Courtesy of Josh Penn Soskin In November 2025, writer-director Josh Penn Soskin began production on his debut feature, “The Rooster Prince,” based on his relationship with his late brother, David, a renowned psychiatrist who suffered from bipolar disorder. He cast Shia LaBeouf to play Eli, the character based on his brother, along with Jackson White and Melissa Leo. These are his reflections on the production.
Shia LaBeouf was exploding on set.
He was screaming across a parking lot, where his character, based on my brother (a renowned Harvard psychiatrist who had a manic-bipolar episode in his 40s) was now breaking down. He’d given a performance so brilliant, and often so meta, that I didn’t cut right away — because we’d lost a clear sense of what was movie and non-movie.
As I watched him unravel, tears and sweat in his eyes, I realized something. He was in deep pain. In fact, he was in even more pain than all the pain he was causing. This was the kind of pain I had seen in my late brother David’s eyes. Pain I couldn’t fully understand, or even soothe. Pain that eventually took him from me. And now, just three takes in, the scene and the day were over. Those in the blast radius were rightfully scared and hurt. Shia had vanished. The producers were palpably nervous. I was about six inches from a panic attack. I looked out at the big dusky Oklahoma sky, and I prayed to my brother for help. In about 12 hours, I would need to give a crew speech and summon the right words to save our now fragile film from derailing and yet, if I was being honest I had absolutely no idea what to say.
Shia LaBeouf and Jackson White Courtesy of Josh Penn Soskin Let me back up for a moment, for context.
My brother was my best friend. He was my idol. He taught me to love literature and cinema alongside surfing and punk music. He regularly mixed words like “epistemology” with “gnarly.” He existed on tofu and broccoli. He read tomes of Greek mythology on the StairMaster, his long blond hair bouncing with sweat and obsession. I took notes. I was the understudy. In high school, we made plans to be the next Coen brothers.
But by college he’d drifted from me. He stopped studying Billy Wilder and started studying the brain. Later, I realized this wasn’t an affront to our relationship. He was trying to fix himself. By attaining god-like knowledge of his own mind.
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