By DAVE ITZKOFF
In its review of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” The Guardian calls its director, Michael Bay, “that prince of unsubtlety, royal rejecter of nuance and regal repudiator of light-and-shade,” and declares the film to be “another of his mega-decibel action headbangers.” Somewhere, we imagine Mr. Bay is smiling.
Over a career that includes the action movies “Bad Boys,” “The Rock,” “Armageddon” and the $700 million blockbuster “Transformers,” Mr. Bay has consistently confounded critics (and the occasional audience member), earning a place for himself in the immortal lyric from “Team America: World Police”: “I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark / when he made ‘Pearl Harbor.’”
None of which has stopped Mr. Bay from continuing to orchestrate colossal explosions on screen and at the box office. And he seems poised to do it again in his “Transformers” sequel (opening on Wednesday), which returns to the war between heroic Autobots like Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, and villainous Decepticons like Megatron.
In a feature in this weekend’s Arts & Leisure section, Mr. Bay talks about how he was persuaded to direct the “Transformers” films through the efforts of Hasbro, the toy company that makes the shape-shifting action figures. For a closer look at Mr. Bay’s essential Bay-ness, we offer these additional excerpts from our conversation with him, in which the director talks about his work on “Transformers” and his toughest critic: Mom.
Was it Steven Spielberg who first approached you about “Transformers”?
Yeah, literally, I was in my edit room and he said, I’d like you to direct “Transformers.” And I knew what it was, but instantly I thought, this sounds lame. I’m like, “O.K., great, great, great.” And I hung up the phone. And I’m like, “That sounds like a dumb idea.” It’s a true story. And that’s actually what a lot of studios thought. So I just went to Hasbro, and they told me, “We’re going to put you through Transformers school.” I go there, and they have this big conference table. They have like 20 people in the meeting, they’re all staring at me. And there’s one guy with these Transformer toys there, and he’s the folder- and un-folder-upper of Transformers toys. But behind them, I kept seeing these Japanese anime shots, and they were dark and moody. And I’ve always liked Japanese anime. It kind of hit me in the room, because I had read about Transformers and I was more interested in the lore of it. I couldn’t stomach the cartoons or anything like that.
It didn’t concern you that you were about to make a movie about a toy?
Here’s the thing: I don’t consider this a toy. It’s not. To me, it’s the farthest thing from it. It was about the mythology, and that there was a story here. The mythology is really deep, it goes 25 years back. And what I liked was, the code of the warrior. Optimus Prime had a lot of samurai things to him. I’m thinking, if I make this very real, and do something very real in terms of effects, then that might be very interesting. It was always about the boy and the car. And that was what Steven said, and I always liked that concept. It’s such a seminal moment in a kid’s life. That’s your sense of freedom and whatnot. There was just this image of a boy hiding this alien robot in his garage or his house or his backyard that just stuck with me. I’m thinking, O.K., that’s the heart and soul of the movie, for the first one. From there we kind of branched out.
So it was the narrative already contained in the toys that drew you in?
Right. But the thing was, you would think I would watch the movies and the cartoons. I couldn’t. I would get 10 minutes into the movie and I wanted to just shoot myself. O.K., I’m dead serious. And all these people on the Internet saying, “Michael Bay, you wrecked my childhood and blah blah blah.” I’m like, Are you kidding me? Your childhood couldn’t have been that great, watching those cartoons. [laughs] You’re remembering something a lot sweeter than it really was.
I realize it’s deeply uncool to admit this, but were there any toys you loved growing up?
I loved playing with toy soldiers. But I had just missed that window when the toy came out, when it wasn’t cool for me to play with dolls. And robots.
What kind of story were you trying to tell in the first “Transformers” film?
Literally, I wanted to see if this movie could even work. Early on we did this Scorponok sequence, to make it more real and vicious and dangerous, and to make these things more lethal. All my friends, when I’m doing movies, my buddies are like, “Are you kidding me? You’re doing that movie? What is that?” Everyone was saying that and I felt like such a jerk. I’m like, “Oh, my God, this is so risky.” I kept thinking: I can make this real. I can make you believe that they are actually here. I remember showing people a few images, we finally rendered them, with the Scorponok’s images and people instantly go, “I get it now.”
Isn’t that hurtful? You get picked on enough by critics – your friends ridicule your movies, too?
My friends keep me humble, which is good. These are guys that like to rag on you. You know what I mean? [laughs] What was shocking about “Transformers” was that, like, my mom – who will tell me, “I hate your movie” – “I loved this movie” – “That movie’s [expletive]” – “‘Bad Boys,’ they say too many swears.” I’ve cut [expletive] out many times for her. [laughs] She’s a very honest woman. And she goes, “I loved this movie. A little too much battle at the end, but I just loved that Bumblebee.”
Having proven that you could depict the robots on screen, how did you approach a “Transformers” sequel?
Instantly I was just thinking of ideas for what it could be. And then [screenwriters] Bob [Orci] and Alex [Kurtzman] had some ideas, and we loved the idea of now going to college, which is another marker in your life. And Ehren Kruger, another writer, had a really big movie idea. So we kind of spitballed ideas, and simultaneously I had a big art department, so we started drawing ideas and coming up with robots, stuff that hasn’t been invented by Hasbro. That was great about Hasbro. I said to them, “I’m going to do this my own way. I’ll vet it through you guys, but you’ve got to understand, I’m going to do a lot of stuff my way. And the toys are going to change. We’re going to make improvements on this stuff.”
What would be an example of a robot you modified?
Optimus Prime, we changed him a lot. We changed his facial stuff, the type of truck he was, the paint colors, the flames, which I got a lot of flak for. When we did the 3-D sculpting on a computer at ILM, 30 people are looking and I said, “This doesn’t look like Optimus Prime. Look at my drawing here, I want this drawing.” All of a sudden, this Japanese guy who barely speaks a lick of English – it’s the funniest meeting you’ve ever seen – he yells, in the meeting, “That is a insult to the Japanese people! That is not Optimus Prime! I want to do Optimus Prime!” Like, O.K. So he made some improvements. It’s interesting how so many people are attached to making one robot.
And you created other characters that weren’t established in the toys, the comics or the animation?
We wanted to get into the deeper lore of it. At one point, I’d already been shooting the movie, and we were doing this scene in space. And I asked these Hasbro experts on Transformers, I said, “So, how are Transformers born?” And they kind of – dead pause. “I don’t know.” “What do you mean, you don’t know? Isn’t that one of the first things you figure out?” [laughs] So I created how they’re born.
How are they born?
They’re in a special sac. They’re called hatchlings. It’s quite nice.
You’re helping to design all these nice new toys for Hasbro. Do you get a percentage of the toys they sell that are based on your designs?
Well, I’m not allowed to say. But things that come from my mind are now becoming toys. But it gets touched by all these artists. There was a woman on the Hollywood Foreign Press tour, and she goes, “Michael, don’t you ever want to do a movie that’s more artistic?” I knew what she meant, but there was a poster of Bumblebee behind me, and I said, “There’s something to be done with a movie in the south of France, whatever, at a winery or a vineyard. But when you look at Bumblebee behind you, it took so many artists so much time. This is something that doesn’t exist in our world. And it has emotions now.” That’s a whole skill. So it is art in its own way. The thing that Ridley Scott always says, and I totally concur with him, his favorite thing to do as a director is to create a new world. That’s just what I love to do.
But you find some artistic fulfillment in making these movies?
Absolutely. We were shooting in Salt, Jordan, and these kids all surrounded Bumblebee. And they were saying, “Bumblebee.” They knew. It’s another world and they know this character, they know this car. It’s pretty interesting when you see it through kids’ eyes.
Do you need to go off and do something completely different before you come back for “Transformers 3”?
Yes, I definitely need some distance and I definitely need to do another movie in between. It’s got to be something – not with a lot of digital effects. Because it takes so much time. I’ve got a lot of different possibilities, from dark comedy to something more serious. But I’m definitely trying to take some time off. The level of animation was so intense on this movie, compared to the last movie. I tell people it’s like making two movies. You shoot a live action movie and then you do the animation movie. Which goes on forever. Optimus Prime doesn’t just show up. It’s painstaking how you make him act. But now it’s, like, summertime, I guess. I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.
Source: NYTimes
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