BY BOB STRAUSS >FILM CRITIC

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A year and a half ago, Shia LaBeouf was just another young Disney Channel graduate who’d done a few indie films, family movies and small sidekick roles in bigger productions.

Then the Echo Park-raised, Burbank-based actor starred in the hit teen thriller “Disturbia,” headlined the monster effects blockbuster “Transformers” and played the hero’s long lost son in Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

LaBeouf also came of legal age while becoming Hollywood’s hottest young star. Subsequently, he’s gotten himself in some legal trouble.

Truly minor stuff that only made the news because he was famous at first. But in the early morning of July 27, another car ran a red light, hit LaBeouf’s truck, flipped it twice and left the 22-year-old actor with a smashed hand and cited for misdemeanor drunk driving.

No charges have been filed against LaBeouf, and his hand, which has two broken fingers, is healing in a protective guard. The injury was even written into the script of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” which LaBeouf is currently shooting. Understandably, though, people are concerned about him.

After all, the guy grew up in a tough neighborhood, had to support himself and his family for part of his childhood and his dad has wrestled with drug addiction. Plus, y’know, the usual rap about what happens to grown-up child actors.

But except for the hand, LaBeouf did not appear the least bit worse for wear when talking about his latest release, “Eagle Eye,” with the new film and “Disturbia” director D.J. Caruso by his side.

As sharp and passionate and polite as he was before megafame hit (at one point, he asked permission to smoke, but before I could grant it muttered something about not wanting to be one of “those” actors and put the cigarettes away), LaBeouf clearly feels safe around the filmmaker. Which was crucial during the making of “Eagle Eye,” too, seeing as it was the first time Shia’s played a grown man.

“I see it as my first adult role, absolutely,” the actor says. “And it was great to do that in the hands of what feels like friends and family. At this point, it’s become like a squadron of people who love each other. It’s just safe, all the way down the line; most of the crew I’ve worked with before, too. It was a big family, and the only shows I’ve ever worked on that felt that way are D.J.’s shows.”

“Eagle Eye” is a paranoid thriller in which some unseen entity can control machines as big as construction cranes and as small as your iPhone - and orders LaBeouf’s slacker Jerry Shaw to perform increasingly dangerous and illegal tasks. The action is crazy and the stakes couldn’t be higher, but unlike Transformers and Indy movies, it’s stuff that could conceivably happen.

Plus, breathlessly paced as “Eagle Eye” is, there’s time set aside to examine the emotional impact of it all on Jerry and his equally reluctant partner in crime Rachel Holloman, a single mom played by Michelle Monaghan.

“It’s a hybrid,” LaBeouf claims. “The beauty of this whole situation was, you were blowing buildings up and flipping cars through the air as hard and as fast as you would on ‘Transformers,’ but you were making a movie in which character was more important than the car flip. Usually in a blockbuster, that’s reversed, you take all day for the car flip and 10 minutes for the character scene.”

Which is something else LaBeouf likes about working on Caruso’s movies. Then there’s the almost psychic bond director and star say they have developed over the course of two pictures.

“I think we feed off each other,” Caruso, 43, explains. “We both go in knowing what we want to happen, but we don’t predetermine it. So we kind of police each other in a way. There’s an unspoken thing where we know what’s working and what isn’t.”

“It’s trust,” Labeouf puts it more succinctly.

Obviously, that’s something the young actor puts a great deal of stock in. But is he finding it on his current job?

LaBeouf says that famously demanding, sometimes shouty “Transformers” director Michael Bay is a mellower fellow now that they’re making the sequel. But that doesn’t mean the set of the movie with even bigger giant robots from outer space feels like a safe place to be.

“I think ‘bigger, stronger, faster’ than whatever the first one was is a huge sell,” LaBeouf says. “I mean, we’re about 67 days in, we’ve had four near-death experiences. And when I say near death, literally I’ve watched people near death, I’ve never seen anything this close, ever. It’s really been outrageous. I think the pyro budget’s, like, $40 million. We’ve really blown everything in the world up.”

And how does doing all that feel with a hand that’s been broken since early in the production?

“It’s all right, I can move on it,” LaBeouf doesn’t just report, but demonstrates by hitting the floor and doing a set of five push-ups.

“It hurts, it’s like having a headache in your hand,” he says, back in his chair. “But if it wasn’t safe, I wouldn’t be doing the movie. Nobody would force me; it would be permanent if it was bad. I’m very safe and comfortable and we’re getting through it.”

And, after all, LaBeouf is doing what Indiana Jones himself said he should right after the accident.

“Like, probably the third phone call I had was from Harrison saying, ‘You’d better wrap that thing up and get back to work, Kid.'” As for whether he’ll work with Ford in a fifth Indy film, or even take over the franchise should the now 66-year-old originator bow out, LaBeouf is circumspect.

“I don’t think you can inherit the franchise,” he says. “I think it just becomes something different, if it ever goes that way. But nobody’s ever talked to me about that. Nobody’s really talked to me about a sequel to ‘Crystal Skull,’ I’ve just heard rumors from the same people you’ve probably heard rumors from.”

Yeah, but Shia LaBeouf is the only young actor on Earth whose name is being mentioned for such things.

“Shia is in blockbuster after blockbuster and always has to deal with blockbuster expectations,” Caruso observes. “But we have George Clooney and Brad Pitt out there in ‘Burn After Reading,’ and that movie doesn’t have to be a blockbuster. It’d be nice if Shia could be in a movie like that.”

LaBeouf isn’t denying that there’s pressure, but he doesn’t think there’s too much to be worried about. As long as he can be around role models like Caruso and Spielberg (who’s DreamWorks company produced all of Shia’s recent hits as well as “Eagle Eye"), he figures he’ll follow the right path.

“Again, it’s the group, the people who are around me,” he says. “It’s more than just my director or my boss. I’m surrounded by a bunch of people who are my mentors and who I look up to, not just because of what they do in their careers, but because they have fulfilled existences. D.J. goes home to a life that I think is extremely respectable [five kids, one wife, if you want to know]. To kind of grow up with these people . . . I’m learning, y’know? I’m 22, I’m figuring it out.

“But yeah, there’s pressure. And there are a lot of things that I enjoy. There’s nothing that would make me want to trade this in. It’s a conscious choice, it’s something that I willed and I’m enjoying it.”

-Bob Strauss

RELATED LINKS

'Eagle Eye' movie review
Director D.J. Caruso feature