Shia LaBeouf stormed out of a Berlin Film Festival press conference, then took to the red carpet with a brown paper bag on his head.
The 27-year-old actor, wearing a dirty baseball cap and chomping on chewing gum, marched out of the press conference about his new film Nymphomaniac Volume I after fielding his first question.
The question, about doing a movie with so much sex, prompted the actor to quote French footballer Eric Cantona’s infamous insult of a pesky press corps, as he marched out.
“When seagulls follow the trawler it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea,’’ he said.
He later took to the red carpet wearing a brown paper bag over his head featuring the words “I am not famous anymore.”
It is the latest display of increasingly odd behavior from the star, whose film credits include Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Last year, LaBoeuf was accused of plagiarizing parts of his short film HowardCantour.com from David Clowes’ 2007 comic Justin M. Damiano.
The actor made an attempt at apologizing, first on Twitter and then via skywriting, before getting embroiled in a social media war of words with Girls creator Lena Dunham.
In January he announced he was stepping out of the public eye.
“In light of the recent attacks against my artistic integrity, I am retiring from all public life,” the 27-year-old actor tweeted. “My love goes out to those who have supported me. #stopcreating.”
About a week later he was accused of headbutting a man in a London bar fight.
His new movie Nymphomaniac, which screened out of competition in Berlin, was directed by scandal-courting Danish director Lars von Trier and stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Christian Slater, Uma Thurman and newcomer Stacy Martin.
The film tells the story of Joe, played by Gainsbourg, and her sexual awakening from birth to age 50.
The picture opens with Joe lying beaten in an alleyway when the kindly intellectual Seligman (Skarsgard) comes upon her and takes her home with him.
She begins confiding her life story, including how she lost her virginity in a degrading encounter with a man who will repeatedly surface in her life (LaBeouf).
Grasping her “power as a woman’’ over men who want sex from her, Joe enters into a competition with a friend as to who can seduce the most strangers on a train within an hour, with extra points for conquering a devoted married man.
Even as her friend later embarks on a relationship and abandons their escapades, Joe’s sexual appetites become more insatiable and compulsive.
“Love is just lust with jealousy,’’ Joe says dismissively.
For a film with major Hollywood actors, the erotic encounters leave little to the imagination, complete with full-frontal nudity and explicit sex acts filmed using porn actors as doubles and prostheses.
Stacy Martin, a model in her first film role, said that she developed a relationship with von Trier and her on-screen lovers which allowed her to abandon her inhibitions.
“I’ve always really loved his films so for me the sex scenes really were part of the film and I trusted Lars … so immediately it makes the job much easier,’’ she told reporters.
“I wasn’t nervous. I didn’t really have anything to lose, being my first film.’’
Thurman, who turns in a fierce, hilarious performance as a wronged wife and mother of three, said von Trier’s more theatrical approach to filmmaking with extremely long takes was “unbelievably refreshing and lively and exciting.’’
“Lars wrote this basically fantastic monologue — this fury of a woman scorned,’’ she said.
“It was a really great challenge to memorize seven pages of Lars’ female diatribe of rage.’’
The two and a half-hour opus premiered to cheers at the film festival on Sunday.
Von Trier, 57, who took a “vow of silence’’ with the media after being booted out of Cannes for a maladroit Nazi joke to reporters in 2011, showed up at a photo call wearing a “persona non grata’’ T-shirt with Cannes’ golden palm leaf logo.
He refused to join the subsequent news conference.
This article originally appeared on News.com.au.