Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox Interview, Transformers

MoviesOnline sat down with Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox at the Los Angeles press day to talk about their new film, "Transformers,” directed by Michael Bay.

Shia: It’s a wild movie isn’t it?

MOVIESONLINE: How much of that was you? How much was stuntmen like when you were hanging off of that building?

Shia: Probably 90%. Well that building stuff is all me.

MOVIESONLINE: You’ve got some fast wheels.

Shia: Oh, running, yeah. When you film it from the side, it looks way faster.

MOVIESONLINE: Outrunning Decepticons!

Shia: No, no no.

MOVIESONLINE: Can you talk about the hardest things you had to do in this film? And the stunts?...

Megan: Golly, every day was pretty….

Shia: Her feet were bleeding.

Megan: They weren’t bleeding. He just made that up. I lost my two big toenails, not from a specific accident. It was just from the constant running in the wardrobe boots. It just rubbed my toenails off.

MOVIESONLINE: Those things grow back.

Megan: They do, they grow back.

Shia: The hairiest was that roof thing. That was wild.

MOVIESONLINE: How did they do that?

Shia: They just put me up there and tied me to the statue.

MOVIESONLINE: So that was a for real building?

Shia: Yeah.

MOVIESONLINE: How high up were you?

Shia: Uh, it’s high. I don’t know exactly. Maybe sixty stories.

MOVIESONLINE: How many days?

Shia: Up there? That was just one day. I was just up there one day.

MOVIESONLINE: Were there really helicopters?

Shia: Yeah, all the time, every day.

Megan: The only thing that’s in the movie that wasn’t there when we were filming are the actual Autobots and Decepticons.

Shia: Most of the explosions were there.

MOVIESONLINE: Was there a point where you thought, ‘I’m going to lose my life’?

Shia: Every day. You look at Bay and Bay’s all frantic ‘Put him on the thing. Put him on the thing!’ That’s scary because you’re moving so fast. You don’t want him to mess up and forget that you’re on the thing.

MOVIESONLINE: What was your relationship like with Bay on the movie. He’s often described as ‘The General’. Was he collaborative with you or did he just give orders and you just did your job?

Megan: He was collaborative. Especially, he gave you a lot of freedom with dialogue. He’s good that way.

Shia: Yeah. I enjoyed him.

MOVIESONLINE: Megan, when you read the script, were you happy that your character got to kick some butt and wasn’t just the damsel in distress?

Megan: Yeah, I was. Both of the female characters in the movie were very strong characters. Rachel’s character is very intelligent. I thought that they were representing women very well.

MOVIESONLINE: Was that you driving the truck or no?

Megan: No, it wasn’t me driving the truck.

MOVIESONLINE: Shia, I read an early version of the script and a lot of the banter between you and your parents and you and Megan, I don’t recall in the script. How much of that was worked up on set and how much was re-writes?

MOVIESONLINE: What was your favorite thing you got to do on set that ended up in the film?

Shia: That rooftop stuff is just great. Oh, the banter? Probably stuff with the parents. All the stuff with the parents. All that stuff was pretty funny.

MOVIESONLINE: Like where you say ‘you handsome man’ [to your dad]?

Shia: That’s a good one. There were a couple of them. They’re all fun to do.

MOVIESONLINE: In the end where you guys are making out on the hood of the car, don’t you think that’s kind of weird that you’ve got these robots hanging around?

Megan: You know what, somebody pointed out that we’re laying on Bumblebee. Kinda weird.

Shia: Yeah, like a threesome. That’s how it was planned.

MOVIESONLINE: Was it in the script that you get de-pantsed by one of the robots?

Shia: Oh yeah. All that was in there. It went way further into it too. The script was really disturbing.

MOVIESONLINE: You were too young when the toys originally came out, but what were your toys as a kid?

Shia: Yogi Bear. That was it.

Megan: I played with Ninja Turtles.

MOVIESONLINE: Can you talk about actually acting without the robots there and how you do that performance?

Megan: All of the robots were represented by window washer poles, metal poles and they were all height appropriate to each character so we were looking in the right direction and sometimes they would attach… I never had a tennis ball, but ILM has these red, glowing balls and they attach them to the top and that’s the face, and the rest we just sort of create and we have to create it together because we have to move at the same time if we’re being approached at the same time by the same thing so it was difficult.

MOVIESONLINE: And they show you animatics?

Shia: Yeah.

Megan: Yeah, they show us animatics. That’s true. That really helped with all the moving stuff.

MOVIESONLINE: Does Michael Bay talk all through it like ‘He’s doing this. He’s doing that’?

Shia: Yeah. His whole demeanor changes too. He starts doing this soft, narrator voice. He goes like [yelling] ‘Quiet on the fuckin’ set. Quiet on the fuckin’ set!’ Then, [whispering] ‘He’s moving. There’s no legs. There’s no legs on him.’ [big laugh]

MOVIESONLINE: Shia, what have the last couple of months been like for you with Disturbia being a big hit, then Surf’s Up and it was confirmed you are in Indiana Jones?

Shia: It’s crazy. It’s nuts. A few times you’ll just catch me with nothing else to say. I don’t know what to say about it. I don’t know how it happened or what’s going on. It’s just nuts.

MOVIESONLINE: You can wait a long time for something like this?

Shia: Yeah, but you never expect it to explode like that though. The Indy news alone would have been my year, my life! So, it’s just been wild. Nobody expected Disturbia. It wasn’t like people were eyeing that like that was going to be a big hit or anything.

MOVIESONLINE: I know you can’t talk about Indiana Jones but it’s been reported that you’re going to be a Yale student and a motorcycle greaser…

Shia: I don’t know nothin’ about that world.

MOVIESONLINE: Have you been on the set at all?

Shia: Next week.

MOVIESONLINE: Are you going to sneak in and put on the hat and the leather jacket?

Shia: Oh, that’s already happened, oh yeah!

MOVIESONLINE: How are you holding up? You’ve said ‘I might just burn out by the end of the year’?

Shia: Yeah. Well, I feel like I’ll get burned out until I’m on the set and it’s the first day and Steven’s behind the monitor and Harrison’s right there and it’s just all adrenalin and then you’re like just wired.

MOVIESONLINE: What was it like working with John Turturro? There were some pretty funny scenes.

Shia: Yeah.

Megan: Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody commit to a character the way that he did. He makes really outrageous choices and it’s great when everybody else on the set is making more subdued ones and he goes with it and convinces us that it’s brilliant afterwards.

MOVIESONLINE: Was the character written that way? Almost like a parody?

Megan: It wasn’t written like that, no. He created that completely.

MOVIESONLINE: He just took it over the top?

Shia: Yeah and Mike let him go with it. It would have been easy for him to go up and say ‘just bring it down a little bit’. He never did that; reined him or anything. Turturro is like the life of the set when he’s on set. He’s doing Tyrese impressions that are murderous. They’re amazing. He’s just the life of the party.

MOVIESONLINE: This movie is a lot funnier than I anticipated. How did you balance that? I mean it seems to make sense because it’s pretty ridiculous. You’ve got robots…

Shia: Yeah. In keeping with the tone of the cartoon. You can’t make a Transformer movie. That’s like making.. I was going to make some stupid analogy but you can’t do it without the humor. The cartoon had humor.

MOVIESONLINE: It’s hard to take that stuff too seriously?

Shia: Yeah. You’ve got to look at what it was. It was this ‘80’s cheesy cartoon that’s now become something else.

MOVIESONLINE: Are you guys signed up for two?

Both: Two.

MOVIESONLINE: You guys have the car, the robots are buried in the ocean so it’s set up.

Shia: Starscream flies off.

MOVIESONLINE: So we’ll get more Decepticons?

Shia: Or something.

MOVIESONLINE: Which one is your favorite robot?

Megan: In this movie it’s Bumblebee which, I’m sure, is everyone’s answer but he is the hero of the movie but, in the cartoon, it was Starscream.

Shia: Bumblebee in both, Bumblebee.

MOVIESONLINE: Did they give you a car?

Shia: No, no, no. A little remote control one. I got a couple of those.

MOVIESONLINE: You had the concept car for the Camaro, right?

Shia: Right. Before they had even made them. We had a dude on set with us from GM who was a real loser.

MOVIESONLINE: Now you won’t get a car.

Shia: He was all over us.

Megan: He wouldn’t let us sneeze. We couldn’t do anything inside the car. We were trying to act in the scene and we couldn’t even move and touch the leather.

Shia: Meanwhile, when we get away from him, we’re pushing the car at 140 on a freeway at night and the second we get back to set, Mike’s like washing down the leather. We just like rode it through gravel. It was weird.

MOVIESONLINE: This might be the big teen fave movie of the summer. When you were a teenager, what was the big movie that just blew you away?

Shia: Titanic, for me was big. That was the one. It had to be.

Megan: We weren’t teenagers though really. Maybe ten.

Shia: But, like my tween life, when I was twelve Titanic was like a party, man. I went like four or five times and Scream was a big deal.

Megan: Scream was a big one. But Titanic wasn’t really big with us.

Shia: Really?

Megan: No. I wasn’t really into it.

MOVIESONLINE: But that’s really more of a female kind of movie.

Shia: Thanks!

MOVIESONLINE: But it had big effects too. Hey he’s sensitive. It had something for everyone.

Shia: Yeah. You could have just said that [he laughs].

MOVIESONLINE: What do each of you remember as your first big date movie that you took someone to?

Megan: I wasn’t allowed to date like my whole life until I moved out, but I snuck out once and went to see Lord of the Rings with a boyfriend. God, I was already like sixteen sneaking out.

Shia: Mine was weird. It wasn’t like a romantic choice. It was Amistad. That was kind of strange. Kinda weird. She was into boats. I thought it was a good choice [laughter]. That’s probably my big date movie.

MOVIESONLINE: At least it was Spielberg.

Shia: Yeah.

MOVIESONLINE: Did you meet Spielberg at all during making this film?

Shia: He came to set and said ‘Hey, Shia, how’s life?’ ‘Good.’ ‘Movie looks great.’ He’s just a very pleasant guy. He’s always really pleasant and trying to make you feel comfortable all the time. He’s super aware that he’s Steven Spielberg and what that does to a person. He’s always trying to knock that down, all the time.

MOVIESONLINE: Megan, what’s next for you?

Shia: I’m doing a movie with Simon Pegg and Kirsten Dunst called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

MOVIESONLINE: Isn’t that shooting?

Megan: It is actually. I’m leaving tomorrow night after this.

MOVIESONLINE: What was the casting process like for you?

Megan: I never saw the other people that they were casting, but I went in at the very bottom with just casting and started from the beginning and went like eight auditions later and did readings with Mike and Shia and finally I got the word.

MOVIESONLINE: Were you pretty jazzed when you got the word?

Megan: I was. I was pretty excited. I remember, when they first called me to audition for it, I didn’t understand. Because, like I said, I wasn’t a huge Transformers fan, I got it confused with like the other robots that had people in them [Power Rangers].

Shia: Go-bots?

Megan: I was like ‘Am I going to have to be one?’ It was all a big blur.

MOVIESONLINE: Is that a Marilyn Monroe tattoo? Someone is a good artist.

Megan: Yeah, Mark Mahoney at Shamrock.

MOVIESONLINE: Why Marilyn?

Megan: She was one of the first people I ever saw on television when I was literally a baby and my mom said, from that time, whenever I would hear her voice, I would cry so I just had immense empathy for her. [NOTE: She also has a star-shaped tattoo on her ankle]

MOVIESONLINE: In the movie was there ever a payoff scene where you go back and kick the crap out of your old jock boyfriend?

Megan: That never existed. I mean he [looking at Shia] kills Megatron so why would she need to go back and deal with the high school boyfriend. He’s the world’s hero at the end.

MOVIESONLINE: Yeah, how do you go back to high school after that?

Shia: You become a pianist.

MOVIESONLINE: And ride your mom’s bike.

Shia: That’s it.

MOVIESONLINE: Do you have any idea if it goes to a sequel, how you would like to see the story unfold?

Shia: There are so many intelligent people working on it, my input is meaningless storyline-wise. They are going to do what they are going to do. Orci and Kurtzman are great. Mike knows what he’s talking about. Tom Desanto, Don Murphy, all these dudes are insane fans of the franchise.

MOVIESONLINE: Are there a lot of Transformers you would like to see in it?

Shia: Oh yeah. Well, I have things that I don’t want to happen. Like I don’t want to go into Beast Wars World, you know? That would be strange. There’s a little bit of it in Scorpinox but it’s not nuts. If it went nuts and it was like gorilla/giraffe fights, that would be lame. Thundercats would be sick. But you can’t do it now. We’ve taken over.

MOVIESONLINE: If you two were cruising in your cars, what would you be listening to?

Shia: She’s gonna say Nirvana cuz she’s so dark [laughter].

Megan: Yeah, they’re my favorite band.

Shia: Tyrese all day long.

MOVIESONLINE: Did he give you all his albums?

Megan: Yeah.

Shia: Oh yeah. Are you kidding me. He read it to me phonetically, like a baby book.