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Alex Kurtzman: I don't know, I think people love cows. I think they're just sort of fascinated by cows. Cows are a mystery.

Crave Online: We do slow down when we drive by farms.

Alex Kurtzman: We do. Yes, we do. We wonder what it would be like to graze.

Crave Online: Are any movies being pushed away to focus on this?

Alex Kurtzman: No, because there's two of us, we found a really good balance. It's one of the major benefits of having a partner. We find a way to do it all.

Crave Online: How weird is it to be at Comic Con and not talk about Star Trek and Transformers?

Alex Kurtzman: It's weird actually. It's very strange because all we want to do is talk about Star Trek but we can't. And Transformers, we're literally in the middle of shooting it. We finished writing it maybe a month and a half before. Literally we finished it and they started shooting it. I think maybe next year at Comic Con we'll have more to say about Transformers because it's going to be coming out right before Comic Con next year.

Crave Online: Michael Bay said he wrote some of Transformers 2 during the strike. When you got back were you surprised where the script had gone?

Roberto Orci: No, he just took our treatment and transferred it to screenplay format. He picked a few characters from Hasbro and wrote what kind of things he needed in production but he didn't write a script.

Crave Online: Were you involved in choosing new characters?

Roberto Orci: We were involved up until the strike and then shortly thereafter. Of course, it's a continuation of the first movie. It's the characters that we selected from the first movie in addition to some of the ones we wanted to see that we couldn't put in the first movie and some of them were even in our original drafts.

Crave Online: Was it fun to just pick through the catalog?

Alex Kurtzman: Actually, that's weirdly deceptive because it's really hard. It's hard. The more robots you have, the harder it becomes.

Crave Online: Some died, so they were eliminated.

Alex Kurtzman: Some of them died but there are literally hundreds of transformers in both the mythology and the toys. Really what it's about is figuring out who are the ones that are going to matter to the story? Who are the ones that are relevant to the story? The easiest thing in the world is to throw in all these robots but you don't want to do that if you can't make some kind of personal connection to them.

Crave Online: Is one of them a girl?

Roberto Orci: It's possible.

 
Crave Online: Are the hackers gone?

Roberto Orci: They will not be returning. We love them. If they would have fit, [we'd have them back]. Our lead for the movie is Sam and Mikaela. They are now going off, this is two years later. We didn't want to just bring characters back just to bring them back. They had to be organic to the story and they weren't.

Alex Kurtzman: Sam's going off the college and I can't say too much about Mikaela but obviously, the end of the first movie set up that they finally got together so now the question is are they going to be able to stay together.

Crave Online: What was the decision to start two years later?

Alex Kurtzman: I think we just felt ultimately like any other way into the story felt like a cheat, that you needed to pick up where they left off and see what was happening with their lives now.

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