INT: Michael Bay

Michael

Bay

has a little
something to prove with TRANSFORMERS.
After the high-profile flop THE ISLAND (which wasn’t nearly as
awful as some folks claimed), many have questioned whether the
director is capable of anything beyond outrageous action sequences
and gigantic explosions. While the failure of THE ISLAND was
relatively easy to forget, don’t expect the hordes of
Transformers-loving fanboys to let Bay off easy if he screws this
one up.

At
the TRANSFORMERS set visit a few months ago (read part 1 HERE),
Bay talked about his vision for the movie. He was in good spirits,
despite a nasty cold. What a champ. Here are some excerpts from the
interview (the parts that we were allowed to publish).

Michael
Bay

How
are you turning Transformers into a

Michael

Bay

movie?

You
know, it’s just…I don’t know. I don’t know if that makes any
sense. It’s got a lot of action but it’s very funny. It’s got heart
and it’s…I only wanted to do Transformers if I could do it
realistic. What I’ve seen, what we’ve done with our digital studies,
real world stuff that has lots of effects around that are real
effects, that’s how we make it realistic.

When
did you realize the “fanboyness” of this movie?

Of
course I knew, of course. When did it hit me? Before I even took on
the movie. I knew there’s a huge following for this thing. Steven
called me I think a year ago last April. My first thought was no,
I’m not interested. Just because I thought okay, how am I going to
do a toy movie. And then I realized when I went to Hasbro, okay,
start over and go for a realistic alien invasion robot movie on
earth. So with that thinking in mind, that’s how I went about it.

Are
you going more family film or hardcore?

It’s
pretty edgy for a family film but it’s definitely got stuff for
families. It’s PG-13 but it’s edgy.

How
do you introduce the idea of all the ridiculous names?

I’m
not going to tell you but we justify how we do it. We have logic
stuff in the script to explain why we say it.

Would
you come back to this franchise?

Well,
I’m having a great time making it. I really have. It’s gone really
smoothly this movie. It’s been a lot of fun. So we’ll see. It’s
really fun to actually- – I’ve done a lot of digital effects before
but this is really fun because you’re really animating characters
and giving everyone a little different kind of thing going on, just
from the way they walk, the way their armor’s scratched or hurt.

How
do you do that without the voices yet?

You’re
got to go through- – first you write down what are all the character
points in your head? That’s a tough thing. With Colin, he’s not an
actor actor. He’s a voice actor so when you see his face, he’s got a
great voice but I need to hire another actor to do his voice. Does
that make sense? He’s going to do the voice and I’m going to have
another actor study the video when he does how he’s going to say it.
They’re actually having to work in tandem. They do this on animation
features as well. We did a very funny study where we did De Niro and
Hugo Weaving, we put our Optimus to Hugo and De Niro. It’s
hysterical. It looks just like ’em. It’s very funny.

So
it’s motion capturing the faces?

It’s
not fully like a human face but it does have certain human things to
it. Otherwise as humans we wouldn’t associate with it as much. We
did a lot of different studies, like if you do nothing, it’s kind of
like it doesn’t hit us.

What
did you try that didn’t work?

If
they’re just frozen robots, pure metal that doesn’t move and the
eyebrow kind of thing. We have these eye slits that can kind of move
and the eyes how they move. It’s got to have some human things to it
to make it so successful to us. You look at the cartoons, that is
like 90% away where we have to go. Right now they’re just big
glowing eyes that have no emotions. It’s what I keep trying to tell
the fanboys is this has got to be so much more realistic than what
they’ve seen in the past. But they’re angry about everything. I hear
they want to protest in front of my office by the way, but I won’t
be there. I’m shooting.

You’re
changing Ratchet?

We
just made him more like one of those kind of modern rescue kind of
ground type vehicles.

Is
that Furby truck a transformer?

No,
we wanted to have burning Furbys. Burning Furbys somewhere on the
ground. Have you seen those little Furbys? We’re going to be blowing
up a lot of little Furbys.

Questions?
Comments? Manifestos? Send them to me at [email protected].