Slauson Rec — first-time filmmaker Leo Lewis O’Neil’s explosive documentary about the electric rise and heartbreaking fall of Shia LaBeouf’s experimental theater collective of the same name — received a relatively quiet birth into the Cannes Film Festival, announced just seven days before the start of the 2025 edition. Weeks before the news broke, LaBeouf confirmed in a statement that he was “fully” supporting the film despite how it captures all of his complicated angles, from talented hustler and charismatic leader to tortured artist and abusive mentor.

He meant it. LaBeouf is backing it by fully leaning in and traveling to France for the doc’s world premiere in the Cannes Classics section Sunday night, a screening that will mark the first time he’s seen the finished film, or any of the footage for that matter. In another first, he agreed to talk about the film with The Hollywood Reporter in what is planned as the sole interview he’ll do regarding Slauson Rec.

He arrived ready to talk, logging on a few minutes early for a scheduled Zoom last Monday from a quiet corner in his expansive L.A. backyard. Sporting a full beard and an American Cinematheque hat, a smiling, reflective and unguarded LaBeouf was joined by O’Neil for what turned out to be an hour-long conversation peppered with compliments and affection. “I see Leo and it’s all love,” LaBeouf says. “We love each other deeply.”

O’Neil, who moved from Austin, Texas to Los Angeles, met LaBeouf in 2018 when the actor announced on Twitter that he was forming a new theater school at Slauson Recreation Center. “I’ll be there every Saturday at 9 a.m., building shit with whoever shows up. I’m trying to change the world,” he declared in the clip. More than a hundred people arrived that first weekend, and LaBeouf lived up to his word then too, by showing up for months trying to shape what he considered a theater laboratory filled with misfits smack in the middle of one of L.A.’s tougher neighborhoods.

O’Neil, not an actor but desperate to find his place in the city and the group, picked up a camera and asked LaBeouf if he could act as Slauson Rec’s official archivist. He stayed behind the lens for three years and, true to the official festival description, what O’Neil recorded “examines the fine line between mentorship and manipulation” and finds LaBeouf “pushing participants to their limits” through a mixture of tough love, verbal abuse and physical confrontation.

Picking up that camera turned out to be a fateful move and the results of that documentation — all 145 minutes of it, shaped from 800 hours of footage — will be unveiled at Cannes with LaBeouf taking a seat in Buñuel Theatre. “When this thing comes out, it isn’t any worse than what’s been said about me previously. Maybe it reifies people’s ideas about me. I think, at heart, I’m a good guy. Am I fucked up? Yes. Is my process ugly and disgusting? Yes. Have I done horrible shit in the past that I’m going to have to make amends for the rest of my life? Yes. Does this movie change any of that? No. Does it also allow my people to get a foot into this fucking industry? Yes. So gas pedal down, green light go,” says LaBeouf, whose appearance in the film is capped by a redemptive interview that shows he’s changed his ways.

I’ve never shown a film before, and I’ve never been to a film festival before so this is going to be insane. I don’t know what it’s going to be like.

That’s a big ass question there. The one that was pretty impactful for me at Cannes, at least life trajectory wise, probably more impactful than all of those other films, came in 2012. I sent a short film called HowardCantour.com to Cannes that I plagiarized from Dan Clowes. It got into this award show thing and then I was kind of fucked. I fucked myself because what are you going to say? I wind up at Cannes and then — firestorm. That’s how I found myself in performance art. Had that not happened, I wouldn’t know Leo, you understand?

Because what happened from that is I started to take my artistic agency back. We will get into all of the pros and cons that came from that, but the pros were that I started to create with a with people that were not necessarily on the A-list. I started fucking around with a bunch of people from a bunch of different creative life forms. That’s kind of what led to Slauson and forming what was meant to be a lab. That’s why Leo even had a way in, because he’s not an actor by trade. He has not one poetic actor strand in his body, and we had to discover that he couldn’t just hold a camera. Leo had to get in the middle, too. Leo had to do a bunch of weird shit, too. We all had to do it. That was the beauty of what we were doing and why there was so much trust. Probably because of that trust is why Leo’s movie is in Cannes because it’s rare that a filmmaker gets this kind of trust with a subject. From 50 subjects. Credit to Leo.

I don’t take it lightly. That group really was my family for years. Falling in love [with the group] and working through that is never something I took lightly, and I still don’t. It’s a huge honor to have been able to make this thing.

Ooh, did you hear his voice right there, Chris? His voice shifted. I could hear the weight of it in his voice, that it’s substantial.

I’m nervous. All of this, yeah, it’s huge.

I describe it as my experience through this family that I found in an art community in South Central L.A. at a time in my life when I was living down the street.

[LaBeouf interrupts to call out to his wife, Mia Goth, who is exfoliating in the couple’s backyard. “She’s happy,” he says.]

Sorry, go again bro.

It’s hard for me to pitch this thing because it is so personal. It’s hard for me to say, “Hey, this is my life and why it matters.” But there are universal themes in it, and it’s a complex portrait of not only Shia but of the group. These are people that were my best friends, collaborators and family.

There’s a tradition of this kind of deep, intimate documentation. My former boss’s wife [Francis Ford Coppola’s wife Eleanor Coppola] made one of the greatest documentaries of all time with Hearts of Darkness. No love lost. I see Leo and it’s all love. He’s not my husband or nothing, but we love each other deeply. There’s no other way you could have documented some of this stuff. Werner Herzog made a movie called My Best Fiend. I told Leo to watch it. He probably never did, but sick movie. All these dudes were best friends. One was a pretty dedicated actor [Klaus Kinski] trying to experiment with the method in the late 1960s, 1970s Germany, which I’m sure was crazier than my time. And guess who showed up to the premiere? Everybody.

I’m not going to speak on society and where we are, but this isn’t new. It’s not a novel thing that your friend films you in a process. Now for me, I know who I am and who I was during the process. So yeah, I’m naked and I’m shitting on myself throughout most of the film. It’s a very uncomfortable thing, but then you weigh the pros and cons of it all and back to that utility chunk, God doesn’t send mail to the wrong address. I don’t think I’m unique or special. I don’t think I’m the first in my line of work or any creative craft to lose the plot a bit. Leo documented it in a loving way, but full-blown — I turned into an animal.

There were boundaries that should have been set up, and I brought my instincts in there. Anytime someone’s instincts swallow another person’s agency — unhappiness. There’s got to be a proverb like that somewhere, but I’m not as well-read as other people. This is a flawed sin; trying to make something happen in a contentious area with a bunch of people who had their own history. It was an egalitarian dream that failed for a bunch of reasons. There’s unacceptable shit in there. There’s beautiful shit in there. What this won’t be is a lack of accountability. This won’t be me saying, “I did this because of that.” None of that type of shit.

What it will be, maybe, is a love letter to art. It is some insight into a collaborative sport, a deeply instructive look into the difference between doers and teachers or coachers and players. I know what I’m not, I’ll tell you that. I know what I’m not because my perfectionism is not for leadership. It doesn’t foster healthy standards. You want to do good sometimes, but you learn that you’re not the guy.

Looking at it now, it was probably an extension of my deep need to connect with others through performance art, and it feeling insubstantial, probably.

I was desperate to belong. I was desperate to be a part of something. I wasn’t unique in that way. I was about as fresh-faced as you can be. I had only been in L.A. for about a year. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had been beaten up a little bit, and was in survival mode, stealing food and shit. When I found this place, it opened up the whole world. It was magic in the beginning, and we all felt it.

Those first couple of weeks I didn’t film out of respect, but I always had my camera with me. I wanted to be a part of this thing so bad but I knew that I wasn’t an actor so I had to find my place. That meant working up the courage. I remember the moment I asked and my heart [was racing]. I still remember the email Shia sent out to the whole group saying I was the official archivist. I think it maybe was the first official position in the company. I took a screenshot of the email and remember being so psyched that I was a part of this thing. I felt like I had finally found something.

Leo’s a very eclectic cat. I could see who was connecting with not just the class but the neighborhood, who sits where and who was there first. He all the makings of somebody you’d want to play ball with if you were the one picking teams. I didn’t know much about Leo. He doesn’t put it all on the table right away. A year in, or something like that, we got mutual friends. We started kicking it on weekends, going to concerts. We had a whole other thing going on with another group of friends, like we were having group therapy. I was deep into the [12-step] program at the time and I had this pink cloud.

Dudes come into the program with nine months [of sobriety] and they’re ready to read the whole book to you. I was in one of those places, and the tentacles of that extended into all other facets of my life. One of my friend groups was a group of rappers whom Leo know,s and we used to kick it at their house and run these group therapy sessions. I don’t know how productive it was, but they sure were sweet, love and warm. That wasn’t a class, and we didn’t film it. We just talked about our feelings out loud as dudes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There were multiple things going on. You had some real heavy hitters in the beginning, too, guys who came in that were real sharpshooters. A lot of the meat eaters that I thought were really special were gone in the first three, four months, because back to this egalitarian thing, we came in and it was hippie dippy. I came in philosophizing about certain things, meta-modernism, and my head was seeped in a whole bunch of art stuff. I’m a street kid but these were highfalutin ideas. I was down with it, but that egalitarian, hippie-dippy stuff was tough when you put it on the floor.

We were so focused on equality that we were ignoring individual efforts, and that created a lack of accountability. That’s cool when it’s the YMCA, but when you’re trying to win the Super Bowl, it created tension and it hurt our sustainability. It hurt our freedom, it hurt our innovation. It destroyed our theater. That’s what I think. A lot of things destroyed it. One of the heartbreaks for me was that I caved to the sweetheart bullshit for so long that it became systematic. By the time I tried to turn the train around, I couldn’t control myself. That stemmed from a whole bunch of dysfunctional behavior, which I’m not proud of but I’m happy it’s documented. Yes, that’s true. Yes, I look like a fucking asshole. Yes, my boy got into Cannes. I can be both disgusted with myself and happy as fuck for my guy. I can be both things.

I’ve gotten in trouble a little bit recently for speaking on other actors’ processes. I don’t mean to downplay nobody. I’m just talking about my own shit. I’ve done all these things. Leo met me at a time when my trust was skyrocketing because I didn’t think I was running the show no more. But that took a whole lot of getting beaten down by the world. It’s not that exciting of an answer but I was just trying to fit in where I could get in and trying to be useful even with all the fucked up stuff that I’ve done. I am a sinner. Yes, no doubt. I really do identify with the good thief on the cross, not the fucked up guy, not the first one, the second one, the one who will openly admit it. I’m that guy and I’m okay with that. You know what I’m saying? Maybe it’s getting too weird now. Fuck. But I guess what I’m trying to say is now thinking about what he’s made and him getting into Cannes, boy, it feels like a mitzvah.

However, I can open the door for any of the people that were on that three-year journey with me at any expense other than that of my child. I think I can still do my thing. When this thing comes out, it isn’t any worse than what’s been said about me previously. Maybe it reifies people’s ideas about me. I think, at heart, I’m a good guy. Am I fucked up? Yes. Is my process ugly and disgusting? Yes. Have I done horrible shit in the past that I’m going to have to make amends for the rest of my life? Yes. Does this movie change any of that? No. Does it also allow my people to get a foot into this fucking industry? Yes. So gas pedal down, green light go.

I was already a year and a half into my role with the company so it had become so innate that it was always going to be what it was no matter what. I filmed every moment, no matter what. Because of the level of comfortability, I felt a real responsibility to keep documenting, I think in part because what we were doing felt so special, important and groundbreaking to us. When the moments got tricky, I kept filming. Looking back on it now, there were certain moments in the film that I just can’t believe I captured. I’m surprised I didn’t put the camera down and walk away, or say, “Whoa, man, give me a sec.” But I had a role, a job, and that was my place,e so I kept going.

Well, see, I haven’t watched any of these. You understand what I’m saying? I haven’t watched any of this. There’s deep sorrow about what went on. I am going to watch it for the first time in Cannes. What I know about my experience with these people, of course, is conflict with 50 people. In a theater company, there’s conflict all over the place. You got to understand that Sarah came out of another theater program that was run by James Franco. When she came to us, she was already a wounded bird and we were being very delicate with her, and that shaped a lot our company. We had to be very careful about a lot of stuff. Almost so careful. It’s like having an intimacy coordinator. Sure, everyone’s safe, but fuck, try to create something impossible. That stuff started to affect us. That was probably the hardest one because this all happened before everything that happened to me in terms of ego death.  

We had to navigate a lot but we also had to be true to this neighborhood that we were in. You can’t be the loudest voice in the room because you feel the most wounded. We can’t have the wounded woman be the centerpiece of the theater company we were building in Slauson, California. It’s crazy. Navigating that and the race relations, the stuff with Zeke felt brotherly. The stuff with Cyrus felt brotherly. There were wrestling contests that went on in the park all day long. It was a madhouse. This wasn’t a bunch of theater kids getting together to make theater. This was a bunch of kids who don’t fuck with theater making theater. It was Lord of the Flies.

It was a devised theater company that, to me, was a laboratory. It started as a lab. That’s when it felt the healthiest to me because there wasn’t any leadership. We were all just observing things and experimenting. When it went haywire was when we were down to the wire. The world had shut down. We had to financially sustain ourselves. We had a finite amount of time to be able to pull something off before people lost complete faith in us. We had made this agreement with the Natural History Museum to pull something off, and we had to make something. We can’t just naval gaze. We can’t just make shapes. We had to build a narrative, and that was very hard to do with 50 people. I’m sure it’s well documented in Leo’s thing, but there was frustration in herding cats.

There’s a whole bunch of conflict and tension on a film set. I come from a whole bunch of schools of that kind of conflict, from Oliver Stone to Lars Von Trier to Michael Bay to [Steven] Spielberg. I’ve seen different versions and musicality to that tension, some cuter than others. I wasn’t the deliverer of healthy standards because the music I listen to isn’t cute. It’s not a cute thing to do what I do. I don’t consider it, “Just hit your mark and tell the truth.” That’s some Spencer Tracey or some Disney Channel shit. It’s just not my shit, and that’s okay. People didn’t show up to the spot because it was free. We had to eat a whole bunch of shit. We didn’t have chairs for a long time. Shit wasn’t comfy. We had to earn our spot, all of us.

People believed in the North Star that I was pitching which was that we were going to have to bleed a little bit. It was going to hurt. You have to ante up. You have to pay the price to be great. You can’t just show up without having done any push-ups and play for the Raiders. That’s not to absolve myself of not being equipped to be in the position that I was throughout the process. It was just, like, fuck, we ran out of plays. I don’t know if this is in the documentary but we were looking for directors and that got crazy, too. It got insane. It got so political. It wasn’t about the truth anymore. It wasn’t about how to get down to the marrow, the capital T truth of fundamentalist theater.

Absolutely.  You’ve got to understand that the guy in the documentary that Leo has made is a godless man. This is a man with absolutely no spiritual principles at all. I’m really running the show. It’s the same kind of thing that sometimes Coppola exhibits in Hearts of Darkness and it’s the same kind of thing you see in My Best Fiend. I don’t think it’s unique. I do think it’s current. I wasn’t leading with love. None of my creativity was leaning on love and generosity and patience and the things that you get out of parenting or the things that you read about in the scripture, none of it. No principles, no guiding line other than be good. Whatever it takes.

Of course. Yeah. That statement is very true. Yeah, that’s definitely part of the complex portrait in this film. I don’t want to speak for Shia, but I believe that to be true about him from what I know about his life. I know he’s gone through some shit in his life and that impacts how somebody treats others, how they behave and how they move through their own life. It’s part of the DNA.

Yeah. I came up as an actor who was always discounted. When I came in, Haley Osment was popping and I was just some kid on Disney Channel. A couple years past that, I was just some other guy who was on some insubstantial shit. Even in my successful films, I was the insubstantial actor. I remember that feeling deeply. I remember one time Ryan Gosling came to set when we were making Transformers, and I remember feeling so intimidated even though he was very lovely. I remember feeling so insubstantial and this shit is all over his documentary. This is all of my own trauma mixed into me trying to get a theater company to pop off. At the time, my whole identity was wrapped up in the quality of the moment.

When we were running this company, I couldn’t get scared in the moment, like, what we were doing was dog shit but take a breath and walk away. I didn’t have that tool in my toolbox. I got frustrated when I felt like I was speaking the language and people weren’t listening, they couldn’t understand or they didn’t care. All of those things felt mute, but I had given my life to the thing. I’m not going to excuse none of it. Don’t print this or we’ll redo the interview if it comes across that way. I have to own all of my shit and I do. I own all of it. No excuses. The behavior: Abhorrent. No excuses. No explanation. I’m happy my boy got into Cannes.

Out of pocket, probably $300,000 in totality, maybe more. There came a point when my business manager said, “This is unsustainable.” When COVID kicked off, everything got very, very weird. We tried to do a fundraiser and YG came and performed. We were ecstatic. We thought, “This shits going to go off.” Then the Natural History Museum came in, and we felt like all the intellectuals were fucking with us now. Then with COVID, we tried to get the play going and I almost had a nervous fucking breakdown trying to get that off the ground. It wasn’t fun no more. We could never develop other directors. The financial situation became unsustainable. The love was gone in a way.

Oh, boy, the pain. I remember that. I remember that.

I hadn’t seen Shia for two years. We hadn’t really talked. I had a dream of him standing in front of a Christmas tree. It was a week before Christmas so I texted him and said, “Hey, can I come and interview you?” He said, “Yep, pull up tomorrow.” I pulled up. Sure enough, there was a Christmas tree with decorations. I set up the camera and we had this moment. I prepared all these questions. By the time I got through the questions, we were just running off and talking. Shia is a big brother to me, and he was especially during that time. He really taught me a lot. Not seeing him for that long was tricky.

I care about him a lot, and I wanted him to be well. Then we started getting into all this shit and it turned into a personal apology to me, I just broke down. It was the first time I had heard him basically say, “I’m sorry the dream failed. I’m sorry for what happened.” I couldn’t hold it in. I started crying. That was really important for me to put in the film because the whole film is seen through my eyes. It’s my perspective. I’m holding the camera and filming every day. It is my diary. To have that moment at the end of the film was really important to me because I care a lot.

I’m in a program. I’ve got to own my side and I’ve also got to make it right. Me going to Cannes, being a support system, it’s all part of my process. It’s a weird thing to talk about because there are mechanics to making amends. It’s not one and done. There’s the emotionality to it all, of course, and there’s a follow through, which is part of what this interview is for.

Well, it’s interesting. Leo’s been part of some of them. I’ve done some of them on my own to come back from Louisiana. I just saw Ash. We hung out, we made it right, walked and talked and had a meal. I do that sort of as it pops up. I still owe Bojangles attention in time. You can’t do it all at once. I got a 3-year-old, and there’s a lot going on in life. I bite off little chunks as they pop up in life and as the universe directs you. But yeah, that’s the goal. I’ve talked to a lot of people since then and I know that 50 of these motherfuckers wanted to go to Cannes. But it’s interesting, my team has seen the movie and they tripped. The people who love me — [manager John Crosby] and [publicist Melissa Kates] —are scared. What’s the scariest thing? The consensus was how me and [Zeke aka Ezekiel Pacheco] got down [in a fight]. So, I called Zeke. Me and Zeke had made it right awhile ago. But I called him and told him the movie’s coming out. Leo was on the phone. With the movie coming out, it’s going to make people feel a whole bunch of different ways.

When the spotlight hits you, it makes you feel a whole bunch of different ways. I got to stay open and current with everything and everyone in my life. If people who felt like we had made it right pop back up and say, “I don’t feel right about that.” I got to deal with it. It’s like whack-a-mole. My whole life has a lot of that. At a certain point, you get out of a sullen, sunken, emo-boy and you enjoy making it right. I’m looking forward to it, dog, as the gophers pop up, I will joyously deal with it as best I can. And when I can’t, I hand it over and keep it simple. That’s where I’m at.

The roadblocks are the same. I have creative friends. I’m working out of garages, dude, that’s is part of the beauty of what Slauson was. Slauson was an avenue for me to not have to wait for permission. I was chasing that before everything happened. Before crash and burn. There was already a deep instinct inside of me to self-generate. That’s what these comedians do with their podcasts. That’s part of what Slauson was for me. I’m finding people to work with now who are like-minded, who know me, who really know me, and are open to working with me. People who don’t know me or who found out about me some other way, are not open to working with me. And that’s okay. God doesn’t send mail to the wrong address. I deserve all that.

That’s a big question, man. Awesome.

O’NEIL My biggest goal with this film is to start conversation. In whatever way that happens to the biggest scale possible and the most impactful scale possible, that’s a win for me. Wherever it ends up, wherever it goes, that’s the big win for me. People have been asking me what’s next, and the only answer that I have for what’s next is something sincere. I have to fall in love again.

How do you support yourself right now?

O’NEIL This film supported me for the two years of edit, but it’s time to sell it so I can move on and make something else.

Who paid for it?

O’NEIL My wonderful executive producer, Kevin Knight, paid for it. This is his first film he’s ever financed. He’s a lifesaver, a magic man.

Shia, what would you like to see Leo do, or what do you foresee for him?

LABEOUF Oh, I think he’s the Werner Herzog of my generation. A lot of people have diaries — cool. A lot of people have really nice spirts and are enjoyable and can socialize with the multitudes the way Herzog can. Leo is that. I don’t think he’s as aware of it as I am, maybe. But I think wherever that dude points, it’s big. That’s what an artist is. He’s got a strong index finger. He’s very specific. And what that fool points at is big. He’s fucking dope.

Shia, where do you go from here?

LABEOUF I go wherever the wind blows me. I’m a hired gun. I’ll go where they let me go.

O’NEIL Can I point out one thing? Since Herzog just got brought up, I have an email from Werner Herzog printed and framed on my wall from when Shia gave me his email. I reached out and asked if he could help me out. [O’Neil out of his chair, takes the frame off the wall and sits back down.] Here’s what he wrote me: “Leo, I am certainly the wrong person as I have no affinity in theater at all. Shia is a wonderful actor, and we met only once, but I think he’s too optimistic about any input I could give to your project. Best, Werner.”

LABEOUF Fuck yeah, dude. Amazing, amazing, amazing.

Interview edited for length and clarity.