It’s been a while since Shia LaBeouf had a major movie moment, following 2019’s Honey Boy and the controversies that followed the actor since.
But now we know what Shia LaBeouf’s next movie will be, a film about Auschwitz that Abel Ferrara will helm. The pair recently worked together on the religious drama Padre Pio [read our review here], and speaking to The Film Stage, Abel Ferrara opened up about working with LaBeouf and how their last collaboration led to the pair wanting to tackle this hard-hitting story.
Ferrara tells The Film Stage: “He’s doing real good, man. He’s doing real good. He went off, and he did a Coppola movie. 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.”
Auschwitz was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. A reported 1.1 million lives were lost between 1940 and 1945 at this location.
LaBeouf had described himself as Jewish, but in an interview in 2007, the actor claimed that religion had “never made sense” to him. Though things seem to have changed following his work on the Catholic-focused Padre Pio, he told an outlet in May this year that he was “currently undergoing the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults” and planned to convert faiths soon.
LaBeouf is best known for his work as an actor, starring in various Transformers films and countless arthouse projects. He has penned and directed a few short films and saw his self-written “autobiographical” drama Honey Boy receive significant acclaim in 2019.
