Even though Shia LaBeouf is a firm believer in method acting, even he was startled when he was requested to submit nude penis pictures as part of the audition process.

Zentropa Productions has published its newest promo interview, this time with LaBeouf, after a conversation with Charlotte Gainsbourg last week. And there are plenty of highlights in the 8-minute chat, particularly when it comes to the actor’s disclosure regarding one of the film’s earliest tasks.

Joining a film crew is like to joining a family, so it’s only natural that the individuals you’ll be working with want to get to know you. Sure, you’ll need to provide measurements to the wardrobe department, as well as letting the catering staff know what sort of doughnuts you want on the morning catering table. Few performers outside of the porn business, however, received the type of request Shia LaBeouf received when he signed up for “Nymphomaniac.”

“The first info we got – and I’ll never forget this because my entire team reacted with such fear – the first request from the production end, not Lars, was for pictures of my penis,” he joked in a video interview for the film’s Zentropa Productions.

“Previously in my career I’d been the everyman or the normal guy stuck in this extraordinary situation. Jerome was the opportunity to play a slimy, evil, blasphemous, mini-juggernaut of a man.”

Nymphomaniac has already sparked debate due to its policy of featuring actual sex in the film.

The request for dick photos was a foreshadowing of the film’s journey to come, and LaBeouf confesses that he didn’t have everything figured out going in. “[Lars] doesn’t write in English, it’s gotta be translated. And so there’s things that get lost in translation, jokes that didn’t make sense to me when I read them, where on the day, situationally, it all works,” he explained. “I don’t think I understood all of it. I had no idea about the numbers, numerology, the golden angles, and all this shit, I had no idea. But a lot of it struck me. Now having just watched the movie, all of it clicks, hard. At the time none of it made sense, but I trusted Lars implicitly because his worst shit is better than my best dreams of my best shit.”

In the upcoming risqué drama about a woman’s sexual voyage of self-discovery, LaBeouf stars with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stellan Skarsgard.

In a 2009 interview with Playboy, the actor said that he was “not extremely well-endowed” when asked about losing his virginity, but LaBeouf didn’t have to worry about falling short on set because the film’s violent sex scenes were created using computer technology.

Shia earlier stated on MTV that there was a disclaimer regarding the sex: ‘It is what you think it is. There’s a disclaimer at the top of the script that basically says, we’re doing [the sex] for real.

‘And anything that is ‘illegal’ will be shot in blurred images, but other than that, everything is happening.’

When it came to his part as Jerome, LaBeouf considered another performance to assist Lars fulfill his finest vision for “Nymphomaniac.” “The way into the character is, you ask yourself, what about you is pugnacious, what about you is vain, and you just turn it all up, you just amplify all of it,” he said. “So I became quite physical, it became like ‘American Psycho.’ It became that without the killing. A lot of tip to Christian Bale in that movie because a lot of Jerome in my mind was that same kind of neurosis and self-centeredness…”

He thinks he got the position because of his fearlessness.

He said: “Lars goes, ‘Send him the letter. The letter was, ‘Are you game?’ I guess the first test was, ‘Let’s time how long it takes this motherf****r to send his d**k over the Internet’.”

“It was like 20 minutes; they were like, ‘Alright, kid’s ready.’”

Shia, 27, even went a step further by handing over sex recordings of himself and his partner doing intimate acts.

“We shot the actors pretending to have sex and then had the body doubles, who really did have sex, and in post (production) we will digital-impose the two,” producer Louise Vesth told the Hollywood Reporter in May.

“So above the waist it will be the star and then below the waist it will be the doubles.”

Vesth went on to say that the film’s representations of sexuality are “right up against the censorship limits, maybe just over them.”