Shia LaBeouf Talks About "Disturbia"

One of Hollywood's hottest young actors, Shia LaBeouf, says he’s a film junkie whose favorite voyeur movies include Rear Window and The Burbs. Commenting on the comparison between Disturbia, a thriller in which LaBeouf plays a teen on house arrest who turns to spying on his neighbors to keep from going stir crazy, and the film everyone is comparing it to - the 1954 Hitchcock film Rear Window - LaBeouf said, “It's funny. People compare us to Rear Window and it's like comparing The Cincinnati Kid to The Hustler. [They’re] just two different movies. Similar story lines, similar plot lines, similar elements, but it's not the same movie by any means. It's just two different movies.

But everyone's a voyeur. If you read People magazine or US Weekly, or if you have a MySpace or a Facebook, you're a voyeur. You watch reality shows. You're a voyeur. It's just human nature.”

The Appeal of Disturbia: What drew him to the role was the chance to work with a director he really admired. “It was D J Caruso and The Salton Sea, and then it was the opportunity to take Say Anything and Rear Window and Straw Dogs and The Conversation and put it in a hat, mix it up and pull something out. That was the attraction. Just the diversity and range of where you could go in one role. Have people laugh at one minute, crying the next, screaming the next. All over the place — that's fun. And especially in genre movies, you never have it. Teen movies, you never have it. So it just felt new to me.”

Tackling the Lead Role in a Thriller: “I'd never made a movie for this audience," said LaBeouf. "I knew [Steven] Spielberg's involvement was going to have something to do with it, and then I think it really became something different when David Morse came on board, who’s one of the best character actors we have in America. And Carrie-Anne Moss… You see her in Mommy mode, you know it's going to be something jarring and people aren't ready for that. They know her as Trinity and as a powerful woman. You see her in rehearsals, she's nursing her baby and you hug her, and she seems like a mom. I knew that was going to be cool for the audience, and we cast a really talented actress. So you knew it wasn't going to be the normal teen thriller.

I wouldn't sign on to a normal teen thriller. They don't interest me. They become very one-notey and it's a trap. You can trap yourself. It's always like, you know, the arms getting hacked off with the saw or they never give the audience time to breathe or be able to emote for themselves. The scariest thing about these thrillers has always been, at least for me, when you look back at things like Rear Window or Straw Dogs - movies that were really terrifying - or Psycho, it was the fact that he left enough room for your imagination to completely mind-f**k you. That was the scariest thing was there's somebody that you know that you had those thoughts about. It's all being regurgitated as you're watching, so you knew that that was always the plan.”

Working with David Morse: Things got so intense during the fight scene that David Morse actually broke a couple of his fingers. LaBeouf explained how that happened: “We were fighting. It's staged and you're trying to be as safe as possible. But it's all real, it's a real set, it's a real seven-foot guy, and I'm really 20. And we're really going to fight or this movie's not going to work. There's so much on the line, and you've been working for two months at this point, put so much in, that when you get there, you've got all this adrenaline. Meanwhile David Morse has not been talking to me, period. [He hasn’t] said a word to me for two months. All this s**t is — you know — you want to fight.”

Despite what happened between LaBeouf and Morse during the fight scene, the two are definitely on speaking terms. “Yeah, we spoke during the last two weeks of filming when everything had kind of settled down. And when we came back to do additional shooting, we had a conversation and were friends then.”

LaBeouf didn’t escape from the shoot without his own battle scars. “I have a scar on my ribs from those fight scenes.”

Keeping the Dialogue Real: LaBeouf revealed a lot of the dialogue was improvised and some came from his own experiences growing up. “I never went through these situations. I went through a similar situation with my mom being attacked, or something like that, but I never went through what he went through, never been under house arrest or anything like that - but been in the judicial system, dealt with that whole thing. You know the lingo.

Carl [Ellsworth’s] a good writer and he would always leave enough on the page for you to be informed enough to be able to go off. If you don't have a good enough place to start, if you don't have a foundation, there's no way you can start varying and changing things because you get lost. There's a scene where I'm on the balcony and professing my love. Literally, the way that the lines were written were like key notes: sits on the roof, reads books… There's nothing in between, just pinpointed keynotes, like with dots going down. You know [you] find it for yourself. How would you do it?

That was fun, the fact that there was that freedom and that they allowed it and that they would work with me, because that's not something you do in one or two takes. You do 6 or 7 of them, 8 or 9 of them, try to find the cadence, and know the mannerisms. Body language is important, especially in scenes like that. And with teenagers, it's more than 65% nonverbal. It's even more than that, especially with teenagers because they don't know how to express it. Normal people don't know how to express themselves, especially at that age, especially in that situation. So a lot of it was like, ‘How do we block this? When do I get off the door? When am I making my case? When am I lying? When am I…?’ All of it, and you've got to find the movement to that.”

Page 2: Shia LaBeouf on Techy Stuff and His Career