Michael Bay barely made it back to L.A. to talk about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Having finished the movie just days before his release, he was on an international tour ending in Moscow. But he made it and told it like it is when it comes to the nitty gritty details of making a bigger, louder sequel.
Crave Online: What were your goals with this sequel?
Michael Bay: We try to push the limits with each film. I mean, I think we really pushed the limits from the first one to this one in terms of just the advances, that people wouldn’t notice that it was all about lighting, reflection and just complicated algorithms. Like the pyramids come apart which was maybe a 100,000 rocks, individually moved, to one guy, six months later, writing code. It kind of stretches the limits of memory for shots like that. When we first started to do the IMAX, it was four full four K rendered characters, which has never been do before. And there are three scenes in this movie that are full IMAX, shot in IMAX, so that’s pretty much something new.
Crave Online: What were some of the moments that made you go wow?
Michael Bay: I remember one crystal clear moment was looking at John Turturro, and we were on top of Petra and I said, “What’s going on, John?” He goes, “You just never get to do this.” We’re looking at this 4,000-year-old monument, and he goes, “You never get to do this.” And we were just on the pyramids two days before, we were shooting in the desert the day before, where they shot Lawrence Of Arabia, and we setting up this 80 foot crane shot, and it was an English crane. It’s like where are they going to do their cover for their catalog, because it had just never been done? So we were the first one in the world to shoot up there with an 80 foot crane, so that was quite a moment.
Crave Online: Does the Imax version have more than the regular prints? Does it run longer?
Michael Bay: It has, I think, probably about a minute more of footage. It's got some more fighting footage that took place in the forest, some additional stuff with Devastator. I have not seen it in Imax. I'm excited to see that. It wasn't ready until this weekend.
Crave Online: Will you start thinking about Transformers 3?
Michael Bay: I told everyone that I’m definitely going to do another movie before I do this movie because it’s just thinking of robots for three and a half years, it’s enough right now. People have been asking me that since I have doing these interviews, and literally, since I just finished it, I don’t even want to think about it. It makes me nauseous to even think of the third one. It’s just too close. I definitely want to do another movie before I come back to this. But if I were to consider something, for Transformers 3, it’s got to be not higher. It’s got to be sideways in a different kind of way.
Crave Online: You keep saying you’ll do a smaller Pulp Fiction-esque movie.
Michael Bay: Well, I keep trying to do it, but Transformers came about and then another Transformers so now it’s time to do something different. I’m excited to have this one done. Literally finished it last week. Last week, that’s when I finished this. So I came back from Japan and Korea, came back to the states, they all went on and I finished the last bit of the movie.
Crave Online: What was your inspiration for the new twin Autobots?
Michael Bay: Well, I wanted two kind of younger Transformers, but with those two guys we used the guy who played Spongebob and another actor. What's interesting when you work with voice actors is, especially with the twins, they did a lot of improv for their parts. We liked their improv and from there, we would animate for their stuff. When you do character animation when you're building a character, it's not like an actor where you shoot the scene and you got it and you move on. With character animation you shoot a bit of the dialogue, you work with the animators and then a little bit more of the dialogue and you keep going back and forth and it kind of builds until you finally have the shot that you want. But I just wanted something that would appeal to younger kids and it seemed to really gravitate to those two characters. It's like the little engine that could with the Devastator scene.
Crave Online: Was it your idea to have a Hispanic sidekick in the movie?
Michael Bay: Yeah, yeah. I picked Ramon out of a number of, hundreds of potential cast members because he’s charming. I think it’s great. I think it broadens [the scope].
