Shia LaBeouf speaks about playing the lead character of Jacob Moore on the Olive Stone-directed 'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps'.
You are filming in Chicago, what's you view of the city?
I love Chicago, the cops are really nice too. Matter of fact first day on Eagle Eye a cop drove me to work. I was in a holding facility, they bailed me out and the cop drove me to my first day on set. That actually helped because Billy Bob Thornton had no respect for me until I showed up in a cop car. No Chicago is a great city, it’s a really amazing place.
How's filming there?
Filming there is great, it’s really conducive to filming where you had a place like New York, New York is hard to film in, there is so much intrusion. These are very private moments for two actors and you have paparazzi on you all the time, it’s hard, it’s hard to get away from that and focus on this reality for the moment. I remember me and Frank having a really hard time in the park our first day and Frank just couldn’t get past the photographers, he could not get over it and they wouldn’t respect us and Frank was losing his, that was really hard for both of us.
Directors?
I would say Steven has been my most, Steven has been in my corner more than anybody. Spielberg. But I think Oliver is, I love this man I would die for him.
What is it like working with Oliver Stone?
He is an incredible person. He can be a Viking, he can be the Easter Bunny, it depends on who you show up as. He can be a nurturer and he can be very malicious. But he is a genius.
You had a drink and stuff like that afterwards, did you socialise after shooting or did you get to know him as a man before?
No before. Because when you make a film at least with Oliver you have to be able to divulge all your insecurities and all your vulnerabilities and say you pull this string and this will happen, pull this string this will happen and in order for me to give all my pain to this man I had to know who he was and so it was vice versa. I walked into my life and he walked into his. Sometimes when I couldn’t find a moment I would listen to his story, feel empathy for him and take that and go and do a scene.
How would you facilitate that, over dinner or whatever?
We had long, long, long rehearsals. All the theatre people we had on the show like you know Frankie, Carrie, said this was more rehearsal than they had rehearsed for plays. We spent too much time rehearsing.
That sounds like a very intense relationship, not an ordinary director/actor thing.
I have always had very intense relationships like love affairs with my directors. It’s never been, with all of them, with Mike, with Steven, these people for me at least become my whole world for those months. If I have best friends in my directors.
What do you do for fun in your life.
I have tons of fun. I have fun making films. I have fun in my life, I just came back from the Grand Canyon from a crazy river rafting adventure, it’s not like it’s all been business. This is my representative. My representative is about work. Me, I have got my own life. I have a lot of fun.
One of the things you talked about before you did this movie, obviously you dabbled in that world, did making this movie influence how you feel about Wall Street?
I think it was really easy to vilify these men. It was really easy to go over there. I was pretty ignorant. It’s really easy if you look at the big picture of things and go, Oh wow there are people not eating and X is getting a hundred million dollar bonuses meanwhile he is being backstopped by 60 billion dollars worth of taxpayers’ money and saying he does God’s work. Get out of here. He hasn’t done anything for anybody you know except himself. You meet a man like George Soros and your opinion changes, here is a man who is a beautiful man. He is a good man. These are good men who have scruples, who have discipline, who you know, there is more to it than just a dollar. They have families, they have things that are sacred to them in their lives you know. Mike Novergratz, there is a man who was a meth addict in the 80’s on the Goldman floors, was fired by Goldman, was living in the slums, started a hedge fund with his friends when he had no money and they created Fortress. Fortress became so big that in 2008 sub prime meltdown the government went to Fortress to backstop Goldman, the company who had fired him for being a meth addict. There are some pretty wild stories on the street. You get to meet these people and they are not villains and Darth Vadars, at least I couldn’t go into it that way. I had to have empathy for Jake or it would have been a disaster you know because I knew Oliver was going to. It's Oliver, Oliver has a certain idea about what Wall Street is, what capitalism is, what needs to change and I couldn’t have the same opinions necessarily.
What was it like wearing a suit the whole time through, you were in a suit for a whole part of the movie?
Well like putting on the Batman cape you mean?
You are investing yourself, you made quite a lot of money?
I am not some kind of financial genius, I think I just lucked out in terms of the timing and the marketplace. When we started making the movie, it was sort of a freak shot, really up until last Thursday when the flash crash happened I mean it was sort of on a straight climb. Also the people I was around, people who were shepherding me through this whole world, I had a lot of friends who were giving me tips and I was trading a million dollars at a hedge fund called (name) Group. Four of the twelve guys who were in that room with me while I was there got arrested for insider trading while I was on the floor. I just had doors open to me that Charlie didn’t have because of the success of the first movie.
So you were trading actual one million dollars?
Yes, that’s one story. It was a really wild experience.
Until that time period exactly?
I studied for my S7. I was going to take the bar exam for traders. I was really deep in this world. Only because I felt completely outclassed as an actor. There was no way I was going to look at Brolin and Michael Douglas and feel like an equal because I am the kid from Transformers and the only way I could feel comfortable was to know more than them and I did.
Did you ever think it might possess you?
Sure.
So having been through this, what do you see as a viable future for financial regulations, their viable paths?
Well there is a couple of easy fixes. You can make the market place more transparent, if people had known who was paying the mortgages instead of having to rely on Moody’s Triple A bull**** rating then the transparency would help. The Triple A rating thing is ridiculous. It’s like Oliver paying you for a review. The people who are bundling this crap, this toxic crap were paying Moodys for their review of their crap. That is ridiculous. It is ridiculous. You can’t have bank holding companies acting as hedge funds. You can’t have them taking a million dollar pension plan for the bus driver and treating it with the same risk appetite that you treat George Soros’s pocket money. It's fundamentally ridiculous. And it hasn’t gotten better, they literally, this is very recent actually, they went from bundling mortgages that were crap to now they are bundling life insurance policies and betting on people’s death. I mean, you can’t just blame it all on the street, like I said, the Hershey’s chocolate thing, people’s mentality needs to change. The Greece contagent thing takes off and then it goes to Spain and Ireland and Portugal, things are going to change drastically for the world you know. Soup kitchens, it won’t be that type of change, you are not going to get compression that way, it will be very different. I think my generation, it’s hard to have hope when you have got a seven trillion dollar derivatives debt to pay and a bubble about to explode and you have got five hundred trillion dollars with the GDP, if you took all the money in the world and put it in the pot, you would be two hundred trillion dollars short. It’s scary man, the average person born today, owes $8000. The average person getting out of college owes $75000 with no job. I mean it’s scary, my generation it’s a scary situation.
Have you ever been that passionate and informed about things like that?
Finance, I knew nothing about maths before I got to this movie. I was kicked out of every school I ever went to. I was not like a scholastic, never. The only reason I went at this so hard was I was a sinking man, I was drowning, I was scared.
Really
Yes.
That part?
Oh yes. Well if you think about it, it’s not like I dropped the ball in a Legacy Prior that people loved and cherished and if I was going to do it twice my career was over.
You mean Indiana. You thought you dropped the ball in it?
Yes this is fight or flight for me. I showed up on this set in a whole different mindset.
Why do you feel you dropped the ball in the Indiana Jones part?
I just think you know, when you get into like monkey swinging and things like that you can blame it on the writer, you can blame it on Steven 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.
What did you learn about finance, did it make you more careful with your money?
Yes, I have never been that way. I have always been pretty conservative, I spend big money on like Dodgers tickets, my biggest expenditure.
Do you think this was your best work?
Yes.
You are in a more serious kind of, I know you have balance of roles, would you like another very meaty role like this?
I have obligations I have to fulfil. I am super excited to go and fulfil them. I sound like I am embarrassed to make this movie, I am really happy and I think we can make some big updates on Transformers. Yes my sensibilities are shifting.
How was it working with Carey?
She is an incredible actress. Outrageously gifted like an emotional Samuri. She is incredible, she is incredible.
