Following the premiere of “Slauson Rec” on Sunday, May 18 at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, the world-at-large will be tuned into all of Shia LaBeouf‘s manic, megalomaniacal energy live and in living color. If the accusations of sexual battery and assault made by former girlfriend FKA Twigs weren’t enough to make his toxicity apparent, this intimate documentary shot by first-time filmmaker Leo Lewis O’Neil certainly will do the trick.
The film was a late addition to the Cannes lineup (it’s premiering in the Cannes Classics section), being added only within the last week. And as he shared in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, LaBeouf is thrilled with the film gaining notoriety, even if it captures him in a way he’s ashamed of.
“Yes, I look like a fucking asshole. Yes, my boy got into Cannes,” LaBeouf said of the success O’Neil has found with the film. “I can be both disgusted with myself and happy as fuck for my guy. I can be both things.”
O’Neil began this project with LaBeouf shortly after the actor had formed a theater collective in South Central Los Angeles at Slauson Recreation Center. He became the official archivist for this group and soon started filming LaBeouf as he worked to train actors and mount performances. As LaBeouf became more and more obsessed with perfection though, his demands on his collaborators soon turned abusive and even physically violent.
“Am I fucked up? Yes. Is my process ugly and disgusting? Yes,” LaBeouf told THR. “Have I done horrible shit in the past that I’m going to have to make amends for the rest of my life? Yes. Does this movie change any of that? No. Does it also allow my people to get a foot into this fucking industry? Yes. So gas pedal down, green light go.”
He added later, “I haven’t watched any of this. There’s deep sorrow about what went on. I am going to watch it for the first time in Cannes. What I know about my experience with these people, of course, is conflict with 50 people. In a theater company, there’s conflict all over the place.”
Working on this project also overlapped with LaBeouf seeking to maintain his sobriety and find his way out of a long, dark period of his life. He has since become heavily involved in the Catholic faith and is continuing to seek forgiveness from those he’s wronged in the past.
“You’ve got to understand that the guy in the documentary that Leo has made is a godless man. This is a man with absolutely no spiritual principles at all,” said LaBeouf of why he believes he lost the thread of the project. “I’m really running the show. It’s the same kind of thing that sometimes [Francis Ford] Coppola exhibits in ‘Hearts of Darkness’ and it’s the same kind of thing you see in [Werner Herzog’s] ‘My Best Fiend.’ I don’t think it’s unique. I do think it’s current. I wasn’t leading with love. None of my creativity was leaning on love and generosity and patience and the things that you get out of parenting or the things that you read about in the scripture, none of it. No principles, no guiding line other than be good. Whatever it takes.”
Of the “abhorrent” behavior on display in “Slauson Rec,” LaBeouf said he does “own all of it.” Whether this means others will be willing to continue tolerating it remains to be seen.
