Having made a habit of courting controversy both onscreen and off, Shia LaBeouf is preparing to make his first feature film appearance in 3 years as the star of Abel Ferrara’s drama Padre Pio, and it sounds as though the duo are considering working together again.
Whether it’s his highly-publicized legal indiscretions that have seen him charged with disorderly conduct, harassment, and criminal trespass, allegations of assault from former partners, his bizarre art installations that led to repeated plagiarism claims, his overly-intense method acting approach or anything in between, the former Disney star rarely strays too far from the headlines.
That being said, his next project could prove to be the most incendiary yet after Ferrara – no stranger to some controversy himself – revealed to The Film Stage that LaBeouf is working on his next screenplay, revealing that “he’s writing something about Auschwitz that we’re thinking about doing.”
LaBeouf did pen the screenplay for the acclaimed Honey Boy, which he promoted as being semi-autobiographical in nature before later retracting those comments and admitting he’d fictionalized the narrative to the point of what he called “f*cking nonsense,” and while he was born and raised as Jewish, he converted to Christianity for the purpose of getting into character for David Ayer’s World War II story Fury.
We’re not saying LaBeouf couldn’t write a moving, reflective, and ultimately worthwhile drama rooted in one of the most horrific atrocities in human history, but there’s nonetheless plenty of evidence already there that indicates perhaps he shouldn’t; for the sole purpose of the inevitable deluge of negativity that would follow such a project at every turn.