Actor Shia LaBeouf has taken to Twitter to apologize for not crediting his newly released short film to artist Daniel Clowes.
LaBeouf’s short, HowardCantour.com, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012 but was only posted to the Internet on Monday. It wasn’t long before people recognized the film’s numerous similarities — including entire chunks of dialogue — to Clowes’ 2007 comic Justin M. Damiano. Yet the artist’s name isn’t listed in the film’s credits.
“The first I ever heard of the film was this morning when someone sent me a link. I’ve never spoken to or met Mr. LaBeouf,” Clowes told BuzzFeed on Monday. “I’ve never even seen one of his films that I can recall — and I was shocked, to say the least, when I saw that he took the script and even many of the visuals from a very personal story I did six or seven years ago and passed it off as his own work. I actually can’t imagine what was going through his mind.”
LaBeouf didn’t respond to BuzzFeed’s requests for comment but he did tweet an apology, while also addressing how the similarities came to be. Apparently, he was very “inspired” by Clowes’ work.