The actor Oliver Stone hated working with: “I wrote ‘Scarface’, go fuck yourself”
No actor goes through their entire Hollywood career getting along with every single person they work with. After all, in the movie business, as in any industry, personality clashes inevitably rear their heads. However, perhaps because moviemaking is an industry filled with passionate creative types whose behaviour can often be indulged because they’re box office draws or have legendary status, sometimes these clashes cross the line.
Take Oliver Stone’s experience with one young actor on the sequel to one of his most beloved films. Hearing how Stone treated the star sounds more like psychological warfare than a standard director-actor relationship, and it’s hard not to think the firebrand filmmaker must have hated his young charge.
In 2010, Stone gave the world the return of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. For the long-awaited sequel to his seminal 1987 stockbroker drama, Stone placed greed avatar Gekko amid the 2008 financial crisis and surrounded star Michael Douglas with a cast of seasoned veterans like Josh Brolin, Susan Sarandon, and Frank Langella. However, he also cast the hot, young up-and-comers Carey Mulligan and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull star Shia LaBeouf – who was disarmingly open about his contentious relationship with Stone from the word ‘go’.
In a Los Angeles Times article published in the leadup to the film’s release, LaBeouf claimed that Stone immediately cut his ego down to size by telling him, “Don’t worry, Tom Cruise wasn’t an actor when I first worked with him either”. The star admitted that hearing such a candid putdown of his acting abilities “was like a knife to my heart,” but he claimed it made him approach the role with a dedication he might otherwise not have strived for. In truth, he was so insecure when surrounded by heavyweights like Douglas and Sarandon that he noted, “I felt like a drowning man. To sit in a room with these actors…I was just the dude from Transformers.”
Worryingly, though, in another interview with GQ from the movie’s publicity campaign, LaBeouf claimed Stone used some tactics to boost his performance that would certainly not fly today. He alleged that Stone gathered personal information from him in the early going, which he then used periodically to “fuck with you”. Worse than that, though, was LaBeouf’s assertion that Stone encouraged him to get blind drunk in a bar across from the set before returning to shoot scenes.
He claimed, “He would really fuck with me when I was smashed” before adding: “He would just open you up completely, make you fucking naked – and then call, ‘Action’.”
Sadly, four years after shooting the movie, LaBeouf told Interview magazine that he came to believe Stone purposefully manipulated him and made him feel stupid. He mused, “I think he felt that I was an imbecile and talked down to me the whole time so that I looked up to him like a scholar.” This is perhaps best encapsulated by a moment when LaBeouf suggested slightly altering a repetitive line of dialogue in Stone’s script, as he felt it was redundant. He claimed Stone fixed him with a stare and said – verbatim – “I wrote Scarface. Go fuck yourself.”
Assuming LaBeouf’s claims are valid, this is an extremely problematic working relationship. It’s nothing new, though – after all, Hollywood history is chock full of directors going to extreme lengths to cajole and/or bully performances out of cast members. However, while they were seemingly deemed acceptable at the time, these days, they’re looked upon in a very different light.
Ultimately, Stone’s treatment of LaBeouf certainly sounds like it would fall into this murky area of morality. Indeed, given how his life and career proceeded following Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, one could argue that LaBeouf was a vulnerable young man whose mental issues needed to be handled more delicately. Equally, though, his own abominable behaviour in later years can’t be solely laid at the feet of a dysfunctional relationship with one director. Perhaps putting these two combustible personalities on a movie set together would always be a recipe for disaster.
