I’ve been previewing films for a week and continue to attend press & industry screenings. Tonight was a fun walk to the red carpet where I took this photo of Shia LaBeouf. Articles to come soon. Gotta run down to Tribeca now for another red carpet. Ciao!
Here’s an excerpt of his interview with Variety titled “Shia LaBeouf on Fame: Celebrities are ‘Enslaved.'”
In 2014, you tweeted that you’re retiring from public life. Can you explain what you meant by that? Are you still retired?
I turned to performance art, as I couldn’t find another container/platform/discipline for individual expression, self-presentation. I couldn’t contact the audience. Performance art tightens the space of relations and allows me to work in real time, as opposed to only synthetic time. It liberated me from the old constraints of genre and taxonomic systems (drama, thriller, comedy, mystery). It liberates me and allows me to work in broad complexities.
Would you be interested in a career as a director?
I’m a performer.
You’ve been in the spotlight a lot, and you’ve talked about how it’s been hard to maintain your integrity as an artist. Why does the spotlight make it difficult to create art? Do you feel like you’re in a better place now as an artist?
The craft of acting for film is terribly exclusive and comes with the baggage of celebrity, which robs you of your individuality and separates you.
The performance work is democratized and far more inclusive. As a celebrity/star I am not an individual — I am a spectacular representation of a living human being, the opposite of an individual. The enemy of the individual, in myself as well as in others. The celebrity/star is the object of identification, with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived. The requirements to being a star/celebrity are namely, you must become an enslaved body. Just flesh — a commodity, and renounce all autonomous qualities in order to identify with the general law of obedience to the course of things. The star is a byproduct of the machine age, a relic of modernist ideals. It’s outmoded.
I started acting as a child. It has been a long time since I’ve known another way. I think our work, for me, is my adult self putting another room on the house to gain perspective on the house.