Disturbia
Disturbia: LaBeouf's Teenie Bopper
"Well [director] D.J. Caruso and Salton Sea are up on my Ten List," LaBeouf began. "I'd never made a movie for this audience. I knew Spielberg's involvement was going to have something to do with it, and then I think it really became something different when David Morse came on board, who's one of the best character actors we have in America. And Carrie-Anne Moss, you see her in Mommy mode. You know it's going to be something jarring and people aren't ready for that. They know her as Trinity and as a powerful woman, and you see her in rehearsals, and she's nursing her baby, and you hug her, and she seems like a mom. I knew that was going to be cool for the audience, and we cast a really talented actress. So you knew it wasn't going to be the normal teen thriller."
Morse plays the neighbor who could be a murderer. It's hardly giving away a spoiler to suggest that there is some physical conflict, and LaBeouf got so into it that poor Mr. Morse broke some fingers.
"We were fighting. It's staged and you're trying to be as safe as possible, but it's all real, it's a real set, it's a real seven-foot guy, and I'm really 20 and we're really gonna fight or this movie's not gonna work. There's so much on the line, and you've been working for two months at this point, put so much in, that when you get there, you've got all this adrenaline, and meanwhile David Morse has not been talking to me, period, said a word to me for two months. You want to fight. D.J.'s all in to that type of stuff and he was fuelling it the whole time."
Don't worry, Morse and LaBeouf have since made up. "We spoke during the last two weeks of filming when everything had kind of settled down. And when we came back to do additional shooting, we had a conversation and were friends then."
A very hands on actor, LaBeouf also contributed to his character's dialogue. "I never went through these situations. I went through a similar situation with my mom being attacked, or something like that, but I never went through what he went through, never been under house arrest or anything like that, but been in the judicial system, dealt with that whole thing. You know the lingo. Carl [Ellsworth]'s a good writer and he would always leave enough on the page for you to be informed enough to be able to go off. If you don't have a good enough place to start, if you don't have a foundation, there's no way you can start varying and changing things because you get lost. There's a scene where I'm on the balcony and professing my love. Literally, the way that the lines were written were like key notes. Sits on the roof, reads books, there's nothing in between, just pinpointed keynotes, like with dots going down… but it was keynotes, and then it was find it for yourself. How would you do it? So that was fun."
While actors may love improvising, a production has to build that into their schedule. "The fact that there was that freedom, and that they allowed it and that they would work with me, because that's not something you do in one or two takes. You do 6 or 7 of them, 8 or 9 of them, try to find the cadence, and know the mannerisms. Body language is important, especially in scenes like that and with teenagers, it's more than 65 percent nonverbal. It's even more than that, more than that especially with teenagers. Because they don't know how to express it. Normal people don't know how to express themselves, especially at that age, especially in that situation, so a lot of it was like 'How do we block this? When do I get off the door? When am I making my case? When am I lying?' All of it and you've got to find the movement to that."
Disturbia opens to theatres on April 13th.
For the trailer, clips, movie stills and more movie info, go to the Disturbia
Movie Page.
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