As some of you may remember, last August I had a chance to visit the set of Transformers with a few other web movie guys down in Los Angeles. During that set visit we all had the chance to talk to the cast, producers and director (Michael Bay). Here now is our conversation with Michael Bay. (Special thanks goes out to my friend Kellvin over at LatinoReviews for transcribing it out). I can’t remember exactly which one of us asked which specific question, so I’ve just put “Movie Blog (et. al)”
The Movie Blog (et. al):
So what’s going to make this a Michael Bay movie?
Bay:
Well, I mean, I don’t know if that makes any sense. It’s got a lot of action, but at the same time it’s very funny and it’s got heart. I only wanted to do ‘Transformers’ if I could do it realistically and from what I’ve seen with what we’ve done on the digital studies and putting it in real world stuff with a lot of FX around that are real FX, that’s how we make it realistic.
The Movie Blog (et. al):
When did you realize the fanboy aspect around this story?
Bay:
Well, I knew. Of course I knew.
The Movie Blog (et. al):
When did that hit you though?
Bay:
When did it me? Before I even took on the movie I knew that there was a huge following of this thing. I think that Steven [Spielberg] called me a year ago last April and my first thought was, ‘No. I’m not interested.’ It was just because I thought, ‘Okay, how am I going to do a toy movie?’ Then I realized when I went to Hasbro that we could start over and go from a realistic alien invasion robot movie on earth. So with that thinking in mind that’s how I went about it.
The Movie Blog (et. al):
It can be a pretty hardcore story. Are you going more family film with this?
Bay:
Oh, well, no, no. I mean, it’s going to be pretty edgy for a family film, but it’s definitely got stuff for families. It’s PG-13, but it is edgy.
The Movie Blog (et. al):
How are you going to sort of introduce all of these ridiculous themes and justify them?
Bay:
Well, I’m not going to tell you, but we do justify how we do it. I mean, we have logic stuff in the script to explain why we say it.
The Movie Blog (et. al):
Obviously this is setup to be a franchise. So are you going to come back to it and do the sequel?
Bay:
Well, I’ve had a great time making it. I really have. It’s gone really smoothly this movie and it’s been a lot of fun. So we’ll see. It’s really fun to actually – I’ve done a lot of visual FX before, but this is really fun because you’re really animating characters who have a sort of different thing going on in the way that they walk or the way that they’re armor is scratched.
The Movie Blog (et. al):
How do you do that kind of stuff before you’ve hired the voice actors yet? How do you work on the characters without that part done?
Bay:
Well, first you write down what all the characters points are in your head. It is a tough thing. With [Peter] Cullen, he’s not an actor actor, he’s a voice actor. So when you see his face he’s got a great face, 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 it the way he does, and they’re actually going to have to work in tandem. They do this on animation pieces as well. Like, we did a very funny study where we did [Robert] De Niro and the bad guy from ‘The Matrix,’ Hugo Weaving, and we put our like Optimist Hugo next to De Niro. It’s hysterical and it looks just like him.
The Movie Blog (et. al):
So you’re kind of motion capturing the faces?
Bay:
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 this as much. We did a lot of different studies, like if you do nothing it doesn’t hit us.
The Movie Blog (et. al):
What did you try that didn’t work?
Bay:
If they are just frozen robots, pure metal that doesn’t move and the eyebrow thing with these eye slits that kind of move and the eyes move – it’s got to have some human things to it to make it successful for it because you look at the cartoons and that’s ninety percent in the direction that we have to go. Right now they’re just big glowing eyes that have no emotions. What I keep trying to tell the fanboys is that it has to be so much more realistic than what they’ve seen in the past, but they’re angry about everything anyway. They’re doing a protest in front of my office by the way, but I won’t be there [Laughs].
The Movie Blog (et. al):
Now the writers told us about a lot of the secondary characters, and we’re seeing what here? About four of the cars? Can you talk about the Transformers that are here today?
Bay:
I don’t have time to go through the whole thing. Each one has about three paragraphs. That’s Ratchet right there. That’s Iron Hide in the black truck and then that’s a newly transformed Bumblebee that started as an old Camero. Then you’ve got Jazz right here. When you have full height on Jazz I think that he’s about thirteen feet tall. Bumblebee is, I think, sixteen or seventeen feet tall. Ratchet is about twenty three feet, twenty four feet. Iron Hide is very wide when he’s transformed and he’s about a twenty six foot tall robot and then Optimus is, I think, twenty eight. Megatron is like at thirty four feet.
The Movie Blog (et. al):
The writers said that the Ratchet was going to be changed a lot because he was an ambulance in the original, but he still looks ambulance like now.
Bay:
Yeah, we just made more of like one of those modern rescues, mountain type things.
The Movie Blog (et. al):
Is that Furbie truck going to transform?
Bay:
No. We wanted to make it look like those Furbies. Have you seen those little Furbies? We’re going to be blowing up a lot of little Furbies.
