The brilliant creative relationship between Alma Har’el and Shia LaBeouf began seven years ago when the actor contacted the documentarian after viewing her genre-bending documentary, “Bombay Beach,” a hypnagogic observation of societal outcasts in the abandoned settlement of the Salton Sea. The film is emblematic of both the empathy Har’el possesses as a filmmaker, as well as her seemingly effortless ability to blend fiction and nonfiction, adding an element of interpretive dance to her work. You can see why LaBeouf, keen on performance art, was drawn to Har’el, and why she directed the upcoming film, “Honey Boy.”
READ MORE: ‘Honey Boy’: Shia LaBeouf Crafts A Love Letter To His Father [Sundance Review]
The night they met, they bonded over being children of alcoholics and clowns (her father a figurative clown, Shia’s a literal). Their rare bond is one of those personal and creative partnerships that produce beautifully vulnerable, ingeniously revelatory works of art like LaBeouf’s meta-autobiographical, extended therapy exercise, “Honey Boy,” featuring, arguably, his finest performance yet. It’s their close relationship and Har’el’s encouragement of LaBeouf to delve further into his painful past that led to such a cathartic end product.
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At the Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF), I sat down with Har’el to discuss her first narrative feature, her documentary background, the complex relationship between art and therapy, integrating therapeutic exercises with filmmaking techniques, mental health, addiction, LaBeouf’s personal transformation, and more.
You bring a unique documentary background to the table, which is invaluable, given the marriage of fiction and non-fiction in “Honey Boy.” What key aspects of your documentary filmmaking repertoire did you utilize for this film?
Somebody like me, that didn’t go to film school and isn’t using any preconceived notions of what it means to be a filmmaker, just dove in and then built my own way of working and looking at telling stories. The documentaries that I’ve made were very much focused not only on capturing the objective, factual, journalistic aspect of the story, if you may, they were very much actually focused on capturing the subjective, inner-life aspects of the people telling their stories and using techniques or ways of storytelling that are not necessarily conventional either in documentary or in scripted narrative. So, if it’s dance, mime or psycho-drama in “Love True,” which used therapy on set. Using all of that became very valuable in this film because there are moments in the film between Twigs and Noah that rely on a lot of movements.
Obviously, the film itself had a very therapeutic value. And Shia, portraying his father in a room with Noah Jupe, is, to a degree, portraying him when he was young and then recreating some of these moments that have been the most traumatic for him. All of that has very heavy, therapeutic aspect to it that is being filmed in real-time, so I could see all of my documentary work in it.
What was the most satisfying aspect of bringing these parts of Shia’s past back to life on screen?
You dream about becoming a filmmaker for a long time before you become one. And the way our culture is arranged, the most reward comes to those who can make scripted films. You feel you graduated when you make a scripted film. There’s a sense of, like you said before, bringing all of everything you’ve learned into it and allowing you to also utilize all of the relationships you had in order to create something.
One of the most rewarding things to me was the ability to tell a story of children of alcoholics. As a child of an alcoholic myself, every time he and my mother would separate, my mother was always hoping this is the last time. And that happens a lot in relationships that have addiction in them, and to the point that my mom wouldn’t want him to come into the house when they were separated, hoping that she wouldn’t relapse into getting back together with him or being angry that he was drinking again. She was living in the shadow of his addiction for many years. So, we would go to see films. That was the only place we could go to because he didn’t have his own place.
Seeing films together with my father has been what started a lot of my love for film, critical-thinking of films, and becoming a filmmaker. The most satisfying aspect of it is being able to deal with the complexity of those relationships, while also directing my first scripted film. And also a sense of closure with my relationship with Shia, which I felt like I owed him, in many ways, a lot of gratitude for the way he supported me as a filmmaker. By telling his story at a moment in his life when he thought nobody would work with him again, I felt that I was there for him in a way that he’s been for me.
“Honey Boy” is not a film about how alcoholism destroys a family. It’s about generational addiction. It’s about love, forgiveness, and redemption. These are themes that so many can relate to. Do you hope that this film resonates universally with audience members?
Oh, man, I hope so, so much. My life was totally changed when I realized some of the similarities the children of alcoholics, children of addicts, or children of people with mental health have. I always say that they’re all my brothers and sisters, but I really had to go into the rooms of 12-step programs that are dedicated to those children. By learning some of the behavioral things that you develop in order to cope with those years, I’ve learned so much about what I was doing to myself and to the people around me. And I hope that people see this film and recognize that there is such a thing because we always put so much emphasis on 12-step programs for the alcoholics and the addicts, but we don’t necessarily always speak about the families, the wives, the children.
