According to President Obama, Michael Bay is a "big-ass director". Must be true then. Moviehole caught up with the "Transformers : Revenge of the Fallen" director in L.A for the film's swanky junket.
Michael, this movie destroys so much property. Was there anything that you thought, "I can't do this?"
Michael: No. It's called summer fun. It's a robot movie.
Q: Michael, what do you think is in this film for the ladies, that would make them want to come see the movie?
Michael: What was interesting about the first one was that it had relationships with the parents and the kids. Kevin is actually playing my father. That's very much how my parents were, when I was growing up. What makes the movie accessible to everybody is the humor in it. It's not just a fanboy movie. Women hone in on the humor. And, there are a lot of young women that say, "I just want to see robots kicking ass." I've heard that before. And, there's the relationship between Shia and Megan.
Q: Michael, can you talk about your inspiration for the robot twins?
Michael: I wanted two younger Transformers. With those two guys, we used the guy who played Sponge Bob and another actor. What's interesting, when you work with voice actors, especially with the twins, is that they did a lot of improv for their parts. We liked their improv and, from there, we would animate their stuff. When you do character animation while you're building a character, it's not like working with 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 and then you work with the animators, and then you do a little bit more of the dialogue, and you keep going back and forth, and it 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.
Q: For the shot from the aircraft, was that stock footage or were you allowed to go on the aircraft?
Michael: I don't like using stock footage, so all that stuff was shot by us. We had incredible access from the military, which is very rare. With all those planes, we shot it. They flew 100 feet over our set. There were six F-16s out doing a mission, and we timed their mission for when we wanted them to come over our set four times. We were setting off live explosions down below, and we timed it with them.
Q: Michael, was it your idea to have a Hispanic character in the movie? Michael: Yeah. I picked Ramon out of hundreds of potential cast members because he's charming. It's great. I think it broadens the scope.
Q: Can you talk about your decision to use President Obama's name, instead of some fictional presidential name, especially in light of the National Security Advisor being kind of stupid in the film?
Michael: Remember, it is summer fun. The Obama thing came about because I was walking in a Vegas airport and he was walking by himself, carrying his bag over his shoulder. This was after I'd just seen him in the beginning of his campaign, and we were walking side by side. I said, "Hey, I saw you the other night and I liked what you had to say. I really like hearing your stuff." I introduced myself and he said, "What do you do?" I said, "I'm a director," and he said, "Of what movies?" I said, "Oh, these movies," and he said, "Oh, you're big-ass director. I've seen a bunch of your movies." So, that's why I decided to put him in.
Q: Does Obama know that he's mentioned in the movie.
Michael: I don't know. Stephen Spielberg might show his daughters the movie.
Q: You did a great job of incorporating Shia's hand injury into the film. When that happened, how did that affect everyone on the project?
Michael: I actually read it on CNN online and was like, "This can't be true." I called my line producer, Ian Bryce, and he said, "It's true," and I was like, "Oh, my God." He said, "Let's shut down," and I said, "We can't shut down," because when you've got a train going, it's so expensive to shut a picture like this down. I was glad we had an action scene in the library, that day we were shooting. I said, "Let's just go for it. Let's just not stop. Let's use his stuntman, and we'll try to cover as much stuff as we can." Then, the next day, we shut down and had to mix-and-match everything, pulling from different scenes that we could shoot without him.
We didn't know how long he was going to be down. I, immediately, had them find the best people in the world to make a special cast that had never been made, with the Kevlar fingers. It was very thin, so you could photograph it. The problem was, if he were to jam his fingers, he could have lost his fingers forever, so we had some experts of the world come up with this design. We were very lucky because we had shot a lot of the beginning of the movie and we were right at a turning point.
Yeah, we had arguments. He would take his cast off and I would say, "Put your cast on." He'd say, "No, I'm fine," and I'd say, "Put your cast back on." We were just trying to protect the hand.
Q: Why did you make a choice to not go to Shanghai to shoot Shanghai?
Michael: When you have a budget and you try to stay on your budget, you have a choice. Do you want to go to Egypt to shoot the pyramids, which are extremely hard to make digitally, or do you go to Shanghai? And, I didn't physically need to go to Shanghai to shoot that scene. We've done a lot of Chinese press, and I've told them that I would love to shoot in China. I know some crew members that have shot there, and they said that it's great. So, one day.
Q: Would you want to work with the Department of Defense again?
They are a special breed. They're very impressive. Q: Michael, will you do IMAX in all your future films?
Michael: I think it's a neat idea.
Q: What are you putting on the DVD or Blu-ray?
Michael: This one is done by Ridley Scott's DVD guy, who's great. We're going to have a lot of stuff on it. We're going to do a special IMAX skew, where it'll open up for those scenes. You can see it, from top to bottom. I'm very curious to see it in IMAX because I have not seen it. I didn't want to see it during the process because I wanted to be surprised in the theater.
Q: When will you start thinking about doing a Transformers 3?
Michael: I'm definitely going to do another movie before I do another Transformers because I've just been thinking of robots for three and a half years, and it's enough right now.
Q: Do you still want to do a smaller, Pulp Fiction-esque movie?
Michael: I keep trying to do it, but Transformers came about, and then another Transformers. Now, it's time to do something different. I'm excited to have this one done.
