52 WSJ. MAGAZINEFROM LEFT: COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS; COURTESY OF ZANNIER HOTELS NAMIBIAWHAT’S NEWSD
IRECTOR ALMA HAR’EL didn’t go to a tradi-
tional film school. “My filmmaking has been
kind of pulling from everywhere,” says the
41-year-old, whose latest project, Honey
Boy, comes out November 8. Her cinematic educa-
tion started during her childhood in Rehovot, Israel,
where Har’el and her two siblings lived with their
mother and grandmother, while her parents “tried to
make it work over the years.” When the couple was on
shaky ground, her father, who, she says, has struggled
with alcoholism, wouldn’t be allowed in the house.
“But once a week we’d go see a movie together,” says
Har’el. “It was the best thing ever. He was a tough
critic, but his taste was pretty broad.”
After high school,
Har’el moved to New York
City, London and then Tel
Aviv, where she embarked
on a career behind the
camera. “I didn’t have a
clear grasp of how exactly
I would get to direct, and
I didn’t have the money to
go to film school,” she says,
“but I knew I wanted to do
it.” She edited TV promos
for Keshet, directed live
video art for electronic
DJs and bands, and, in
her early 20s, was asked
to host an Israeli National
Geographic show. She
replied: “I’ll do it if I get to
direct it.”
In 2006, Har’el moved
to Los Angeles and, after
reaching out to musician
Zach Condon on MySpace,
started directing music
videos for bands like
Beirut. But it was difficult
to lock down financing
for her own film ideas. “I
was struggling in my 20s
with addiction and mental
health and a lot of things that happened as a result of
my childhood,” the director says. “I didn’t launch into
some film career and have my shit together. I was a
person who was really searching for something—and
I was trying to find a connection to life that was strong
enough to sustain me.”
In 2011, Har’el found her footing with Bombay
Beach, a documentary that chronicles individual sto-
ries in the dilapidated Southern California community
of Salton Sea. In her hands, protagonists’ lives took on
a lyricism, and the film won best documentary at the
2011 Tribeca Film Festival. Months later, actor Shia
LaBeouf saw the documentary and emailed the gen-
eral inquiries address on Har’el’s website to see if she
wanted to meet. “He’s the kind of person who goes out
of his way when he finds an artist he believes in,” says
Har’el. They met for dinner in Los Angeles and imme-
diately connected. “Something happened that has to
do with our childhoods,” says Har’el, “and we have acertain story to tell together.” LaBeouf, whose years as
a child actor were shaped by his relationship with his
father (who is portrayed in Honey Boy as having addic-
tion issues), agrees: “We share sensibilities and both
come from a similar pain index.”
The director and actor collaborated shortly there-
after, first with LaBeouf starring in Har’el’s video for
“Fjögur Píanó,” by Sigur Rós, and then with the actor
financing and executive producing her 2016 docu-
mentary, LoveTrue. In 2017, when LaBeouf went to
court-ordered rehab following an arrest in Savannah,
Georgia, for obstruction, disorderly conduct and
public drunkenness, he asked Har’el to read the semi-
autobiographical script he wrote as therapy. “He wrote
his father in a way that you
could feel he prepared for
his whole life,” says Har’el
of LaBeouf’s narrative,
which she helped develop
and rewrite. “I had to stop
everything and make it
right away.”
Honey Boy, the first
fictional film for Har’el
and the first feature-
length screenplay for
LaBeouf, is a touch-
ing take on the actor’s
troubled childhood, with
LaBeouf playing a char-
acter inspired by his own
father and Noah Jupe and
Lucas Hedges depicting
LaBeouf-like characters at
different stages in life. The
film, which debuted at the
Sundance Film Festival,
loosely traces a line from
events of LaBeouf’s child-
hood to his legal and
behavioral troubles as
an adult. “It was painful,
and it was stormy, you
know?” Har’el says. “It
was walking straight into
someone’s trauma and bringing it to life.”
As Har’el’s profile as a film director has risen, so too
has her work on big-budget commercials, including
global campaigns for Facebook, Procter & Gamble and
Airbnb. To break into the commercial industry, Har’el
says she had to disrupt what she viewed as male-
dominated networks in which female directors were
generally not considered for large commercial proj-
ects. In 2016, she founded Free the Bid, urging more
than 160 top advertising agencies and 120 brands to
pledge to include at least one female director in every
bidding process for a commercial. In 2020, Har’el will
officially launch Free the Work, an algorithm-driven
database for production companies and entertainment
executives to search for talent, geared specifically
toward women and other underrepresented groups.
“I always wanted to make sure that if I got the oppor-
tunity,” she says, “I’d bring as many people as I could
with me through the gates.” SCREEN TIME
“We have a certain story to tell together,” says
Har’el of working with LaBeouf on Honey Boy.DESERT HIGH
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