Tribeca 2015: Shia LaBeouf overshadows TrueLove promo by railing against Hollywood, Transformers and Al Pacino in candid rant

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True to form Shia LaBeouf, one of the most off-the-wall characters in Hollywood, reportedly “stole the show” at the Tribeca Film Festival with candid remarks criticising the film industry.

Despite announcing last year that he was retiring from public life, the actor attended a Q&A at the Lower Manhattan festival to promote the film TrueLove which he executively produced and financed.

But instead of just talking about the film LaBeouf spoke openly about himself; in particular his battle with drink and drugs and a destructive relationship.

“[LaBeouf’s] candid comments today at the half-filled screening stole the show as he railed against Hollywood, Transformers, and Al Pacino’s acting, while knocking his former Transformers co-star Bumblebee,” writes Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro.

Talking about Pacino LaBeouf is reported to havesaid: “Al Pacino’s acting [in Scarface] – nothing against him but there’s a big difference between something that’s presentational and something that’s representational. I think even Pacino would agree that his work is representational, whereas someone like Joaquin Phoenix is presentational.”

He continued, criticising the Transformers franchise: “Bumblebee never sounds real, it’s just a f***ing name. The name alone you can never make real, no matter how much you put into it, because on the other side, you have a director who doesn’t believe it either. So when you work with certain directors who give over and do something that’s presentational and you both believe it, then there is no f***ing around, and you really are in this alternate universe.”

LaBeouf got involved in TrueLove, which helmed by Tribeca prize-winning documentary Bombay Beach director Alma Har’el, after writing her “a fan letter” having been moved by her earlier work, and because he “was in a really sh***y relationship at the time and it was an escape”, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

LoveTrue is a documentary featuring re-enactments of real events in peoples' lives and follows couples in Hawaii, New York and Alaska. Forty minutes of footage from the film will be shown at Tribeca as a work-in-progress screening.

Talking about financing the film LaBeouf remarked on Har’el’s recent divorce: “The best art comes out of pain. When a genius has pain, the Warren Buffet in me is like ‘Go’”

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LaBeouf’s remarks come a day after he told Variety that celebrities are “enslaved”. In an email he wrote: ““The requirements to being a star/celebrity are namely, you must become an enslaved body. Just flesh — a commodity, and renounce all autonomous qualities in order to identify with the general law of obedience to the course of things. The star is a byproduct of the machine age, a relic of modernist ideals.”