The Shia LaBeouf comeback tour continues as his movie with Abel Ferrara, “Padre Pio,” which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year, hits theaters today. Ferrara’s film is LaBeouf’s first acting performance since his ex-girlfriend, FKA Twigs, sued the actor for sexual battery and emotional distress. Is two years out of the limelight (and in the middle of a pandemic) just punishment? Whatever the case, LaBeouf also has a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming “Megalopolis,” so he’s a regular working actor again.
READ MORE: ‘Padre Pio’ Trailer: Shia LaBeouf Is An Italian Priest In Abel Ferrara’s Latest Drama
And that’s not all: Indiewire (via The Film Stage) reports that LaBeouf is also hard at work on a new screenplay with Ferrara, his first since 2019’s “Honey Boy,” directed by Alma Har’el. And according to Ferrara, it’s a script that takes place at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. “He’s doing real good, man. He’s doing real good. He went off and he did a Coppola movie,” Ferrara started off. Then the writer-director jumped to his time working on “Padre Pio” with LaBeouf and the actor’s script. “So that was, there was one of those films, right? I mean, “Padre Pio” was 15 days or 20 days and he was in for four, so he wasn’t there a long time. But anyway, it was good, and he’s working. And we’re working on a film together, he’s writing something about Auschwitz that we’re thinking about doing.”
A Holocaust movie written by Shia LaBeouf and directed by Abel Ferrara? That doesn’t sound intriguing so much as problematic. After all, LaBeouf disowned his script for “Honey Boy” after its release, calling it “f*cking nonsense” that betrays his real-life father. “My dad was so loving to me my whole life,” LaBeouf said on Jon Bernthal‘s “Real Ones” podcast last year. “Fractured, sure. Crooked, sure. Wonky, for sure. But never was not loving, never was not there. He was always there… and I’d done a world press tour about how fucked he was as a man. Here’s a man who I’ve done vilified on a grand scale. I turned the knob up on certain shit that wasn’t real. My dad never hit me, never. He spanked me once, one time. And the story that gets painted in ‘Honey Boy’ is this dude is abusing his kid all the time. My dad was going to live with this certain narrative about him on a public scale for a very long time, probably the rest of his life. I wronged him.”
Kudos to LaBeouf for calling himself out on his own shit, but it makes one wonder if he’s the right person to write a script about the holocaust. Should Ferrara be working on subject matter as thorny, deep, and delicate as the concentration camps at Auschwitz with LaBeouf? Maybe, maybe not. But the two apparently like working together after “Padre Pio,” so that’s what audiences will likely get sometime soon.
As for “Megalopolis,” don’t expect Copolla’s magnum opus in theaters until next year at the earliest. And “Padre Pio” is in theaters now (read The Playlist’s review of the film from Venice 2022 here).