LaBeouf On INDY IV: “My Fault”

On of the major targets of criticism of 2008’s Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull was Shia LaBeouf. And this weekend while doing the press rounds for his upcoming film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the 23-year old actor agreed that part of the film’s problems was him.

“I feel like I dropped the ball on the legacy that people loved and cherished,” LaBeouf admitted to the LA Times. And he was surprisingly candid about his own work in the film-

You get to monkey-swinging and things like that and you can blame it on the writer and you can blame it on Steven [Spielberg, who directed]. 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.

LaBeouf also explained that he understood why the audience was upset.

I think the audience is pretty intelligent. I think they know when you’ve made [crap]. And I think if you don’t acknowledge it, then why do they trust you the next time you’re promoting a movie… We [Harrison Ford and LaBeouf] had major discussions. He wasn’t happy with it either. Look, the movie could have been updated. There was a reason it wasn’t universally accepted. We need to be able to satiate the appetite. I think we just misinterpreted what we were trying to satiate.

Is such honesty biting the hand that feeds him? After all, Spielberg is also an executive producer on the Transformers franchise, which has been a big part of LaBeouf’s meteoric career rise. But he doesn’t think that Spielberg will be too upset with him.

I’ll probably get a call. But he needs to hear this. I love him. I love Steven. I have a relationship with Steven that supersedes our business work. And believe me, I talk to him often enough to know that I’m not out of line. And I would never disrespect the man. I think he’s a genius, and he’s given me my whole life. He’s done so much great work that there’s no need for him to feel vulnerable about one film. But when you drop the ball you drop the ball.

It’s hard nowadays to find such candor from a Hollywood actor. And while I’m still not much of a fan of Shia LaBeouf the actor, I think I’m now a little bit more of a fan of Shia LaBeouf the person.