Michael Bay talks about his movies

Esquire; 7/1/2001; LASKAS, JEANNE MARIE

Michael Bay, do you smell that? That's another Michael Bay movie burning up the box office. And if that bothers you, if you think he's just another schlockmeister with, fancy cars and testosterone problems, all he can sayis shame on you. Shame on you!

Don't be an asshole. This is what his mother tells him, or what he hears his mother telling him, or at least what he reports hearing his mother tell him, the main point being that he is well aware of the asshole assumption. And while the asshole assumption probably has more to do with his movies than with him personally, it's still, he says, frustrating. Then again, it's fair to say that Hollywood is a place where asshole-becoming is an occupational hazard, and so far he has not, thank God, become an asshole. [paragraph] He's driving. He's driving his silver Ferrari from his Santa Monica office over to Jerry Bruckheimer's compound, where he'll screen footage for his latest movie, Pearl Harbor. [paragraph] "You know what I've learned?" he is saying. "I've learned to just keep my head down, and people say shit about you, and you just kind of let it, just, that's their problem. That's not my problem!" He is getting worked up. His Ferrari is making a most pleasing, guttural roar while simultaneously providing a surprisingly fine toe massage. "Just keep your head down and keep doing what you do, and, you know, sometimes they get to you. It's like, sometimes, it's like, not everyone has to like my movies! Okay? I don't care if they don't like my movies!"

The movies he directs--Armageddon, The Rock, Bad Boys--are movies that play well to teenage boys. They are movies in which very many shiny objects blow up. They are movies that make you wonder how you got so out of touch with things, in that you've never met a single person who likes these movies, and yet the movies make tons of money. "It's like, you know, I had a reporter here who said, `Would you ever date a girl who didn't like your movies?' I'm like, Yeah. Yeah. Um. Yee-aah. That's, you know, you don't have to like what I do. You know? It's just something I like doing."

He has his collar up. The collar on his light-tan jacket. You find yourself wishing he didn't have his collar up. Because a collar up says, Hey, look at me, I have my collar up. A collar up says, I am the type to spend time thinking, Hmmmm, how would I look with my collar up? He's handsome. Far too thin to be categorized as ruggedly handsome. He has fine features and eyes that sit far inside his face, like there's quite a nice shelf over those eyes, a shady place to think and dream. He's handsome in the way a poet is handsome--that's the problem. That doesn't work at all. This is not the kind of handsome you expect of a guy who has entered Armageddon, The Rock, and Bad Boys into the canon of the world's cinematic literature.

But soon you are past the collar-up thing. Because now you're wishing he didn't park in the handicapped spot. Oh, you wish he didn't just pull up here to the production office and, without so much as a blip of hesitation, pull his car into the handicapped spot. But he did. And there's nothing you can do. There really is no defense you can give to a healthy thirty-seven-year-old man parking his $200,000 Ferrari in a handicapped spot. And why do you wish he wasn't this way? Because you are a generous human being with a regular heart and you like your main character to be sympathetic? Maybe. That's certainly got to be a factor. But there's something else going on here. There's a very definite despite-it-all likability factor going on here. There is more than a glimmer of decency about the man.

He's pointing to the building housing Jerry Bruckheimer's office. All of his movies have been Bruckheimer productions. He's making a loving joke about Jerry, something about how Jerry--now, Jerry's the guy with the real testosterone in this town.

It's funny he would bring up the word testosterone. Because that is the very word you were thinking about. That is the word you often hear used by people who are critical of Michael Bay's movies. And testosterone, let's face it, testosterone gets a bad rap. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with testosterone. It's just that the only time you ever really hear anything about it is when there is too much of it. And too much testosterone is what causes men to commit unspeakable crimes like murder and rape and The Rock and Bad Boys. You're sorry, but you couldn't resist that one. God, it would be so much fun to be a movie critic. You could say anything and just walk away. You could just amuse the hell out of yourself and walk away.

Then again, and this bears repeating, the movies make money. It seems as though the more testosterone you pump in, the more money comes out. Bad Boys, which Bay made when he was just twenty-eight, having never made a movie before, having done a string of commercials and music videos with artists ranging from Donny Osmond to Meat Loaf, grossed more than $140 million worldwide. You can't argue with $140 million, you just can't, and this is why Bay got to do The Rock with Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery, and this is why the notoriously tightfisted Disney then entrusted Bay with the largest budget in Disney Studio history, about $150 million, to make Armageddon, the movie that would in turn make Bay the youngest director ever to reach the billion-dollar mark worldwide.

This bothers people. Of course it does. This sort of thing has been bothering people since the birth of the action-movie genre as a whole, which hardly ever wins respect and of which Bay is said to be the crown prince.

And now: Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor? Michael Bay doing a movie about the single most devastating, most holy day in United States military history? Why, that's like the Three Stooges doing a Holocaust movie. Or Barney doing Hamlet. That's like John Tesh playing Vienna's Schonbrunn Palace, accompanied by two soloists performing Delibes arias. That Tesh thing happened, folks. It happened.

This, anyway, is how many very intelligent people, including movie critics--who, let's face it, can have a crankiness problem--are conditioned to think.

"Shame on those people," says Bay. Like he doesn't even know where to begin on this subject. "Like, I see these people on the Internet saying, `Oh, it's a travesty that Michael Bay is doing this story.' `Oh, why's he doing it?' `Oh, he's going to wreck it.' It's like, shame on those people, you know? Shame on them!" He really doesn't know where to begin. But give him a moment and he will. He's got a few things to take care of first. He's greeting the guys in the production studio--his guys, the guys who have been working with him since he got into this business.

The guys inform him that Industrial Light & Magic, which is doing $30 million worth of special effects for Pearl Harbor, is charging $150,000 for one second's worth of a torpedo shot. "Oh, that's totally fucked," Bay says. He doesn't need a battleship in the background that bad. Make the torpedo bigger, he tells them. Just have the torpedo cover up the battleship. "Just make the background as out-of-focusy as possible, okay?"

THE THING HE'S NOTICING is this could very possibly develop into a bad day. His agents are calling. A few days ago, he told them he wants out. After nearly eight years with CAA, he's walking away. And now they're calling. They want to come over and "talk." Oh, he doesn't want to deal with this. Nothing personal, he just wants to move on. Doesn't anybody get this? "I just gotta. Personally, I need to shake it up a little," he says. "You know, this is the point in my life to do it. You know?"

He's now back at his office, the Bay Films office, which shares a wall with the Playboy production studios, which is a funny coincidence worth noting, seeing as Bay definitely has a Hefneresque reputation around town. Hefner himself was kind enough to send several delicious Playmates to a recent Michael Bay birthday bash.

Inside the reception area, there is a pretty girl answering phones and a giant white orchid and Bay's dog Mason, an English mastiff, the biggest dog you can get. We're talking 250 pounds of dog. But that's not all, because recently Bay got another mastiff, Grace. Mason is named after Sean Connery in The Rock, and Grace is named after Liv Tyler in Armageddon, but the point is, Bay now has nearly a quarter ton's worth of dog, so he has to get a bigger truck; they won't fit in the Yukon, so he's getting a Suburban. He got the Yukon originally to fit Mason because, let's face it, there was no way Mason was going to fit into either of his two Ferraris or his Porsche. "Grace here, she just ate three handfuls of rocks," he points out. "She was in the hospital. I mean, it was a lot of rocks. She had enemas and all that stuff to get them out--it was so funny. And my other dog, Mason, he's been opened three times because of eating stuff. The last time, they had him on the operating table and the doctor called me when he was opened up, and I go, `Well, what does it look like? Does it look like pool equipment?' And he goes, `Yeah, it does.' He ate one of those jet things off my pool. They had to take a foot of his intestine out."

So there you have the dogs. Moving on, this is his office--sorry for the mess--and this is his giant lava lamp, probably the biggest lava lamp you can get, and this is the conference room where we can sit and talk about Pearl Harbor. It was a one-sentence idea. That's how it started. What happened was, he took a year off after making Armageddon. He wanted to catch his breath. He wanted to do something different. "You know, I wanted to change it up," he says. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what he's saying now to his agents. And what is wrong with that? What is wrong with growing?

"You mature," he says. "It's like when you look at Spielberg. When he did Jaws and E.T. and he just--I remember people saying, `Oh, he's just a commercial filmmaker. He just makes popcorn movies, right?' And they gave him a hard time when he did Empire of the Sun. It's like, look at his career--he matured. It's like he wanted to do more touchy movies and things that meant more to him, and there's nothing wrong with entertaining audiences--that's what we do!"

He is getting worked up again. "Okay, people, like, critics especially, they take movies too seriously. I mean, how are you going to compare Armageddon to Schindler's List? You've got, like, an opera against rock `n' roll music. And you've got the reviewer from the classical section reviewing Armageddon. It's like, dude, wake up! You know what I mean? Um. So. It's, I mean, Armageddon, when I look at it now, it's like a comedy. It's like a fantasy comedy, all right?"

He rubs his forehead in his hand. Oh, this is going to be a bad day. And for some reason the phone on this conference table keeps ringing. Which is driving him crazy. Chinese-water-torture crazy.

Money is power. And power is freedom. This is the thing he wants to point out. There is a reason it's good to make a studio a lot of money. Because then they like you. Then they give you money to do stuff you want to do. Then they stay out of your face. More or less. No, more. Because what if he took the path everyone seems to want a truly great movie director to take? What if he was Mr. Artsy Film School Grad running around town begging for pennies and making gorgeous films that satisfied his young genius soul but never made anybody any money? What, he's supposed to just walk into a studio and say, Now may I please have $140 million to make a movie about Pearl Harbor? It doesn't work that way. It doesn't. And that's not the path he took. He was just a kid who liked to shoot. He got into photography when he was thirteen. It caught his interest. He grew up in the Westwood section of L. A., on the middle-class side, not the rich side. On Sundays he always went to the movies with his mom, an education counselor, and his dad, an accountant. When he was fifteen, a neighbor helped him get a job in the filing room of Lucas-Film. He filed Yoda pictures. Yoda's house. Yoda's backyard. He was there when Spielberg made Raiders of the Lost Ark. He saw some of the storyboards. He was like, "Wow, this movie is really going to suck." And he told his friends that, and they all went to see the movie when it came out. And his mouth dropped open. He was like, "Holy shit." He was like, "How did this happen?" He was hooked.

He studied film at Wesleyan. He didn't fit in, didn't wear black, didn't suffer the right kind of angst. He was in a fraternity and played sports. He shot some student films and proved to be a natural. Maybe it was in his genes. He was adopted, and supposedly he knows who his biological father is, and supposedly he's a famous movie director. But this is not something he would ever bring up; this is not something he needs. In college, he won big awards, went on to film school at Art Center in Pasadena, and soon after got hired by Propaganda Films to shoot music videos and commercials--Nike, Budweiser, Coke, and that Got Milk? ad with the guy with the peanut butter in his mouth. By the time he was twenty-six, he'd won every major commercial directing award there is to win. "People say, `Oh, you know, he was a commercial director and now he's doing features,' "he says. "Well, I wanted to be a feature director. It was just like, how to get there? This gave me a chance to shoot, shoot every week. You know, pretty soon I had shot over five hundred days."

His commercial work caught the attention of Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson, and that's when the road to filmmaking opened up. The point is, this is a road he's on, and he has no idea where it will go next; he just wants to be free to explore. Well, that's one of the points he somehow needs to make to the agents when they stop by later. Oh, he is not looking forward to that conversation.

The phone rings again. This stupid phone, which is the only thing on this conference table except for another giant white orchid. "God, this is so irritating. Does anybody know how to turn this stupid speaker thingie off?" he shouts into the hallway to no one in particular. There is no answer. "I'll tell you how to turn it off," he says, picking it up. "You unplug it, that's what you do." In one mighty burst, he rips the cord out, looks at it. He seems satisfied. He tosses the phone back on the table, where it lands upside down, just dead there like that, a carcass of phone beside a giant white orchid. It looks like a destroyed helicopter in one of his movies. Things are starting to fall into place.

Anyway, a movie about Pearl Harbor. The idea intrigued him. He had a two-picture deal with Disney, and this was the only idea to come out of all those boring meetings that intrigued him. But then again, was a movie about Pearl Harbor even possible? The planes no longer existed. The ships no longer existed. Who could afford to re-create all of that? Titanic cost $200 million to make, and that was one sinking ship. This would be a whole fleet of sinking ships.

He asked Bruckheimer what he thought. They read everything they could find on Pearl Harbor. They wondered what the story could be. They spoke to Randall Wallace, the writer who had been nominated for an Oscar for the Braveheart screenplay, a serious writer, a writer who would not suffer through the series of rewrites by some team of twenty hacks that has come to give Bruckheimer movies that certain je ne sais quoi. No, this was a subject that deserved a real, actual writer. Wallace was interested. Bay flew to Hawaii to look al Pearl Harbor. It was so beautiful. And there were bullet holes still in the tarmac. The Navy keeps them there as a reminder. It was all so damn beautiful. Maybe it was the subtlety. Maybe that was it. Maybe this was the first time Michael Bay got the taste, like a young man who suddenly finds himself choosing a really good Scotch.

"It's weird," he says. "It's like, people die all over the world in earthquakes, whatever, you know, in much huger numbers than at Pearl Harbor. But there was something; there's something. You wonder, What is it? You think, Okay, only three thousand people died, but there's something, you know? You stand there and wonder why it's so important compared to things that happen nowadays, like in Mexico where a landslide can kill fifty thousand people. You know?"

It's not the number of dead bodies, it's not the number of explosions, it's not about size at all. It's something else. He wanted to get at the something else. The whole something else, if possible. This was turning into a quest.

He wanted to meet some people who had lived through the attack. He went to San Diego with Wallace to meet some survivors, eighty of them, crotchety guys in white pants and aloha shirts who were plenty pissed off that the big-shot movie director was a whole half hour late. "Let's get this over with," they said. Bay and Wallace sat them down four at a time. The stories started coming. The tears started flowing. The crotchety men were transformed into boys, terrified boys, before his eyes. He wasn't used to seeing anything like that.

Bay came home a driven roan. He couldn't escape the image of those man-boys. He felt a sense of duty to them. Duty! It was as if his heart were growing all new parts. Wallace got to work on a script. It would be a love story, of course. This was, after all, Hollywood, and this was Disney. But it would also be a story about the heart of the volunteer. That's not something people think about too much anymore. That would be the theme that drove the movie.

Disney told Bay to come up with a budget. Okay, how does $200 million sound? They laughed. He trimmed the numbers, kept coming back. They kept laughing. He said, "To do it right, it's going to be expensive." He would need to ship planes in from Japan. He would need $120 million in insurance policies alone to stage the explosions at Pearl Harbor. This went back and forth and back and forth. He kept trimming. He started getting actors in. Stars would come by, and he was like, Okay, this is the price. Their agents would call and say, Well, we want $3 million. He would say, See you later. The movie was more important than any one star. The movie was the star.

"My job as a director is to save the studios." This is what he has come to believe. "My job is to protect them from themselves. Because they'll just cut things left and right. All right? It's like, `Oh, get rid of FDR.' Hello? Or, `Well, get rid of the third act.' Or, `Just get rid of the whole sinking of the Oklahoma.'"

He kept quitting the project over Disney's stupid ideas of how to trim the budget. He quit four times. Finally, he and Bruckheimer were told that if they could get the budget down to $140 million, plus give up their fees, plus be responsible for the cost of overages, they could do the movie. Bay swallowed. With a movie like this, you can hiccup and go $10 million over. He swallowed. He said, "Okay, I'm going to do this for free, and I'm very possibly going to be financing the damn thing." This, he thought, is going to be the most expensive low-budget movie ever made.

And then came something else. Something else that made him stop and think about who the hell he was and what the hell he was doing.

What happened was his dad got sick in the middle of shooting. Sudden lymphoma. But then they said he was cured. "And then literally a day later, my mom called me up and she said, `Honey, you better turn around.' I was in the car, driving to the set. She goes, `I think you should turn around.' And then it's like, you're shooting and it probably costs $200,000 to turn around. Everyone is there, the crew's waiting, and I'm like, `Mom, how serious is this?' So I turned around, went to the hospital. And so I was ... It was just, sudden. It was just like, a bacteria got in. Um. I got to see him at the very end. I did, I got to see him. Um. It's, you know. It's sad because, you know, he said, `One thing I want to live to see is your movie.'"

That has to be part of it. First you see those crotchety old men turn into boys as they relive the horror that defines their lives. And then you see your dad die. There are just so many things you can see before you finally have no choice but to grow up.

Sometimes he still talks about his dad in the present tense. "You know, he's an accountant. He's a really funny guy. And he's the one who came up with the idea. I remember because I showed him the rough trailer, the teasers, and, you know, he's very down to earth, not into all the hoopla bullshit, and the trailer had words--peace, hope, love, you know--all these words floating up on the screen. And he was like, `What is all that crap? Get rid of all that crap! It happened on a Sunday morning--that's all it should say. Because that's when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened. Get rid of all the rest of that crap!' And I'm like, You know what? You're right.

"So I called the marketing guys, I called Jerry, and that became the campaign."

HE'S YAWNING. GOD, he can't stop yawning. After two years of this, he's at the point where he's sick of this movie. Everyone is. Hell, the computer is sick of this movie. The computer is so full and so slow, it's practically begging for someone to reboot. Bay and his editors are hovered over screens, tweaking.

"Michael, your mom called."

"She did?"

His mom called to say she's heading over to the sound studio to watch Hans Zimmer work with the orchestra on scoring the movie. He wants to go meet her there. He stands up as if to leave. But then he's reminded that the ILM guys are on the satellite hookup to go over the corrections and to make sure the bubbles on the torpedo shot aren't overly perfect-they need to be more random. "Aw," he says. He'd rather go hang out with his mom. He deals with the bubbles. And also he insists that the digital bullets coming out of the Japanese Zero fighter zoom right at us, instead of over us, even though he can only afford to use the cheap ones (without smoke).

Now he and the editors just have to put in dates. Because in the middle of the movie, it's a little confusing to figure out how much time is passing. So just some dates, and that should do it for reel four.

"What do we say here, November fifteenth?"

"That sounds good."

"Let's say, November 15, 1941, Pacific Ocean."

"But if we say November fifteenth and cut to this next scene, they make love here, then we go to this, go to this, then they're hanging around and she feels sick here, now how many weeks until she feels sick?"

"Now that's a good question."

"When do women get pregnant and know it?"

"Um."

"Four to five weeks."

"I think it's possible in three."

"Get out."

"Well, they would know it, but they probably wouldn't believe it, would they?" "Um."

"See, this is a dilemma."

"Okay, but if she was impregnated November first, she would definitely know December sixth. Or have great concern. She would definitely have reason to worry, right?"

"You know what, let's not put a date."

"Yeah."

"Let's just say, November 1941."

"Yeah."

They're tweaking. They're yawning. They believe, even though no one is saying it, that the movie is good. It seems it might jinx it to utter the words. But they have indicators. The test screening, for example. Eight hundred thirty people pulled at random off a Denver street. That audience watched all two hours and fifty minutes of the movie, and in that time only four people got up to go to the bathroom. Bay knows this because he sat there and counted. He watched the audience go perfectly still when the attack scene started--the attack scene lasts forty-five minutes--and they sat there motionless from that point until the end of the movie. Afterward, they gave it the highest rating Bay has ever gotten at a test screening, the highest Bruckheimer has ever gotten. And Disney CEO Michael Eisner was there. It was the first time he'd seen the movie, and he pulled Bay aside and--let's face it, Eisner is not known as a gushy guy--he was speechless, just speechless, until finally he said, "Magnificent."

That felt good. When the boss likes your work, that makes you feel good. When you promise to deliver something, and then you deliver it, that just really makes you feel good.

"Ah, Michael, they're here." The agents. Oh, brother. "Why do I have to have this conversation?" he says. "I already told them."

They come marching down the hallway. They're short. They're in suits. They're an army of Weebles that wobble but won't fall down. Bay's in the conference room for about an hour with them. You can hear the shouting; you can hear the pleas. When it's all over, he comes out rolling his eyes. "I am still deciding," he says. "I am officially still trying to de-cide." He's tired. He's getting a headache. You know what, he just wants to go home. He wants some time alone. Because then later he's got a party to go to, which will probably be great, but still.

His home is giant, a shiny white Bel Air mansion behind two white iron gates that move slowly, Wizard of Oz slowly, giving you a good chance to get mentally prepared for entering a place like this. There are hardly any lights on inside the house; it's like a cave where sound bounces in an endless search for a soft landing.

"You starving?" asks Lisa, the sweet young chef who's working on a shrimp-and-pasta dish.

"A little bit," he says. "And I gotta go soon."

"Okay," she says. She would probably prefer that he say something, anything, about the zesty pork-tenderloin salad she served for lunch, but she is not one to complain. She loves working for Michael, just loves it, because Michael has no food issues. Not one. That's pretty rare in this town. Like, the last people she worked for would eat only green food.

Mason is here. Grace is here. There is no one else here. There are all those cars in the garage. "But I'm getting out of the car thing," he says. He's selling the Ferrari 355. There is a pool out back and giant palm trees he had craned in. It's funny, he visited this very house as a possible location for a shoot way back when he was making Aerosmith videos. He thought, Someday I would love a house like that. And now he has it. And now the thing he really wants to do is build his own house. He's always wanted to be an architect.

There is his collection of famous photographs. "That's like the dust bowl there, and these are mug shots of Mafia guys. Pretty cool." There is no movie memorabilia in here. He doesn't like to be reminded. There is a picture of his mom. There is a picture of his dad as a little boy. There is a giant white orchid, not the biggest but arguably the loneliest flower you can get.