Q1: Honey Boy has been eagerly anticipated since it premiered at Sundance in January. This is your first narrative film—and star Shia LaBeouf’s first feature-length screenplay—following a portfolio of documentary work. The film addresses many of today’s most urgent social ills, from mental health to toxic masculinity. Why did you make this film?

HAR’EL: I’m not like one of those people who, at 12 years old, picked up a camera and wanted to be a director. I have wanted to since my 20s, when I started to do video art and watch more films. But there’s a certain quality of certain films where it seems as if people are imposing their ideas of who they want to be on their characters, and I very much want to avoid that. Starting with documentaries allowed me to focus on people first—to find out who I am and my voice—as opposed to imposing my ideas on them and fitting them into plot points and visual manifestations.

I think it’s cool that Honey Boy is my first narrative project because it felt like an evolution from everything I was doing. I first started working with Shia when he reached out after finding my documentary Bombay Beach. He then produced a documentary I directed called Love True, which had psycho-drama in it. People were talking to their younger selves and this idea of being a performer in your own life has been so intertwined with Shia’s story in a real way. It just feels organic.

Q2: How is your story intertwined with LaBeouf’s story?

HAR’EL: I made this film, in many ways, for adult children of alcoholics, like Shia and myself. With any parent like that, the child suffers from a certain kind of pain or generational trauma. They are caretakers at a very young age. They have to be steady to not escalate a bout of anger or depression. And it causes them to perform adultness, but they haven’t necessarily had the opportunity to develop. They end up growing up and at a certain age, realize they have become self-sufficient, insular and always wanting to satisfy other people. They seem very mature, but in certain areas of their lives, they’re still 10 years old.

Q3: LaBeouf has said that you supported him when headlines fixated on his mental health. He’s suggested that other filmmakers didn’t want to work with him. From your point of view, why did he become tabloid fodder instead of an opportunity for us, as a society, to discuss mental health?

HAR’EL: Because our society loves to identify with the narrative of growth. We live in a society that thrives on production—anything from economical structures to high societal expectations—and then when somebody is stepping off that narrative, they become a burden. Shia’s [alcohol] addiction was really just masking PTSD. People are not completely aware of what it means. They associate it with trauma only from war. But a lot of people live with PTSD from all sorts of traumatic events. And PTSD can cause you to react to certain, maybe harmless, moments as a fight-or-flight situation. It can create oppression, violence, heritability and verbal abuse. PTSD can cause you to constantly put someone in situations that are challenging and triggering to them. It’s such a mind fuck, the construct of this life since birth.

Q4: Do you sense more people are open to forgiving him now?

HAR’EL: There’s a narrative of therapeutic healing, and him being on a path of recovery and a comeback and all those things. It’s a narrative people identify with, accept and show compassion for. But the harder thing for society to do is show compassion for people who are not showing progress. You know? Like the many who suffer from mental health and are living on the streets.

What I always see, in the industry or whatever you want to call it, is an inability to forgive ourselves and others for being human. Right? The industry has a way of elevating some of these human stories when they can benefit from them, but spit out somebody once they become toxic in their relationships or to their audiences.

Q5: How frustrating has it been to be asked why, as a female director, you chose to tell a man’s coming-of-age story?

HAR’EL: I understand why people ask. We need more stories about women and more women as characters. Even when women are in films, they are not represented well. I thought hard and long about my film and the women in it. It’s a film about the lack of the feminine in many ways. When women do come, they are strong and they portray healing qualities. For instance, FKA Twigs’ character is like a motherly figure. She’s the therapist—the one who provides him with the tools to finally have that face-to-face with his trauma and forgiveness.

On the decision to do a male coming-of-age story? It’s complicated because I’m an artist first. I already think I’m taking a political stand by calling myself a woman director. I identify myself now as a woman director in order to hopefully get more work for women, but I can’t tie my whole artist carriage to that before I honestly deal with some of the things that have been my issues, like my relationship with my father. My relationship with my father and my relationship with his alcoholism has been extremely defining and the reason I even make art.

Q6: What’s the power in telling a man’s coming-of-age story, like Honey Boy, through the female lens?

HAR’EL: Men have only been seeing themselves through the eyes of other men—and usually white men, and usually alpha white men—which has created this expectation of masculinity. We keep performing this expectation of masculinity, which we’ve been taught, because gender is performance. Once we bring in more storytellers, no matter what stories they tell, they’re going to change the fabric of consciousness in our society. It’s like you’re adding in thousands of mirrors for reflection as opposed to only looking at yourself in one mirror. Taking on a man’s perspective forced me to ask myself, “Who am I outside of my father’s pain? What is my ownership of my conscious feminine?”

Q7: Depending on who you’re talking to, the idea that gender is performative is either novel, radical or an inarguable fact. Explain how you translated this notion in the film.

HAR’EL: We are born with tendencies that may not necessarily align with our genitals. We can be forced to align our gender performance with our gender by a parent or society at large, to the point that you feel inadequate if you don’t answer to those expectations. There’s this line in the film: “Wipe your tears, Otis. Don’t cry in front of me.” Those tears are at the hands of his own abuse. That anger is out of his own inability to stand up and discuss the situation with this woman whom he’s attacking. He is taking that anger, confronting a woman for the job she chooses, and passing that anger to his child, as if it’s the woman’s foul. That’s the kind of masculinity that is toxic. That child is then taught to get angry and to pass his anger to someone else.

Q8: There’s also the risk that if you focus too much on gender, the result will feel less than genuine.

HAR’EL: Have you heard of the Bechdel-Wallace test? It measures representation of women in fiction. The work has to have at least two women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man. Well, it’s necessary sometimes to have measurements. Geena Davis has been doing all sorts of work with face recognition and Google Analytics and breaking down art to see how well women are represented. I think it’s important to have data in order to understand what we are creating from our subconscious. That’s one thing that is good to do, but also as an artist, you have to work with your subconscious and your own education, gender education, political education, all that it is without detaching it from the truth of your emotional state, who you are, where you are.

It’s a give-and-take. You have to diversify your crew. You want to hire more women. I don’t want to work on a script that has no diversity, but at the same time, if you grow up as a child of an alcoholic and you’re attracted in your life to people who have similar problems and you find a deep connection with them, pretending that all of that didn’t happen in order to pass that test, that does not make you a better artist or a better human being.

Q9: And of course this film would be completely different if it was directed by a man.

HAR’EL: What if this film was directed by David Ayer? Would it be the same movie? No. David Ayer has great collaborations with Shia and they just made a film called the Tax Collector, which is a knockout that I can’t wait to see. But…do we really need only to have that perspective for every story? No.

It’s not that I don’t connect with that perspective and see it as completely useless. I’m always like, get in there and prove to them that you can do it better than anybody, and then they’ll never look at you again as just your race or gender. But is it starting to get better? That’s why data is needed, and why tests like Bechdel-Wallace are needed. It offers proof to prove that this problem is systemic. I still have to get up every day and look at what I do, who I work with, who am I hiring, and what I’m writing. It requires daily work. If you’re not making yourself aware of the problem, how are you ever going to find out how to fix it?

Q10: How did you avoid turning one of the only female characters in the film, played by FKA Twigs, into a pixie dream girl?

HAR’EL: By giving her agency. I let her work on the part and bring into it her own opinions. I work with a woman, a scholar who does do work with actors and directors, who worked with Twigs—on Twigs’ relationship to this character and what she thought it meant to her. When she saw Shia’s initial script, she noticed that a lot of motherly themes weren’t necessarily there yet. Some of them were, but she very much leaned into that and I went with her instincts. So it’s kind of like giving the actors you work with the opportunity to bring their own story to something that I really care about and am very passionate about.

Q11: The film also managed to, even though it is centered on a privileged white man, point out that privilege. There is a moment when Otis [the fictional version of Labeouf, played by Lucas Hedges] and his roommate [Percy, played by Byron Bowers] have a frank discussion about their luxurious in-patient recovery facility. How did that scene about socioeconomic class come to fruition?

HAR’EL: In the original script, Byron’s character was more religious; he was written to speak to Lucas about his privilege, but more from the perspective of learning to be thankful for God, for a higher power. But when I brought Byron in, he was much more connected to his own real-life story about the connection between drugs and privilege, like that his cousins were children of addicts. His cousin’s mother was addicted to crack. Byron’s father was addicted to crack. At the time that we were prepping to film this, Byron’s cousin was in prison, which inspired him to rewrite all of the dialogue. He wanted to call Lucas’s character out because it is a privilege to be in a rehab facility. Choosing to include another perspective—in this instance, a Black person’s perspective—is more inclusive than being a white person and writing a story about black people and casting them in your own fantasy of who they are and what they go through.

Q12: There are two character representations of Otis: Hedges plays him at age 22 and Noah Jupe plays him at age 12. Do you think that because our society’s perception of gender is slowly changing, the future of masculinity will change?

HAR’EL: I think that Lucas and Noah are great examples of the next generation of men, that maybe kids today will grow up with a lot less of that masculine-rich expectation.

I love growing old, because I’ve really been waiting for this generation. I’ve been waiting for them and I often connect with them better than my peers because they grew up with a totally different perception of gender influence. They’re so much more free, and they have a totally different connection to the tools that they can have in order to get to places that we only thought we could get through pain and hard work. They know that they can get there with magic.

Q13: An article I read mentioned there was a lot of crying on set.

HAR’EL: It wasn’t mushy all the time. There were days where it was extremely brutal and intense, but when I mentioned that there was crying to that reporter, they wrote it like we were crying all the time. That’s the thing about identifying as a woman director.

I was hugging a lot. A lot of hugs on set. It’s just this idea of allowing vulnerability in certain moments when it arises. When you’re shooting something so intimate and raw, you see somebody stepping into their own trauma and bring to life a moment that was so painful for them. That’s what triggers you sometimes, when people see that others went through a similar plight. So we had those emotional moments, and then we had other moments where I felt like a general in an army and like a boss. I think that there’s a way to have both, right? To not feel like you are losing your power the minute you show your vulnerability.

Q14: You were hesitant about being interviewed by PLAYBOY. Why?

HAR’EL: I want to be an artist first, but I have to keep in mind that I have a message and a responsibility to put out certain information, especially with this kind of work. So I was so weary of doing this interview given PLAYBOY’s past. But seeing women like Tarana Burke do it convinced me, as well as seeing the attempt to create a more subversive representation of what sexuality means and what women stand for and represent. I have seen a lot of women whom I appreciate working with PLAYBOY and I want to support what they’re doing. On one hand, I really feel women should do whatever they wish with their bodies—but I don’t see PLAYBOY as somewhere that necessarily allowed for that in the past.

I work with brands that have done a lot of stuff in the world that isn’t good before shifting their perceptions. Now, their platforms have the power to change their impacts. You can always ask, ‘Okay, but what’s the integrity behind that? Are they only doing that to sell?” Even though those questions are legitimate, what’s more interesting to me are the individuals who are stepping in to create change. I believe in people more than I believe in anything else.

Q15: That’s partly what motivated you to start two non-profit initiatives, Free The Bid and Free the Work, which aim to increase diversity and inclusion in the old and troubled entertainment industry, right?

HAR’EL: When I launched Free the Bid in 2016, I did it on a laptop. It was just a PDF with this website that had very little—70 people, 70 women directors—on it for ad agencies to use as a tool to promote inclusivity when it comes to their commercial filmmaking. But I wanted to legitimize it. I went to production companies that were doing commercials and picked out who they signed with. I also reached out to all sorts of connections to find out if there’s more women I can put on it and looked into a lot of roles that weren’t represented. I listed their work, maybe presented with YouTube links and biographies. It was very basic compared to what we have now, which is crazy—powered by algorithms and intelligent discovery and all that, in 20 countries with over 2,000 filmmakers.

Q16: Where is the work today?

HAR’EL: I mean, we’re in the process now of digesting the incredible amount of people that have been using it and signing onto it and trying to go for the right customer service. It’s a learning curve, but people have been claiming their profiles all over the world that we’ve created for them. I want to make sure that people stop looking at discovering diverse talent as a mission or task, or whatever you want to call it, and start looking at it as the most exciting thing that they can do for their own creative life.

I feel like people in this town have been looking to hire women and people of color as a risk that they so kindly take when the project calls for it, because otherwise they would be targeted as insensitive to the material. They’re like, ‘ We have a woman’s story, we should get a woman. We have a football star, so we should get a person of color otherwise people could say something. We have a trans actor, we shouldn’t hire a straight person or we could get in trouble.” What about the 90 percent of projects that could benefit from the creative people that we have been ignoring for a decade?

Q17: Free the Work is represented locally by ambassadors around the world who are tuned into the specific needs of a given region. What region is particularly challenging?

HAR’EL: We’re in the process of doing an Israeli-Palestinian database. How do you even get Palestinian filmmakers? Some of them don’t recognize Israel’s right to exist or to work with us. I want to work for a solution and to recognize everything that Palestine is fighting for, so instead of just doing a database, we’re starting a months-long process of workshops, meetings and screenings of work. We’re trying to find new ways to discuss and understand ways we can work together while honoring local politics, dynamics, hiring practices, racism and all of those things before we even begin to start a database.

Q18: How do we sift through clickbait activism? How do you make sure they’re supporting the legitimate causes as opposed to what is now considered on trend?

HAR’EL: There’s room for everybody. I guess the question is, Are you active in a way that’s constructive? Are you active in a way that is really about working for change? Or are you virtue-signaling? Are you just trying to decorate your timeline with things that signal to other people that you’re on the right side of history? Will you change your mind or drop your work on an issue once it’s not popular anymore, once it’s not getting the right attention?

Q19: What is the change you’re seeing following #MeToo in the industry?

HAR’EL: I see this year a lot of women stepping into their power in a big way. I think that women have been in their power, but they didn’t always get the support. I can see a few places in the industry where its better, but it’s not that you look around and everything’s different, you know?

All these movies that are getting made this year, and are out, and are by women and they’re getting recognition by critics or at the box office. The fact that there are more people of color that are getting represented and that the industry is seeing now, there’s seeing how much thirst there is for these stories. So that’s happening. The thing is that the gatekeepers and the people that are still interested in preserving bars of structure, are often still using those lines. Although people are killing it right now, we can’t find any black directors. There’s like two. Because that’s all they know. They know two or three and they’re like, who else is there?

Q20: Which is why we need Free the Work.

HAR’EL: Free the Work is the reason I’m so passionate about it. It is a tool that everybody can use. It’s not just for people that are from this initiative or that initiative. It’s about stopping the thinking that only the white man is at the center; that everybody else has to fight for the crumbs around him while we focus on his narrative.

Maybe we can start seeing the world through a kaleidoscope rather than a telescope. Our view of society could be fractured and fragmented and colorful, and part of one psychedelic reality that is actually hiding so many truths we still need to discover, as opposed to looking through your little telescope that only sees a white man that we keep focusing on.

I’ve definitely worked with a lot of men on set that were just really…just had the ability to be there for each other and see everybody as equal and be vulnerable.