go up and say, ‘Hey, who’s your favorite football team?’ It was a guy you don’t talk to. Unless you have some amazing s**t to say, don’t say anything. It’s the Mark Twain rule, you know: ‘Better to say nothing and have people think you’re a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.’”
You were both born decades after the events in the film took place, so how did you connect to the story?
Shia LaBeouf: “You talk to your parents, see where they were at emotionally. My mom still cries about it. My dog died, I have a tattoo - I love him, I still don’t cry about my dog. My grandfather, my grandmother, they die - I don’t cry about them. My mom cries about Bobby still. That’s a different type of power. It was more than a man, it was more than a guy, more than policies. First of all, she loved the man. She was in love with him, had a romantic crush on him, among other things.”
A lot of people did.
Shia LaBeouf: “He was a beautiful man. He was handsome.”
Brian Geraghty: “I don’t think he was handsome. I think it was a lot more his charisma and his honesty and what he was doing. I don’t know about his personal life in terms of his wife and that kind of thing, but I’m talking about as an American and what he believed in. He came out of his brother’s shadow.”
Shia LaBeouf: “Yeah, you also have to think his brother was assassinated right before.”
Brian Geraghty: “No one of any color has ever loved a presidential candidate like him. They’d freak out. It was like he was a Beatle. He was a rock star. And those people had, I mean they would just have ecstasy in their eyes when they look at him. You can see that in the footage in the film.”
Shia LaBeouf: “Did you see that black guy in the movie who Bobby touches his face and he was like he loved him? You could see the f**king love in his eyes. You don’t see that with anybody.”
Page 3: On the Message of Bobby and Independent Films
