CraveOnline: Before we get to Transformers, what was your reaction to Hot Fuzz which was so inspired by Bad Boys 2?
Michael Bay: I haven't seen it yet, because I was finishing this movie. It's really hard, the end of your post schedule is such a grind, seeing a movie is like the last thing you want to do when you go home. I thought this would be an easy post. On our budget we had a hiatus scheduled in here, because I said, "Oh, my God, I have the longest post schedule," I didn't think the robots would be that hard, but I was directing them all the way to the very end.
CraveOnline: It also came out that you were offered Die Hard 4 but were already signed for this. Do you think you might have done Die Hard if this hadn't been available?
Michael Bay: Die Hard 4, no, I don't think so.
CraveOnline: There are a lot of homages to the Transformers fans in this, but you weren't an original fan, were you?
Michael Bay: I was not a Transformers fan before I signed on to this movie. I think I was two years older when the toys came out, so I just discovered girls then instead of Optimus Prime. But I quickly became after I went to Hasbro, where you heard about that Transformers school? I really thought, "What the f*** am I going to Hasbro for Transformers school?" I thought I was going to learn how to fold up robots, but I met with the CEO and I went through the whole Transformer lore. I've been offered a lot of superhero movies before and nothing's really appealed to me and in the room, because I've been such a fan of Japanese anime it just hit me that if I make this really real it could be something very new and different. So I quickly became probably one of the bigger Transformer fans in the world, and I tried to make this movie for non Transformer fans. I wanted it to be a little bit more, if you could say, adult, so I'm sure I'm going to get flack. "You made an edgy movie on a toy, how is that going to affect kids?" I know there are Transformer fans that are 40 years old.
CraveOnline: Having no nostalgia for the toys, does that make it easier to make the film than if you were a fan?
Michael Bay: Listen, I'm a huge Transformer fan now, I can officially say I've probably thought more about robots on earth than anyone in the past year and a half. Yeah, I actually think that because I wasn't a fan I think makes it more accessible to other people. Does that make sense? Megatron was a gun, and I'm like, "I don't get that," and I did get a lot of flack from fans on the net, like, "Michael Bay, you wrecked my childhood. Michael Bay, you suck. We're going to protest his office." They protested my old office apparently. That's true. The death threats freak me out, but I would listen to fans on the net, I really would. I would kind of hear their comments, but I'm still going to make my movie and I'll still put flames on Optimus.
CraveOnline: Why do you have to yell so much on the set?
Michael Bay: Listen, press is very weird, because a sound byte gets out there, "Michael Bay yells." I visited Jim Cameron on Titanic. I'm very similar the way he directs. He's an assistant director, I'm an assistant director of my own sets. I move my own sets, I shoot very fast, I never leave the set, and I love working with actors. I love giving actors freedom, I love improv'ing with actors. It freaks studios out because they're like, "That wasn't in the script, what's this, he's wrecking the movie." And I'm like, "Trust me, it's going to be funny," because there's a whole issue of tone in this movie. But when I'm doing action scenes I'm going to be your worst nightmare basketball coach. That's to get
the energy, the adrenalin going.
CraveOnline: Speaking of improvising, did you throw in that Armageddon joke?
Michael Bay: Well, that's just me, I'm like, okay, this kid is so funny running I'm like, "Dude, you've got say this." He's just funny. I'll often add jokes along the way. A perfect example, because I will always hire actors that have a good improv skill, like Nic Cage in The Rock, there was really nothing funny in The Rock script, and that was all through improv, just trying to work with the guys and try to make it funny. A good example in this is the scene was when the parents knocked on the door of the bedroom when he's hiding the robots. In the script it said, "Maybe he's mas—" and that was the joke, and that's pretty lame. So we actually brought him in the room and we just started this whole masturbation talk, and that's because the mom's such an amazing New York actress. Julie White.
CraveOnline: Was it your idea to give the Transformers lips?
Michael Bay: Well, because, you know we did a lot of facial studies, and emotion is so hard without that kind of movement. We tried it solid, it just didn't look right.
CraveOnline: They'll probably want Transformers 2 right away. Are you going to be doing Prince of Persia?
Michael Bay: I don't know, I leave my negotiation open, because the President of Paramount is right behind you. He could probably kill me. I don't know what I'm doing right now. There's no script right now. I really don't know what I'm doing. I'm unemployed right now. I finished the movie like a week ago.
CraveOnline: With all the loyalty to Transformers, how did you keep this a Michael Bay movie?
Michael Bay: When Steven [Spielberg] called me a year and a half ago, he said, "I want you do direct Transformers, it's a story about a boy who buys his first car." To me that was a great hook. I hung up and said, "Thank you, I'm not doing that stupid, silly toy movie," but I thought about it, the hook was great because that's such a launching ground from a young adult into manhood or womanhood. I liked the simplicity of it. It just made it somewhat more accessible. If you notice, I shot this movie kind of generic, I've never in my life shot at a Burger King, or a guy riding on a pink bicycle, or a house that's kind of very suburbia. But it just makes it more acceptable and accessible to the ultra slick uber action around it. The charm of the movie is to me in thinking about it was, I kept having this image of this kid trying to hide robots from his parents by his house, and that just stuck in my head as we were writing the script, so to me that was the whole charm of it.
CraveOnline: Do you ever want to do an intimate low budget character study?
Michael Bay: I've got this one I keep trying to do it, called Pain and Gain. It's a really funny character story, I keep talking about it, we're going to be here next year and we'll talk about it again. I just keep getting cash to do these big movies. Sometimes it's a fear of like are big movies going to go away? Hollywood is kind of tough right now, so I don't know.
CraveOnline: What's it about?
Michael Bay: It's very pulp fictiony, true story, it's about these knuckleheads that kidnap and murder, searching for the American dream in all the wrong ways. It's very funny. All true.
CraveOnline: Since you're inspired by James Cameron, could you see yourself moving into digital 3D filmmaking?
Michael Bay: Honestly, I think I'd want to shoot myself working on a blue screen stage. I did maybe one, two days of blue screen on this movie, I just hate it. It's just I like doing things real and it's really hard to go there.
CraveOnline: You came to the press screening to see the first reaction. Is it stressful watching it on the screen in front of people for the first time?
Michael Bay: Yes, it is so nerve wracking. Do you want me to describe the testing process? Real quick. I do little focus groups on my own. I'll take like 30 kids into a screening room. I'll do like 9-year-olds to 15-year-olds, and I did like 16 year-olds to 25 year-olds and I have someone who has nothing to do with the movie come in and say, "You can say whatever you want about this movie." I show it in rough form and they were great, because they will fill out little pages about what is confusing them, what lines they thought sucked. They are very blunt about it. And there was something where they hated Megan. She said one line and the women just turned off. And I'm like, "We've got to deal with that." And then I get to the big test in Phoenix where we did 450 people. It was all families and I'm like "The kids are cute because they are applauding at different things Oh, they all laughed at the masturbation thing and they are 9years old." So then I went to the adult screening next store, introduced that. So the movie starts they were like laughing and applauding at certain things. And I'm thinking, "This sucks. This movie sucks. It's a kiddie movie, alright?" And I said to the guy sitting next to me, "Do you like this type of movie?" And he goes, "Eh." I'm like, "Ugh. It's a kid movie. It's a kid movie." So all these emotions go through your head. And then we did a focus group. I ran out and we did a focus group with the kids and the parents in the focus group. 26 out of 26 gave it an excellent. I'm like, "Oh, that's interesting." Our scores were gigantic. I'm like, "That's okay, because it's a kids movie." Then I went to the adult focus group and we got the same score. We got like a 95. And I was like, "That's weird." A lot of the older ladies, like 35, 40, they are like, "I didn't want to come here. I didn't want to see this. I was dragged here." This one lady goes, "This kinds of reinvents super heroes." She said this great line. She goes, "We're tired of the suits and the whatever. This is totally new and different." Anyway, It's still nerve wracking, you know what I'm saying? That is a long boring answer.
CraveOnline: How have you changed as a filmmaker over the past few years?
Michael Bay: I've gotten older, crankier. No, I'm not cranky. No, I crack a lot of jokes. I tease people. A little bit. Someone said to me in Australia, "Well, after The Island did you want to go back to your more safe roots?" And I just thought this idea, if it was done in a cool way, could be a big idea and a fun movie idea. And a fun summer movie and I liked the challenge of taking something that hasn't been done and trying to working with my team of artists for months, 8 months, 9 months and my digital effects companies, to try and create characters made out of thin air. And it was something really challenging for me. It's like doing an animated movie. Working with animators is such a great process. And the end result, it's like, you look at Bumblebee and it's like there is a soul in this thing. That was a fun challenge for me.
CraveOnline: This scene in the back yard is so funny. How did you create that comic timing with the characters not being there until post?
Michael Bay: What I do is I do a series of animatics, which are crude cartoons. And a movie really comes to life, I mean working with the writers and creating the script, but it all starts with the concept drawings. That becomes the tone of the movie. I showed Steven a picture of Megatron in the hanger and he's like, "Oh my god, I love it. That's the movie!" And I'm like, "I know." And that's how you get the tone. It's like you build off of there. So, in the backyard we kept coming up with the beats and whatnot. I think the dog peeing was something we made up. That's where we tied a little string to his leg and lifted it up to nothing is there and they added in the squirt. It's just really good to work with someone like a Shia or a Megan where they can actually see a cartoon and they are looking at window washer poles, which is tough. And, you just keep doing it.
CraveOnline: What directors do you like?
Michael Bay: Oh, God. Everyone always asks me this question. It's just, you know, from Kubrick, I've always been a huge fan of the Coen Bros. Raising Arizona was such an instrumental movie in how I've done some of my commercials. Just that comic timing, a lot of people didn't get that movie when it came out. From Steven to Cameron to Scorsese. When I was young, you've probably heard, I worked at Lucasfilm, and when I was 15 I was like a librarian and filed Raiders of the Lost Ark storyboards. It's how I got interested in the business.
CraveOnline: So if they do go ahead with Transformers 2 right away, would you jump right in? And what characters you'd like to bring to the franchise?
Michael Bay: Maybe a little break. But, we have to come up with a good story first. I mean, I have some really cool things that I came up with for the first one that was just too expensive. Stuff that was really cool, but Steven was right, "No, we should pull back and not have as many robots so you can really focus more." I wish I really got to go into some of the faces more of some of the robots. But I really think it was Steven who said, "I think we should make it like 5 against 5 or 5 against 6." Or something like that. So, it was good we scaled back a bit.
CraveOnline: The ILM guy said you were really hard on them.
Michael Bay: Well, let me tell you, these robots didn't come out good at first. It was hard. It was not all peaches and cream at ILM. There were a lot of angry phone calls like, "We have to do better. We have to do better." They thought they were settling on something and I was like, "Nope. This is unacceptable." I just kept pushing them and pushing them and pushing them, but we came up with a really a good visual thing. I wanted them not to be clunky, lumbering robots. I looked at a lot of kung fu movies. I wanted them to have a different type of movement so I would just clip different things from different movies and I'd reference those to the animators on how they would move. Because if they sucked, if they were horrible than the movie was doomed or is doomed. So you've got a lot of pressure they're trying to make it work. And you've got pressure from the fans saying "You wrecked our childhood" and all this about, complaining "We don't like the look of them." You just had to hold to your guns. The fans just wanted me to literally take these cartoons and blow them up. And it's like literally the equivalent of Ghostbusters with the Marshmallow man. It just wouldn't work. They needed to be much more complex the way they are.
CraveOnline: You made a reference about being afraid big movies were going away. Do you really think they'd stop?
Michael Bay: I don’t know. You know what it is? You do a movie and then you are unemployed, you know what I'm saying?
