Born Villain (film) in West Hollywood, California, which LaBeouf described as a large movie theater where Manson spends much of his time viewing films. LaBeouf said that he and Manson watched several films together there, and discussed the "really eccentric ideas" they had for their video collaboration. LaBeouf financed the film himself. It was inspired by William Shakespeare's "Macbeth", Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's surrealist short film "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), Alejandro Jodorowsky's "The Holy Mountain" (1973), and what LaBeouf described as "heavy theology." Laney Chantal, the wife of Marilyn Manson member Twiggy Ramirez, served as the makeup artist for the short. Manson
The Big Swallow "makes imaginative use of an extreme close-up to create one of the seminal images of early British (and world) cinema, as effective in its way as the slashed eyeball of "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), and of just as much appeal to the Surrealist movement." The film, however, "might have been still more effective if Williamson had omitted the second and third shots," in which he, "cuts to the photographer apparently disappearing into a black void, and then back to the man who retires munching him up and expressing great satisfaction, "since they detract from the logical purity of the first,