Honey Boy
Short description
Honey Boy follows Otis Lort, a young television actor whose career begins at twelve under the guardianship of his father, a former rodeo clown with alcohol problems. Between shooting days, the two live in cheap motels on the edges of whatever town the production has brought them to, and Otis endures his father's controlling and sometimes violent behaviour while the two try to make sense of a bond that stretches across more than a decade. Years later, after a car crash and a stay in rehabilitation, the adult Otis looks back on that relationship while working through the causes of his own drinking and self-destructive tendencies.
Shia LaBeouf wrote the screenplay, drawing loosely on his own life, and plays the father, James. Lucas Hedges appears as Otis at twenty-two and Noah Jupe as Otis at twelve; Byron Bowers, Laura San Giacomo and FKA Twigs are also in the cast. Alma Har'el directed and produced alongside Daniela Taplin Lundberg and Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, making her narrative feature debut after a career in documentary. The film runs 94 minutes.
Released in November 2019, Honey Boy was made for about 4 million dollars and returned roughly 3 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.2 from some 43,000 votes, and on TMDB 7 from about 752 votes, while a critics' rating of 7.7 from 235 reviews places it somewhat above the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Shia LaBeouf was arrested in July 2017 for public intoxication. This occurred in the city of Savannah, Georgia. He was sentenced to 10 weeks in a rehabilitation clinic, but it was later revealed that he was also suffering from post-traumatic stress. It was then that he began working on the screenplay for this film. Filming began two weeks after the actor left rehab.
- At the very beginning of the first trailer for the film, a character played by Lucas Hedges screams “No!” several times, and is then thrown into the air. This can be seen as a reference to Shia LaBeouf himself, the author of a semi-autobiographical screenplay who repeatedly shouted “No!” in a variety of films, and especially in the films of the “Transformers” franchise.
- Shia LaBeouf convinced his father to sign a rights agreement by telling him that Mel Gibson would play his role in the film. In reality, Gibson had already declined the offer to appear at that point, although he generally felt favorably towards both LaBeouf and the project.
- Shia LaBeouf hadn't spoken to his own father for 17 years before filming this movie.
- Shia LaBeouf admitted that his relationship with his father wasn't as bad as portrayed in the film. Furthermore, to get permission to film, he misled his father and sent him a script missing certain scenes.
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