So I get this phone call, July 30th, 2005, from Steven Spielberg.
He calls me up in his jovial self and he says,
"Michael, I want you to direct this movie called Transformers."
I'm like, "Okay, Steven, well, that sounds great.
"Let me think about it, and I'll get back to you."
I hung up the phone
and in the 30 seconds everything that goes through your brain.
"Is that that little robot toy movie?" "Is that like a Small Soldiers movie?"
"That was just Steven Spielberg calling me up. Oh, my God!"
"This is one of my idols, wants me to direct a movie
"that he wants to be involved in."
So I thought about it.
I called Adam Goodman, president of the studio at DreamWorks.
I said, "Adam, so what is this Transformers movie?"
He goes, "Why don't you think about it?"
Adam convinced me to go to Transformer school,
which is in Hasbro in Rhode Island.
And I'm like, "Okay, well, let's make the trek."
So the next morning we went into Hasbro.
You pass this hallway of all the famous toys we all grew up with.
We sat in this big conference room.
I mean, they must have had 25 people in there,
all trying to convince me to do Transformers,
and they started with Transformer school
which is, they basically take you through the entire lore of Transformers.
Now, I have been offered a lot of comic book, superhero movies
in my short film career.
And I have always said no because it really hasn't appealed to me.
But one thing I did spark to recently was Japanese anime movies.
I just love their visuals. It's just a really unique type of cartoon.
And I'm sitting in this Transformer, I guess, like, lecture.
I kept looking at this artwork of just a multitude of images
and there was something from this Japanese artist.
He had some amazingly dark, cool images that...
That just right there in the room inspired me.
I kept thinking to myself, "I need to make this very real.
"I need to make this cool."
I kept thinking about cars transforming at 80 miles an hour.
Action images would just kind of come to my mind,
of, like, "Why would I be interested in doing this movie?"
I did like the lore of Transformers.
It's very noble, it's got good morals, it's interesting.
But it's like, how do you make Transformers
understandable to an adult
who has no knowledge of what Transformer toys are?
We broadened the story in terms of bringing in the American military.
It's this big story, but it kind of comes down to this little story on Earth,
which is all about Sam and having these glasses.
This is kind of how the birth of Transformers happened.
I have always had the lucky fortune of working with military equipment
before anybody else, such as these Ospreys right here.
They have never been used in a movie,
and I don't think many people have shot that Stealth 117 either.
So I've got this hotline to the Pentagon.
I've got this relationship with the film liaison, Phil Strub,
who helped me on Armageddon where we worked with the Air Force.
And Pearl Harbor, where we worked with the Navy and all the branches.
And I called Phil up and I said, "Phil, I'm gonna be doing this movie.
"It's a fantasy movie called Transformers."
And he goes, "Oh, the kids' toy, huh?"
He said, "Well, Mike, you know, if we did have alien robots on Earth,
"I think the American military would be involved.
"And we will bring the fight anywhere we have to.
"So let me read the script. I'm excited to read it."
And I guess the rest is history. He loved it.
And then it's a matter of me going to different bases
and trying to convince bases to be... Imitate Qatar,
which is the forward command for the whole Middle East.
And we found Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico,
which kind of has these white sands
which are test missile ranges for, I think, the Army.
Right here, this was done at Edwards. These are two F-22s,
which are the brand-new planes that are costing $130 million each.
They can take out six F-16s before they can even be spotted.
They are just deadly lethal,
and of course, I was the first to use those as well.
Why does the military let me use this stuff?
Because they look good at what they do in my movies.
And working with these men and women...
You know, I have done many years of working with them, in movies,
and, you know, they are really great people.
And they're really dedicated.
And I really admire them for the service they do for the country.
And, you know, they don't work for a great wage,
but they're just so dedicated to the country and...
You know, so, like, just diligent and just, you know...
I find many of them so intelligent,
and it's always been a great experience when I've worked on these bases.
And I really have fond memories of it.
And very much, they're impressed with our film industry
because we work very much like the military works,
in terms of the different hierarchy and how it works on our sets and crews.
And they are always very sceptical when we show up,
because they think we're going to be a bunch of Hollywood...
But they always come away with, I'm sure, with a great respect.
And they tell us that,
that they come away with a great respect for what we do,
because they see it so similar to the military.
So this was our first transformation here.
And the transformation was... "How are we gonna do this, basically?"
I had my animators do rough versions of it.
But when we had this first version up...
That was the very first version I ever saw of that transformation.
And it was done by an artist named Keiji.
He's Japanese. He speaks like no English.
He is the absolute Rubik's Cube genius to figure those things out,
of how those parts actually move and come together.
I met Keiji in a very odd meeting at Industrial Light and Magic.
I had about 30 ILM artists sitting in a kind of hi-def room
where we are looking at the artwork
that my illustrators had worked for months,
I mean we're talking eight months, on.
And then I saw Optimus Prime's face in his first 3-D kind of,
I guess, iteration of him.
He looked terrible. He had this fat, ugly face.
And I'm like, "You guys got to be kidding me.
"This is awful. What happened to Optimus?"
And all of a sudden, in this small room, this guy pops up in the back,
and he goes, "That Optimus Prime is an insult to the Japanese people.
"That is an insult to the Japanese, I want to do Optimus Prime."
But you can tell someone else was obviously modelling
Optimus Prime's fat, ugly face and Keiji knew this.
And so I said, "Keiji, first of all, this is the most bizarre meeting
"I have ever been to, the biggest, funniest outbreak I have ever seen,
"and you know what, just because of that,
"I'm gonna let you work on Optimus Prime."
So not only did Keiji do Optimus Prime in terms of the 3-D modelling,
but he did the amazing Rubik's Cube
of how we were going to transform these robots.
What the military is very concerned of when they do movies
is that they just want things to be accurate.
They are very into, like, those uniforms.
If they are not Qatar-issue uniforms, we just can't use them.
Right here, I shot this in the Tank Graveyard.
These are old tanks, some are just kind of shells of other tanks,
where they actually put them out in the field,
in this white sand, and they use them as target-practise.
We actually started the shoot, the very first day was...
I shot this little, I guess, Mars rover. I shot that.
I got it assembled because I had this idea for a teaser
that was the very first teaser that came out the summer
where we just began to start... We just started shooting.
I just wanted to mark our date of July 4th and to say we were real.
The very first day of pre-production photography,
I shot in the Tank Graveyard.
My first days really never suck, but this one really sucked.
I get to the set, I'm all excited,
and I'm walking around with my viewfinder, ready to go.
And I get on set an hour before call
and the hour passes and then I'm waiting, "Okay, where's my crew?"
I'm like, "This isn't good."
My crew apparently was just eating dinner.
And normally when you get to set, you show up,
you either eat dinner before...
So my cameraman, Mitchell Amundsen, my operators, everyone's eating.
And I'm like, "Okay." And that pissed me off, the first night.
So I'm like, "Mitch, this is a big movie,
"and you're not going to be eating your burritos any more
"when I show up to set and I'm ready to work."
So I think that kind of shook the ground of everyone, the first night.
Because I got to tell you, when I come on the set
I'm like, I come in... They joke on the set,
"Bay's coming in hot."
It means I like to work. I don't like to fart around,
and everyone knows that I do a lot of set-ups every day.
An average on a movie is 19 to 25. I do 50, 60, sometimes 75.
And these are real set-ups.
And I shot a lot of this movie very, kind of, suburbia.
But I didn't kind of sex it up in terms of making this slick.
This is a classroom that we all know about, we have all been to.
And it's something that makes it more accessible, I think, to everybody.
And like, I have never in my life ever shot in a Burger King.
But you know what? We all eat at Burger King or McDonald's or whatever,
and it just makes it more everyday life.
And I kind of like this, kind of, sci-fi movie
coupled with this suburbia life.
I thought it was a good mix.
And casting Shia...
I actually started to look for kids and I had...
My casting ladies scoured the Earth for the best 16, 17, 18, 19, 20-year-old kid
that can play a 16-year-old out there.
And we looked from London to Australia to Canada,
and Ian Bryce was the first to mention to me Shia LaBeouf.
Or "LaBoof." I call him "Shia LeBuff."
I said, "Well, I saw him in Constantine,
"and I have never seen the movie Holes,
"but in Constantine he was playing a cab driver. He looked a little old."
So the kid came in, and he was kind of skinny
and, like, a little goofy and way over-excited.
I'm like, "Dude, you got to calm down here,
"you're just auditioning with me at my office."
And he goes, "Wow, I just... I want to be an action guy and I want to be a...
"It's just like, wow, I love your movies and I can't believe I'm meeting you."
I'm like, "All right, calm down, let's just do the audition."
And I just instantly liked his energy in the audition.
You know, we had some of our early, early written pages,
where the dialogue really needed to be tweaked and made more real.
And sometimes it's actually good to read with some clunky dialogue,
and you see how actors could fare through,
because a good actor can make any line sound good.
And Spielberg will even tell you that.
That's the art of acting, in a way.
But I started throwing some stuff to Shia,
like improv-ing with him a bit in the audition.
My thing is I love finding actors that can improv
because a lot of my film-making, we improv as we go.
I mean, we have the basis of the scene.
I mean, I kind of learned this on working with Martin and Will on Bad Boys.
Shia just had this great thing.
And, you know, I called Steven, and I said, "I met with Shia."
And Steven goes, "I love Shia." So he was all excited about that.
And I said, "Well, I really want to show you this tape."
I went downstairs and because I had auditioned a couple of other kids
and he just was heads and tails above every other kid that came in.
And I asked the girls in the office,
my assistants who are very blunt, I said,
"So what do you think of him?"
I said, "Just watch the DVD, watch his thing."
They saw and they go like, "Oh, my God, he's great, he's great.
"He's so funny, he's so charming, he's so funny."
So I sent the audition to Steven,
and then I called Shia back.
And meanwhile I had to make this movie for a price.
And I actually do some of my own actor deals
because when I make a movie for a price, I make it for a price.
So I have to play a tough guy and I say, "Basically, if you want the part,
"you got 24 hours to decide. This is what we are going to pay you.
"Yes or no, give me an answer in 24 hours."
So sometimes that's the only way to get a deal done.
I must say, I'm very proud of the fact
that we made this movie for $150,000,000.
But I'll go into that later, okay?
But Shia, I guess he was my first snag on the cast.
And from there it followed to Jon Voight
and then the amazing John Turturro, who I had always wanted to work with.
I originally thought of Steve Buscemi, but Steve was busy directing something,
because I love working with Steve and Turturro is someone I've always loved.
Me being such a huge Coen Brothers fan.
It's like, anyone who can bowl and have a rose in their bowling ball,
I got to work with that guy.
From there we kind of went on to get our female,
and I looked at a lot of females. It was a very hard role to cast
and Megan Fox is someone we auditioned for a movie
I produced for Platinum Dunes for Amityville Horror.
And I remembered her and my casting ladies brought her in.
I said I wanted to see her because I really liked her look.
And in person she's very, kind of, timid and shy. She's from Tennessee.
She had a sweetness about her, and I knew I had to make her tough.
And she was very new at acting.
But I just liked something about her.
There was something that was more exciting to work
with an actress who is fresh and not done a lot of movies.
And so I had Shia come in and work with her.
And we did several auditions with her
and working with Megan, she was so timid in the beginning,
just being on this big, massive set.
But there was a good kind of chemistry between her and Shia.
Shia was able to really lighten her up,
and there were times I really had to make her tough.
And every actor has a button you got to push once in a while,
and you got to figure out what that button is when you're directing them.
And her button was... Because I couldn't get her to emote tough enough
when she was, like, cutting that little robot in half with a saw.
And it just was looking way too girly, way un-tough.
And I'm like, "Megan, remember I told you when you got this part,
"you had to be tough."
And she told me she would hang out with mechanics or whatever
to get this movie part.
Finally, her button was, I said, "Megan, we have so much money on this movie,
"we will stay here all night long to get this one shot.
"I don't care if we stay here 15 hours, we're gonna shoot it all night long.
"Because you will hate this shot right now.
"Come here, look at the monitor."
And all of a sudden that would get her angry. It would get her pissed.
And that was her button where she was able to really give me...
Like emote, and whatnot.
So anyway, I just thought she had a good thing with her and Shia.
And Shia was able to really throw a lot of things at her.
And, you know, her problem was with his improv,
she just kept laughing through the takes. So that wasn't good.
Many of the times we had to CG her face out when she was laughing.
No, I'm kidding, we didn't.
Mojo, the dog, was kind of like an idea...
I just love dogs and like...
You know what, a dog addicted to pain pills with a cast,
that's just funny.
So I said to the writers, I said, "Let's put a dog named Mojo."
So I auditioned a bunch of Chihuahuas.
And this one was, I guess, by far the best one.
Then I thought, what better than having a Chihuahua
that's stoned eating pain pills,
that hobbles up on his little penthouse of a birdhouse.
So you can imagine when I'm telling the art department,
"I want to build this little silly, little doghouse,
"but it's elevated."
Well, this gives the movie audience a laugh,
because that's just funny.
Right here, the dad right here, this is my best friend,
Robert Offer, who's my lawyer, who I have known since nursery school.
He has a problem with his kids.
He doesn't let his kids walk on his grass.
And I have always... I save things up that I learn in life for movies.
And I'm like, "What neurotic dad
"doesn't let their kids walk on his own grass?"
Well, this is Robert Offer right now.
And this right here is complete improv, where...
This is an example of how
we were playing around with Kevin Dunn and Julie White,
this amazing mom who just actually won a Tony. A Tony award.
This is a scene where for Shia, you know, our character Sam...
This is an experience where every guy has had this experience,
where the tough guy comes up
and kind of tries to embarrass you in front of his friends.
This moment right here is the moment where
I think every guy first of all identifies with him.
But you like him instantly because he's able to come back with comedy and wit.
This guy, John, right here, he jumps up on this tree
and I'm like, "Wait a minute, that's great, that's funny.
"I mean, what kind of kooky-ass friend would hang on a tree
"and make this kid embarrassed?"
So I wasn't gonna make this kid the geek,
because I didn't want the geek.
I wanted the geek who was sharp, who was witty
but was able to come back with humour.
And right here with this whole "colouring book" thing,
this is, I think, where you kind of fall in love with this kid.
People were very worried about the tone of this movie,
where it was very edgy and hard
and then it had these funny kind of suburbia touches.
And, you know, that's the thing that everyone talks about,
the tone of the movie. They love the tone of the movie,
and that's what, around the world, when I did press for this movie,
everyone talks about the tone and how funny it is.
And, you know, that's just kind of what I like doing.
It's my thing.
So when I signed on to do this movie,
God, there was a lot of talk on the Internet about,
"Michael Bay will wreck this movie, he won't know how to do this movie.
"He doesn't know anything about Transformers."
You know, stuff like, "Michael Bay is wrecking my childhood."
"Death to Michael Bay." Boy, I had a lot of death threats, I must say.
They even actually protested at one of my offices,
but it was an office I had moved out of two years prior,
so, you know, I guess they weren't that smart, to figure out where to protest.
But I remember listening to stuff on the Internet.
I would listen to some of their ideas that they would talk about,
because fan support is very important,
and I wanted them to be happy with Transformers.
But I was trying to introduce a world of people
that have never seen Transformers to this movie.
And, I think, in a way, it was better that I wasn't a Transformer fan,
because I was able to make this movie more accessible
to the non-fan, I guess.
So I must say right now, I am a true Transformer fan.
I have probably thought about robots
more than anybody in the past year and a half.
And probably... I thought about robots
more than anybody else on Earth for the past year and a half.
We would have artwork that would leak.
I mean, it was truly one of the most sought-after movies
and talked about on the Internet than I can remember in a very long time.
Our art server had 39,000 attempted hacks
in the month of January, in the year 2006.
And we had to literally get, like, almost Pentagon-type quality encryption.
And they actually personally hacked into my personal computer.
And they were able to steal one script.
We know who stole it, and I was able to get the script back.
But luckily it only got out once.
So there were so many leaks that I decided to actually keep the script...
Just literally, I had the only original script in my computer.
And certain actors had ones that were older
and everyone had coded scripts.
And we collected all the scripts from the crew.
We gave them out and they gave it back
and all those different measures.
And there was one script, a very old script
that got out on the Internet that everyone read,
and everyone kept commenting on, and...
But it was so old, scripts can change.
In a month you can change so much in a script.
And theirs was, like, probably five months
older than what the script was in the movie.
I mean, we had... In case the script got out,
we had names of our robots, a.k.a. names.
But there were many characters that I tried to create.
Like, let me give you an example. We were working on this movie,
budgeting this movie and they have to make these toys,
like moulds and like the idea of these type of moulds,
a year and a half out. We didn't even have a script
and Ian Bryce came to me and says,
"Hasbro needs to know what Transformer vehicles
"and what are you using for the Decepticons?
"Autobots and Decepticons. What kind of cars?"
And I'm, like, literally had to come to a choice with, like,
"Okay, I think, maybe a tank.
"I don't know if we can get that amazing bomb-searching Buffalo truck,
"that's brand new, that they are sending to Iraq,
"if we can maybe do that one.
"I definitely, if I can get an F-22, but I don't know if we can get an F-22."
So that's how we kind of had to decide. We had to decide very quickly.
I also wanted to make other characters, like in the boom box on Air Force One.
I like this kind of character,
and I think, if we do Transformers 2,
we're gonna have a lot more unique characters,
like this but also bigger.
And just, you can imagine where the mind can go here.
I mean, I designed some...
With the artists, some amazingly huge characters
who just got to be too big, too costly, too expensive, whatever.
And it was Steven who said,
"You know what? We should probably just keep this kind of like
"six against five or something, where it's a little bit more manageable."
And I think he's right that we keep it smaller
to kind of try to introduce what's going on here.
Steven says I saved 30 grand right there by doing that little one camera move.
We had a guy grab the boom box. He's right. So I saved an effect.
Then right in here, this is our actually full-scale puppet of this... Frenzy here.
Frenzy was animated by a French artist
at ILM.
I liked this very quirky kind of movement.
And when I was directing the animation,
because I would actually every single day,
I would work with animators
where they would send me down what they are working on
so that I can actually direct them,
you know, after these shots that... We have done these plate shots
and try to direct their acting.
I got to tell these characters so well
that I knew that when another artist was working on this Frenzy character,
he wasn't the French guy.
I'm like, "Well, did you guys have a different animator working on this?"
They are like... You hear them kind of over the conference call, "Yeah."
So I'm like, "You got to put the French guy back on,
"because it's a total different character."
You know, and he says, "He's on another movie, he's working on Pirates."
I said, "Well, you got to get the French guy back.
"Whatever you got to do, you got to get the French guy back."
My theory on effects, well, it all comes down to lighting.
And I feel everyone in their brain
has something that we don't really know that's there,
but we can tell when something is not lit right.
We don't know why it's there,
but we just know there's something wrong with the shot,
and it's all coming down to lighting.
Because we are used to looking at the world
the way we see it through our eyes.
After I did Pearl Harbor, Dennis Muren said to me...
He says, "You raised the bar on effects."
And I'm like, "What did he mean by that?"
And he goes, "You have just made effects more realistic."
And the first time I went to ILM, or used them, was on Pearl Harbor.
And I had a big meeting up there where I just felt
that Lucas' stuff is awesome, but it's very pastel.
In terms of their light, it doesn't look real,
the shadows aren't dark enough,
it doesn't have enough contrast.
It doesn't have the right ripple reflections on metal.
So that was one of the big achievements
I think we worked with on Pearl Harbor,
in terms of shooting a movie at 12:00 noon,
and making it, not disguising it in night and showing it in broad daylight.
And making the planes as real as possible and all these other ships.
And so I think that's what Dennis was talking about.
Well, you know this, we had to take it to a brand new level,
in terms of trying to make reality here.
So we spent a tremendous amount of time
and software and just trying to invent new tricks
on how to light these robots.
They use this process called ray tracing.
When you look at a car, you go out on a parking lot...
I've shot a lot of car commercials, so...
I was trying to explain, you can't just have one quality of light
on a car, on a piece of sheet metal.
It will reflect soft light, hard light
it will have pings, it will have long lines.
Cars are, like, a nightmare to light,
in terms of if you're actually doing a total digital model of a car.
So you probably couldn't have done this movie,
I guess, as of two years ago.
So in terms of our effects,
we had Industrial Light and Magic that were heading up Transformers,
and we had Digital Domain, which is an effects company
that I recently purchased with a couple of other partners.
Those are the ones that did...
Both companies did the work for this movie.
ILM did three-quarters and Digital Domain did the last quarter.
ILM came down and they talked to me
about something that was used in Star Wars III.
It was a digital model of a character
that was kind of like a robot, and it was so uncomplicated.
I'm like, "Guys, we have to go so much farther than this."
General Grievous was ILM's most complicated digital model at the time
and it was, if you look at it, it's so simple
compared to the complexity that we needed to do our models.
They talked about these models which finally, when they were done,
Optimus Prime is made of 10,108 parts
that all have to move, not intersect,
and it's just an immensely
complicated digital model.
They say they're the most complicated digital models ever made.
So this is actually Shia's first night, and you can see his nappy hair right now.
I just kept looking at his hair, I said,
"Dude, we gotta do something with your hair."
And he says, "Mike, what's the matter with my hair?"
I said, "It just looks nappy. We gotta make it cooler."
I wasn't allowed to cut it because he was still shooting Disturbia.
And this is his first scene for the movie,
and those dogs chasing him are actually killer police dogs.
And Shia's running,
and there's a man in a big dog suit who stands behind him,
and he was there with a whip, and he was calling the dogs.
Well, they actually missed the guy with the big dog suit
where they're supposed to chomp on the arm,
and they kept going after Shia.
Shia was almost killed that night, I am not kidding you.
Thank God he was fast.
It wasn't good when the guy with the whip, he says, "Uh-oh, uh-oh."
The whole crew started chasing after the dogs
with the big chains on their necks, so we were able to tackle them.
If you have military assistance, you have to have advisors on the set
that are from the Pentagon that make sure
that we're doing things correctly.
They won't tell us, like, what lines we have to say and what we can't say,
but it's just gotta be accurate.
When Rachael here had to go into this room,
I was just gonna have her slip into the room,
but we had to have this other guy knock on the window.
That was the only way they were gonna let me do this shot,
because they would say there would be no way in the Pentagon for her
to slip into a private room like this.
So you gotta make these little concessions here and there.
And I said to the guy, "Are you sure that would never happen?"
"No way, that would be impossible." "Are you sure?"
"No, that's impossible."
So, okay, I'm, like, "All right, this is the way we gotta block this scene."
This was actually the very first day of official shooting right here.
New Mexico, White Sands.
The way we made the Skorponoks work
was I remembered something we did in Armageddon
where we did these primer cord explosions that...
Primer cord's like a very stable kind of explosive device.
It's like rope.
And we put like 150 of these in a row,
and they had a computer that was able
to fire milliseconds apart from each other so it made a ripple effect.
And that's how we did this shot right here with this ripple shooting up
and the thing jumping out right behind them.
I remember doing the animatic for that shot.
I said, "You know what? That shot's a trailer shot."
And that was Tyrese's second day
where the guys actually had to run over a carpet of explosives
as the stuff was fired behind them.
I'm, like, "Guys, do not stop, do not trip,
"and we're gonna fire these things off,
"and this stand's gonna go, because it will really hurt your foot."
So that look is, I guess, one of fear and real terror, there.
A lot of these guys, these rangers here, are the real deal.
Many of them were very decorated United States SEALs and Rangers.
This scene right here with Josh
was something that I remember a real SEAL telling me.
It happened down in Grenada where they were trapped in a house.
They lost all their come,
and they had a cell phone where they had to call to the Pentagon
and literally had to get a credit card to get out of the country
and link up with an operator at the Pentagon to get an air strike to come in.
And they had to vector in their position.
So something I always held in my ideas of wanting to get into a movie,
and so this was an idea of making it
kind of fun and serious at the same time.
I just like the whole chain of events
and how fast you can see this air strike come in.
It's called an Air Force Combat Controller. That's what Tyrese plays.
An Air Force Combat Controller is a job that a guy can use a gun.
He can help them in battle, but he's a very important tool
in terms of getting very deadly air support,
which is what they call "danger close,"
which is where they'll shoot missiles,
and they give a precise position where the friends are,
and they will give a precise position where the foes are.
And these missiles will sometimes come in 50 feet, 20 feet,
that's why they call it "danger close" there.
You know, sometimes you think we're "movie-ising" this thing up
where the guys are coming in with,
I guess, those laser-sighting things on their guns.
That's called marking a target.
These guys on the AWACS, that was done on Edwards Air Force Base.
I told these guys on the AWACS... These are all the real guys.
I said to the guy in charge of the AWACS, I said,
"How would you run this mission?
"This is what's going down on the ground.
"This is what's happening."
And literally within three minutes, these guys were talking.
I did not add one line here.
This is exactly how they talked. That's as fast as they talk.
And, literally, we were capturing it like a documentary.
It's amazing how fast everyone's talking over each other.
And a multitude of things going on.
And what's going on, Josh, right now
is laser-designating for these missiles coming in right now,
and that's actually how it's done.
These Warthogs are, I must say, very, kind of, scary
'cause they've got a very low, kind of, sound to them
and they get very low to the ground,
and they're slow enough where you can see them
and they just got this evil whine to it, and they're just so deadly, these things.
Skorponok was our first scene that we shot
and it was one of the first scenes that was kind of digitally completed.
And that was kind of, I guess, the basis of how these Transformers should look.
I started showing some of my friends this scene and everyone kept saying,
"Well, what is it, an animation? What is it?"
And then I'd show them this scene
and then instantly, this is a scene they go,
"I get it. I understand the movie now."
"You're doing this kind of in a real-life way."
And it's got fun, and, you know, it's kind of sci-fi.
So I guess this is when we started convincing a lot of people.
Like even the Japanese came in, the Toho distributors.
I had to do a lot of dog-and-pony shows for a lot of people
because we were, I guess, one of the very few non-sequels of the summer,
and we had to kind of position ourselves.
And a lot of theatre owners,
"Well, what is Transformers? I don't get it."
So we did this little compilation reel of 20 minutes,
and it's something that we started showing around to theatre owners
and to try to get people on board, to understand what we have here.
Because everyone thought this is, kind of,
"What is it, silly?" "Is it animation?" Is it this, is it that?
We started showing people this.
Like, for example, Toho,
which is the biggest movie distributor ownership in Japan,
which is a gigantic market.
They came into my trailer, I showed them 20 minutes of stuff,
and, literally, you just heard the word...
And I guess that meant "Good" in Japanese.
They upped our estimate,
they doubled our estimate of what we're gonna make in Japan,
and they gave us the number one house...
Toho, I guess, chain in Japan.
But that reel was a way to really get people on board with this movie,
you know, 'cause I kind of knew what we had early on,
and I remember going in to see my very first fight in Vegas.
A live fight. It was Oscar de la Hoya.
And I walked in and there was Peter Chernin, who I'm friendly with,
and, you know, good jovial fun, he's walking in with his friend.
And he goes, "So, I hear you got Transformers."
And I said, "So, I hear you got Die Hard!"
And I'm, like, "Yeah, they're the same date."
And I just kind of said, "Yeah, but you'll move, don't worry."
And, of course, they moved.
You know, it's kind of a game of chicken.
I think they saw our second teaser.
We wanted it to be a hard-edged teaser, 'cause we wanted to show the fans
that we're gonna do a serious, cool Transformer movie
and we weren't making it too kiddy,
and it was going to appeal to the 30-year-old guy and girl
that, you know, grew up with Transformers,
as well as the younger kids that are just getting into it.
You can tell right here, I mean this guy, Omar, right there,
he wasn't in the script,
but I always add weird stuff like this right here... Going through glass.
Why are we doing that? I don't know, it's funny, all right?
That's just my humour.
So this is where the studio goes,
"What are you doing? Is this director out of his mind?"
But in every single movie theatre,
I've seen it around the world, they all laugh.
You know, what can I tell you?
We had $145 million to make this movie.
It doesn't sound like a lot.
I mean, it sounds like a lot, but it's really not.
When you look at some of these movies like Pirates, which is $350
and Spider-Man which is $325,
I don't even know how you spend that much money on a movie.
I'm really proud of the fact that we did this movie
for ultimately $151 at the end of the day.
We were very judicious about where we used the effects.
And I must say a lot of that is attributed to Steven,
'cause Steven would put the reins on me.
I mean, literally, Steven is very, very tough about budget.
He wanted me to think really hard about how many effects I used
and to use them and choose them wisely.
He would say, like, "Listen, when I did Jurassic Park,
"it was only 50-something effects, and we all remember it as more.
"When I did War of the Worlds, it was only 117 effects."
I kind of thought, "Are you kidding? I would think it'd be more than that."
So he really got me to thinking how to use my effects wisely
'cause they can get very pricey
and that's why the budget can just balloon.
So I literally animaticked the whole movie, in terms of every scene
where we were gonna do big effects.
Literally, a lot of these effects in the movie are exactly how we did them
in our little Maya files in my office.
I started to get excited about potentially what I can visually show.
Like this shot right here of Shia going in, this whole scene.
A kid on his stupid mom's bike that is now gonna confront a monster.
I kept thinking this could be a movie...
Every kid has to have a movie that they own, you know.
With me growing up, it was like E. T.
and really, like, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars.
Those were two movies that kind of...
There are seminal moments in my childhood of cool movies I saw,
and that's what I wanted this movie to be for kids.
You know, it's something new and different that they can discover.
It's not a repeat of something.
You know, I can't tell you how many kids have come up to me
saying, "It's my favourite movie I've ever seen!
"I love Transformers! I can't wait to see Transformers 2!"
You know, this is why you do movies, and I think people responded to it
because it was kind of new and different.
And, well, what I'm really surprised about
is the massive age range this movie had,
from 50, 60-year-olds to, I mean, young four-year-olds.
I don't get that. I don't see how four-year-olds can see this movie
and not think it's too scary or whatnot.
I don't know if I really believe in parents bringing their kids to a movie like this
when they're that young.
I think what really inspired me to do this movie were not only animatics
but the illustrations.
The movie started to become more real, and there's a charm about the movie.
I like this whole magic of these two kids kind of discovering these things.
And, you know, my favourite scene, I think, in this movie is...
It's kind of ironic. Thinking back, it's like all my movies, like, first hour in,
there was always one montage. That kind of...
You can kind of see this in all my movies like The Rock.
Sean Connery and Nic Cage breaking in into the Rock,
and then Armageddon, the astronauts lifting off
or Pearl Harbor, the Japanese kind of getting ready to attack
or the asteroids coming in and landing and the kids meeting the Autobots.
I kind of have a theme, I guess, in my movies.
I do these montages that really inspire me,
and they always seem to happen an hour in.
But that's kind of my favourite scene,
when we see Optimus kind of transform in front of the kids.
So when we're doing scenes like this,
I'm sometimes, often times, in the car with Shia and Megan,
and we're driving with the stunt driver,
and we're driving very fast and controlled,
but it really gets your adrenalin going, I must say.
Shia always says I'm the director that will put my knee pads on,
I'll be right next to the actors.
When I do action... Oh, God, you hear these rumours.
It's the kind they love to just get onto the...
"Michael yells." "Michael's a screamer." Blah, blah, blah.
No, Michael's like a tough-ass basketball coach
that is in your face, especially when you're doing action.
For one, because of safety,
two, because I'm trying to get your adrenalin level
where I think it needs to be for that scene.
How many action scenes do you see
where it seems like actors are just kind of walking through it?
I really want that adrenalin to be real, and I want you to look energised.
So that's kind of how I work, you know?
So the screaming only comes, I guess, when I'm doing tough action,
and I want you to get to that energy level, you know.
And it's also, a lot of these times,
I'm very safety-conscious, and I take it personally,
and I'm like my own A.D. on my sets.
I work with an A.D., I worked with Simon this time,
but I move my sets forward for myself,
and I want everyone to know what I'm thinking and I'm vocal about it.
Like, "We're moving over here! We're coming over here!"
And so I've got a good projecting voice that, you know, like,
"Let's get our day done, and let's, like, do it."
Granted, I like to laugh just like the next guy, and I tease.
I am a professional teaser with my crew.
And it's funny when you see new crew members come on.
They're day players, whatever, and I'm teasing,
'cause I'll act it like I really mean it.
I'm totally screwing around with people,
but my crew that's been with me for 16 years,
they all know that I'm screwing around with you.
But I like picking on people, and I like being picked on, too,
just as long as you're good at picking on people. It's fun.
But I do like to have a good environment on the set
and especially work with people that I really like being around
that look at it as a career, not as a job.
Because, let me tell you, I know everyone's job on this set.
I've been doing this since I'm 24,
and I will be the first to point out to you when you're not doing a good job.
But you know what?
A director's only as good as his or her crew,
and the studio wanted to ship me off to Australia, then to Canada.
We went to check out Canada. I felt Australia was too far away.
And we went up to Canada and I just, like, "Oh, my God..."
I was trying to make it work, trying to make it work.
Looking around, scouting, and I realised this will be a waste of money.
It'll just be...
There's no way the crew can do the serious kind of stunt work
that we really do on our sets,
'cause they just don't have a lot of great stunt work up there,
and you gotta ship in too many people, and it just would be a lost cause.
And so the studio gave me some grief for not going up there.
So I ended up giving 30% of my fees so I can shoot with my crew in America,
and that's because I'm loyal to my crew, and they're just, I think, the best.
The sound work was done by Ethan Van der Ryn and Mike Hopkins
who did the sound work for Lord of the Rings and King Kong.
Mike is from New Zealand, Ethan was trained up at Lucasfilm.
And I must say, awesome sound.
When you listen on this DVD, it is just awesome sound.
My mixers, Kevin O'Connell and Greg Russell...
Kevin, by the way, is the biggest Academy loser in Academy history.
He's lost, I think, 20 times.
He's done some amazing movies. He's an amazing mixer.
As a team, they're amazing mixers.
And Kevin and Greg said to me, in all their time on mixing,
they felt this was the most inventive sound work they've ever worked with.
And, meanwhile, they feel it's one of their finest sound designs
and mixing efforts that they've done as of yet.
We had to invent so many different sounds here,
and it just gives these robots such personality,
and it's really just a launching pad for where we can go on number two.
I have no idea why this scene right here,
and I've seen this movie from Korea to Australia, all over Europe,
America, just why right here in the movie,
they applaud when this yellow car comes up.
Oh, that shot. Let me tell you about that shot right there.
That was the most patient I've ever been
for doing a stunt in the history of my career.
That took exactly three and half hours for that guy to go up on two wheels.
Why was he on two wheels?
Well, he was on two wheels because, I don't know,
I wanted the guy up on two wheels
and, you know, wanted to go old school with the stunt there.
That Camaro was a prototype that I saw
when I was looking through all these car companies,
new kind of prototypes that were coming out.
Then I saw this at the skunk works at GM,
this little, kind of secret building in California
where they do kind of these concept cars,
and I kind of knew right away that was the car.
That was gonna be Bumblebee,
and the fans were gonna give me grief because it wasn't a Volkswagen,
but there's just no way I could do this movie if this was a VW bug.
And so I just felt that was the car.
So there's a scene with this little girl in her bed.
And, you know, this girl was five,
and I actually hired two of them for the exact same scene,
and I shot one shot with one and another one literally with the other girl,
and we were like flipping back and forth, 'cause I knew...
The studio teacher that comes with the kid
is a kind of a social worker that watches the kids.
She said, "I've never seen a director in my 20 years
"ever hire two girls for the same role."
I said, "Well, at 11:30 at night,
"when we have 20 minutes left on our time,
"where you have to take the kids, we're doing the most important shot
"with this robot getting out of the pool,
"and I guarantee you, one of them will crap out."
And sure enough, by the time we got to the pool, one of them had crapped out.
And so we used the little blond girl.
This was a fun night for the crew, I must say,
because we're up there at this house, it's 8:00 at night,
and I said to the guy, "So what crane do we have?"
And everyone kind of looked at me. It was like the silent look.
"Crane?"
"Well, guys, you saw the animatic, what we need to do, right?
"We have to move this, like, long move, and whatever."
Well, let me tell you, they called every place around Hollywood.
I don't know how they manufactured this weird-ass crane,
but anyway, we got to do this shot.
And this was our very first take with the girl.
Now it's very hard, 'cause she has to follow this pole above her six times
and right there when she does that little stutter step, I just loved it,
'cause she tripped and it just looked more real.
And ILM said, "Whoa! Let's use the other shot
"'cause she looks like she screwed up."
I said, "That's what it's about. It's about a kid screwing up. That's what it is."
Now the concept car, 'cause we only had one in the world,
we had to actually build it.
And once we got the CAD files and the okay...
It's very hard to get CAD files from a car company
because of thievery or whatever they call it.
This shot right here with Optimus transforming,
this is one of the shots we made very early on in the animatic process
that got me excited about the movie.
This is almost verbatim to our animatic that we created in my office.
I think this moment right here when I finally heard all the sounds
with Peter Cullen's amazing voice.
Thank God the fans actually...
I kept listening to fans, and they were right.
You guys were right all the way through.
But I just wanted to have an open mind of who can play these robots, so...
You know you can't fault me for that.
But that was Optimus Prime. When he speaks, let me tell you...
But when Ethan and Mike added those sounds to Optimus,
it just made it come to life.
You know when you look at these effects right here, it's just so real
in terms of the reflections of the metal and how they fit in.
You know, there's the whole thing about Transformers about mass-shifting,
and to me, that was just always a complex thing.
It was very hard to get across in movie-making,
and I wanted to keep the idea of the robots.
If you're coming from a vehicle, you've gotta kind of stay that same size
of whatever that vehicle you could possibly stretch it out to.
So, yeah, I got some flak about
changing Optimus from a flat-nose to a long-nose,
and the long-nose just made him so he can be 28 feet
instead of the 20 feet that he would've been with a flat-nose truck.
And, you know, I got a lot of flak for that.
And then I got more flak for putting flames on Optimus.
Boy, I mean, it was literally... Death threats all started over again,
and the "Damn you, Michael Bay!" And whatever the hell it was.
I mean it's just, you know, I wanted flames.
I mean, if you want a pink house,
I want a green house. What's the difference?
I'm the director, and, it's just, that's what I wanted.
And I knew the flames were barely visible
when you saw him when he was transformed,
and it kind of gave the impression that he had ribs.
And it was a picture of a truck that I saw, and I wanted to copy it.
And I must say,
I went to my teamster captain,
and I said... They're in charge of painting vehicles, and I said,
"I'm telling you, a white guy is not allowed to paint those flames, okay?
"I want, what we call in LA, I want a cholo.
"I want a guy who is an artist
"who knows how to do these amazing kind of cholo cars.
"It's art. Find him, all right?"
And so the funniest picture I got in this entire movie was our guy.
He's from Mexico. He had a cup of coffee with his hat backwards.
He's sitting in the art kitchen. They took a picture of him and said,
"Here he is. This is your guy.
"He doesn't speak any English. We're gonna use an interpreter.
"But he does amazing flames."
And I gotta tell you, they were the most beautiful flames I've ever seen.
I must say, I did audition Peter Cullen twice.
They wanted me to go with Frank Welker for Megatron.
To me, Frank Welker, great voice artist, but it just sounded too cartoon to me,
and I don't think I could really tell Frank to change it for this movie.
It just wouldn't feel right.
So early on in the process
when I picked certain actors
to be what I would interpret that character to be...
Like, let me give you an idea. Liam Neeson was Optimus Prime,
Michael J. Fox was Bumblebee,
Hugo Weaving was Megatron.
And, you know, just in terms of movies
that I wanted the artist to look at, to kind of emulate,
not the way they move, but just how regal,
like, Liam Neeson is, to, you know, Hugo Weaving.
And it's just his voice, Hugo's voice just kept sticking in my head for Megatron.
One of my producers, Lorenzo di Bonaventura,
who used to run Warner Brothers, he did the Matrix movies.
And he called Hugo and got him into doing this,
and Hugo was down in Australia and I was directing him from here via iChat
and they had the movie down there,
and it was amazing how I was able to direct him so far away
in modern technology.
But he just has an awesome voice for Megatron.
So I never get sick when I shoot.
You just kind of have this adrenalin that carries you
for a full year-and-a-half, two years through a movie.
But one day I had a little vacation down in Cabo,
'cause I guess there was a union break we had,
and I leaned down in the elevator of Air Force One, I'm like, "Uh-oh!
"Maybe we got a little Cabo-Wabo something going on there."
And within an hour, I just got violently sick with the flu,
and I'm sitting in my chair, and I'm shaking and I'm sweating,
and I'm like, "I'm okay, I can direct. I'm okay, I'm okay."
And you know how you get when you get fluey.
So I went outside of the trailer, and I had to lie down on the asphalt
'cause I was so cold. I'm shivering.
And my producer, Ian Bryce, is standing there and says, "Buddy, you gotta go."
I said, "No, no, I've never gone home ever, ever in my career,
"ever gone home sick. No, I'm not going home."
And then we had some gigantic days like, literally, two days away,
we had to shoot downtown at the cost of, like, $375 each,
and it's a big deal to shut all that stuff downtown.
And then the set doctor came by and she says,
"You got 102-and-a-half. You gotta go home," so...
Anyway, I kicked it kind of, sort of, like the next day, or whatever,
but I was sick and kind of whatever,
and I had to direct in my trailer, so they had a microphone.
And I was kind of like Coppola in the Silverfish where he would direct,
but he had a Jacuzzi in his.
But I was trying to direct my crew
and they were so slow without me on the set.
We went from 50-something set-ups a day to 15, and I'm on a microphone,
and it was just like, "Guys, you are so slow. What's going on?"
It was pretty funny.
So, you know, working on these scenes,
they are looking at literally window washer poles with different heights.
And those arms we had two window washer poles with tennis balls on them
so that they can actually kind of have an eye line to watch.
It makes it kind of hard
when you're trying to do camera moves without things there
and trying to imagine what fits in.
That's why the animatics were huge helps for the actor to see.
There are times like this, this is a shot I made up on the fly,
just having Optimus look in.
I always do these crazy things, like, this should've been a set,
but I like shooting in a real house where I have the access to the outside.
The houses are always way too small, locations are small.
Sometimes locations just feel better to me.
And even though this is a minuscule room we're shooting in
with a crew. It's sometimes ridiculous.
Right there, she grabbed that box.
That was kind of an improv thing. And he ran over.
I mean, that's got to be his porn box, I would think, you know.
Every boy's got that somewhere in the room,
and guess we all understand that, don't we?
The way we'd get facial emotions like this from Optimus, I'd actually...
The animators up north or down here at DD
would kind of imitate something, video themselves or whatnot,
and then they'd kind of animate how that would work.
Or we'd actually use actors to do certain things.
We wouldn't use motion capture like you would here...
First time I showed this scene to Steven,
I said, "Steven, I want you to...
"I'm almost done with my rough cut. I want you to see some scenes."
He goes, "No, no, no. I want to see the movie when it's all done."
I go, "Come on, Steven, I want you to see this scene."
So he was watching this scene particularly,
around the house, with the robots around the house.
And it was hysterical
because he kept hitting me on the leg and laughing like a kid.
And I'm like, "What are you doing?"
And he goes, "I have never seen robots do this."
It was a funny moment
because, considering I filed his Raiders of the LostArk storyboards...
And now this guy is slapping me on the leg saying he's never seen robots.
And I'm like, "You're the dude that's invented dinosaurs,
"and you've seen everything."
And he goes, "But I've never seen this." So that was kind of a fun moment.
Also a funny moment,
when we saw the first cut at my house in my screening room,
he kept giving me high fives when he was watching the movie.
Spielberg giving me high fives when he's watching the movie.
When a good scene would come on,
you'd see his arm go up, "Bam!" Another high five.
But, you know, when I do scenes, I actually...
When I'm doing the illustration and the animatic process...
Like, a shot like this.
This was like a seminal shot you base these scenes around.
And so this shot was created very early on
in the animatic process.
Those are the scenes I kind of hang my hat on.
Or those are what the charm of the movie is.
John Turturro in his character study,
he kept saying he was trying to imitate me.
Now, I don't understand how his character
is even the slightest bit imitating me because that's not who I am.
But according to him, that's what I am. See, I would never do that.
John's character, we kind of felt that he was a Sector Seven Agent,
that his great-great-grandfather was a Sector Seven Agent.
He's been doing it for generations.
It was actually in the movie,
in some of the dialogue, and we actually cut it out,
made it pretty funny for his character.
He thinks he still lives with his mom and whatnot.
He was questioning his sexuality in this movie.
I just didn't think that was really necessary.
John, I don't think we have to really go there.
I think you're a guy, okay?
So just let's keep it at that, all right?
He was a great delight to work with.
He has the best Scorsese imitation you have ever seen.
I think we must have that.
We must have that somewhere in the making of.
I don't know where we found this little dog stick,
but I just thought that was a funny moment.
"Put that thing around the dog, please."
Mom walks out and she says, "I'll kick your ass."
Judy's a funny woman.
We actually hung these actors on this little contraption
that would spin them around.
I got on the car with the operators, and it's quite fun.
I got to tell you, this stunt, where we strapped cameras, right there, bam,
that looked like it hurt.
The scene where we pull the guns out,
look at the driver in the car with John Turturro.
We had little Jazz here. He uses his magnetic gun right there.
If you freeze it, watch as the gun... Watch the guns fly up past the guys.
I want you to go back in that DVD and freeze it.
Because I told the driver, I said, "No, you will not get hurt.
"They're rubber guns and they're on bungee cords and they're gonna pull."
If you freeze it, you'll see it hit him kind of on the temple.
He goes, "I thought you said it wasn't gonna hurt." Well, I'm sorry.
I don't know, I was kind of crazy when I told the writers,
I said, "I really want to have Bumblebee piss on John Turturro."
Call me crazy, but you know what? At least the audiences laughed.
You know, doing Transformers, I got to tell you,
a bunch of adults running around the set the first couple of days
and saying the word "Bumblebee" and "Megatron"...
I remember the first couple of days,
literally about 50 airmen, military extras
at Holloman Air Force Base
and I said, "I know, guys, this sounds really stupid,
"but you're gonna have this big robot fly in, transform, land right here."
And the guys were in their 20s, 30s, they go, "Would that be Starscream?"
I'm like... You know, it was...
I honestly did not think
there were that many fans around the world for this thing.
And how much it meant to people that are now in their 30s...
Being told but seeing in your life is a different thing.
But for Hasbro to say, "This is the largest-selling toy around the world.
"It's the top-five largest selling toy around the world for 20 years."
I think that's a big accomplishment.
But I just didn't realise the depth
of how many fans there were around the world.
And, you know, right now, you just kind of...
As we were getting ready to release the movie,
the trailers were always, like, in Yahoo,
like, the number-one downloaded, most watched, consistently
from when they came out Christmas till almost the day of the release.
Like, Pirates would come up there, and they would fall back down,
but we were always one and two for the entire time.
And that kind of told me something.
It actually became one of the most downloaded trailers in history,
according to Yahoo that tracks this stuff.
So all those kind of signs were telling me something.
And when it opened and it became the largest non-sequel opening of all time,
I guess I was...
I just honestly did not think it could do as well as it's done so far.
I mean, it's gonna pass 300-plus million here.
And it's right up there with the Spider-Man and Pirates 3,
these gigantic franchises.
And internationally, it's gonna...
Right now we're already at 260-something,
and it'll probably go to 350, 400, I don't know.
Anyway, I guess it was a good gamble for the studio on this.
A lot of people would've done that helicopter shot right there digitally,
but not me, for some reason.
That was a real helicopter very close to that bus.
I just like things real. As much real as I can get, I'm gonna do.
It seems to be like a dying art with a lot of directors now
where you do your own stunts, you do a lot of stunts and stuff like that.
Doing these gigantic moves on this special Akela crane,
which is like 75 feet tall, we're able to do these big drops.
This was kind of a chaotic scene
because we had four helicopters, one airship,
and it was quite noisy in this river of...
I don't know if that's...
I don't know what's in that river. That polluted river right there.
We actually saved a guy's life in the river that night.
We just so happened to be there
when a guy in a hospital uniform was floating by.
And literally, there's no getting out of that thing
because that channel travels very quickly.
And it's all algae, there's no stopping, it goes all the way to the ocean.
One of our electricians just threw out a piece of cable and saved this guy,
who was like an escapee from some hospital.
I've never worked on a movie
where obviously I've had to do so much digital animation,
character animation.
It was really one of the most fascinating things about this movie,
is actually directing these kind of creatures
and ultimately making them feel
like you've got a soul inside of them when you see these things.
And I think it's done through sound and facial stuff.
You just start to feel for this thing that doesn't even exist.
I think that's kind of the accomplishment of the movie.
Right there, right there, that's the mock-up of Bumblebee
we actually built for 200 grand.
Really complicated to build. You couldn't really shoot it that closely.
Like you're gonna see right there,
it's the mock-up which saves money on digital shots.
And then there again you see the mock-up,
and then we go back to a digital shot.
So if you use it sparingly, right there,
the five, six, seven shots with that mock-up just saved a lot of money.
We only had mock-up pieces of like, Optimus Prime,
and certain head sections but nothing that detailed.
We built Megatron's legs in the chamber where he's being held.
We built about 30 feet of his legs, which cost us half a million dollars,
but when we use it through those shots it actually saves you on effect shots.
Because every one of those pieces...
Reason why it's so expensive, you've got to carve it out of foam,
and then it's got to be on a steel kind of frame to hold it up.
This shot right here, I call it "the jungle gym Optimus."
I just hated the blocking of it,
but we were just kind of stuck with the shot that we had shot.
Often times the animators
had to squeeze in where we could fit our robots.
We got to be very good at shooting robots after a while.
We used a special tool.
It's a Porsche Cayenne with a special crane on it where we were able
to move at a high rate of speed on a car
and we can do these amazing crane moves.
It was actually a robot-cam where we could spin around.
Right there walking through National Military Command,
that was a room that I'd been to,
it's in the basement of the Pentagon, that's where they run wars and whatnot.
And the thing that I always remember was going down there,
they have these two Lucite doors
that are like bullet-proof and blast-proof and you have to go through these doors.
The chamber that we take this conversation that comes up
is called the Vault in the Pentagon, actually.
It's this soundproof room that has this vault door
and it has five seats
for the Secretary of Defence and the four different branches of military,
with a direct link to the President.
They feel that this room is like,
the fewer people that know about what's going on,
the better a secret could be kept.
We kind of designed it exactly the way I saw the room
from my memory, I guess, when I was down at the Pentagon.
They actually took me into the room
where the two guys are there to launch nuclear weapons.
They sit in their own vault. It was kind of an odd experience.
I was down at the Pentagon
when I was doing Pearl Harbor, the tap dance.
I met with every branch of the military because of the cooperation we needed.
Actually, Transformers, since Black Hawk Down and Pearl Harbor...
This has been the largest military cooperation
that they've done thus far since those two movies.
This is actually the very first stuff
we ever shot for Transformers right here, the Mars rover here.
It was part of our teaser.
I've always been fascinated,
what if the Mars rover found something that was of human origin?
So it's something I always saved for a movie.
Josh Duhamel is someone I met
in one of my Platinum Dunes meetings, for a movie,
and I just liked his energy. He just was a great guy.
And he's got those movie star looks.
Just thought he would be a good fit in this movie.
Jon Voight's one of the elder statesmen. He's just...
Actors love hanging around him. He's a really fun guy.
He's just such a good actor.
And it was nice to see all these young actors around him.
He's really such a leader among these actors.
Steven wanted me to cast this movie where I wasn't using movie stars,
like he would do a lot of his movies.
Because, you know, the movie was the star.
The Transformers were the star.
I think right now you've got this Shia LaBeouf,
who's just gonna explode off the screen.
He's now in Indiana Jones.
The guy is, you know, he's like the young Tom Hanks.
He's just one of those kids that really has exploded off the screen.
I'm proud to have worked with him.
He's been a lot of fun to work with, actually. Great energy.
This is the Los Angeles Observatory,
and it's been under renovation for five years.
And California becomes a very tough place to shoot,
where they just make it tough to shoot.
And that's been closed...
And when you have a big movie, you have a lot more clout.
So going to City Hall and convincing them
that we're bringing this gigantic movie here,
and we're keeping it here in America and in California
where things are running away, moving out of state.
And we demanded certain things, like to shoot at this observatory.
I think the only way I got into this observatory, from what I heard,
because it's run by this doctor,
he knows someone who is married into my family
called Leonard Nimoy. You know, Spock,
who's a big giver of the...
Susan Bay and Leonard Nimoy are big givers to the Observatory.
Right here this is the Hoover Dam.
And that's its actual wall.
They don't touch it because it's kind of a landmark, obviously,
and they don't put rails around it and whatnot.
They told me I wasn't allowed to do anything that exploded by it,
because they're worried about a terrorist blowing up the dam.
Now, let me tell you something.
I think you need a nuclear bomb to blow that thing up
because it's seven football fields thick of concrete.
It was made in three years.
It was a constant pour. Actually it was made in four... I think, four years.
A constant pour,
where they poured one piece of concrete for four years.
When I did this movie,
I mean, certain people in California look at this movie,
like, "Is this director stupid?
"Because they go from Nevada all the way to Los Angeles.
"How did they go so fast?"
Ultimately, most people don't know where this dam is,
which is in Nevada.
Half of it's in Nevada, half is in Arizona, by the way.
And I tried to shoot Los Angeles not as Los Angeles
but Anytown, USA.
That shot you just saw there, that crane shot by the dam,
we had to keep our crane very low because of possible arcing,
where it would arc from the gigantic power lines onto the crane,
just because of metals too close to these power lines
that could jump and kill my crew members.
It's very scary, I must say.
This was shot down at the Spruce Goose,
where we built this entire set. We did some digital extensions here.
We used some of the actual Spruce Goose walls.
It just gave me a lot more production value.
Right there, you're seeing that's all real,
everything there is built, those feet are real.
It even says "Bay Foundry" right there on that little plaque
right there if you zoom in.
My grandfather actually helped build that platform... No, I'm kidding.
My grandfather was in the stonewashing business.
Like you need to know that.
He actually never thought I would make it in the film industry.
He always thought I would be stonewashing jeans.
Thank God I wasn't doing that.
Right here, that was a real structure as well.
We built part of the hands.
We walk into this next scene.
I had a very funny speech for John Turturro.
He actually... John kind of sparked off something I said,
and he made up this very funny speech
which is in kind of the added extras, extra scenes.
Right here, that was an all-digital shot.
For some reason, I just wanted pictures of the First Seven.
I don't know what it means.
I think these are the guys that helped discover this Cube long before,
and then they built the dam over this Cube.
So when we had to shoot by the F-22 on the ground,
it was a totally secured area.
And they wouldn't allow Simon Warnock,
who was my assistant director, near the plane because he was a foreigner.
And I didn't want him near the plane because he's clumsy.
It's $130 million plane made out of composite material and whatnot.
They wouldn't allow your cell phones near the plane.
I think they were worried about radio interference or something,
I'm not sure.
That Blackout pilot was
actually the helicopter pilot of that very helicopter,
and when we hired Moustache Man,
the guy actually flying,
I said, "My God, you look just like the Moustache Man I'd imagined."
And Steven Spielberg called me up
and goes, "That's exactly how I pictured Moustache Man."
So, we actually had him delay his wedding and his honeymoon
so that we can come and shoot Transformers
and thus make more money for his future babies.
So we helped in the cause.
Originally when we did this scene, I really wanted to have a little iPod,
but Steve Jobs wouldn't allow it.
So we ended up using some, I guess, Nokia phone or whatnot.
On that sign behind John Turturro
it says, "The last accident happened here 322 days ago,"
because that meant that 323 days ago someone was killed in that very facility,
as you saw the scratches in the wall and whatnot.
I actually ended up cutting it out just for time.
I think when we do Transformers 2,
I think this is a start of something where we can branch off
what can really go on, happen in our world.
That is, if I'm gonna do Transformers 2, still haven't made the deal yet.
Listen, I gambled my fee on this movie.
That means I put my cojones on the line
where I gambled my entire fee that this movie would make money.
So that's why when I go to Vegas with my friends I don't gamble.
'Cause I gamble on $150 million movies.
I don't need to be gambling on $20 slot machines
or, you know, $5 hands of blackjack.
I gamble on big-ass movies, that's what I do.
That was Kenny Bates and Ian Bryce.
Kenny Bates is my stunt coordinator, who I've worked with since Bad Boys.
He's like my older brother.
He's like the Rain Man of stunts.
Sometimes you can't understand what he's saying,
but he's brilliant in his physics and whatnot.
He's gonna kill me for saying that, but that's the truth.
There's so much physics when you do stunts
in what can go wrong and trying to predict what can go wrong.
That's why we've had such an amazing safety record together.
Because we do very dangerous stuff,
but we've just been incredibly safe about it.
Steve Jablonsky did our music. He is Hans Zimmer's protégé.
Hans helped a little on the movie, as well.
It was very hard to get that theme,
that heroic theme I wanted for Transformers.
And just one day, I said, "Steve, that's the theme."
I played it for Steven and Steven goes, "I love that, it's very memorable."
Because it sounds like a Western. It's just got that great tragic hero.
Which I liked. It's just so powerful how to get the right mood
through music.
That's why I really feel that sound in movies is 50% of a movie.
What you try to do with music is you try to set up different themes.
You've got the heroic theme for the Optimus.
You've got Sam's theme which is kind of by the lake.
You've got the Decepticon theme which is kind of, we found this...
There's this church choir in London
that's got this very dark-sounding church they record in,
and we gave them operatic kind of words that they sang.
And it was just this chilling kind of Decepticon music.
You saw that Camaro transform right there.
That was officially the lamest shot of the entire movie.
That's why we cut it down. You always have turkey shots.
And that was, let me tell you, a turkey.
I'm gonna tell you another shot when we get there.
Steven actually wanted to pay for it.
It's where Optimus' nose unfolds and you see his face
after he slides around the Camaro. I never ended up putting it in the movie.
I left it off.
Right here, that thing flying, I didn't like that thing flying.
That flew a little farther than I wanted for comfort.
We had stuntmen down below, but no one was hurt.
That one sound when you see Starscream on the top of that dam,
and he's vibrating, that's my favourite sound in the entire movie.
When you hear his body shudder, right there.
What I'm gonna do in Transformers 2 is I'm gonna focus more on the faces.
I guess, because of the limited number of effects shots, I limited myself
on how close I went into these faces
so that I can, I guess, do more with less.
This is called our Alien Archive room, that I thought was fun.
It's got books going 40 feet tall up into the stacks.
This holds all the Sector Seven stuff that's been there through history
of anything alien, having to do with our world here.
That shot where we're tracking behind Optimus,
I'm actually in the Porsche Cayenne. We're going 55 miles an hour,
as an entire semi locks up, and we are right behind.
I mean, I gotta tell you, that's a little scary.
We shot that scene where they're driving in the Valley of Fire.
We actually blew a roadblock because the sun was going down.
Which means we passed a cop roadblock, and we kept shooting
on this road, and they were so pissed.
They hauled Ian Bryce, my producer, and he had to kiss a bunch of hands
in Vegas or they were gonna shut us down at the Hoover Dam.
So thank God to Ian, but I had to get this shot. And you know what?
I'll run any police roadblock I have to if the sun's going down,
and I got a beautiful shot.
See, I'm never really good at taking no for an answer.
I don't know, "Whoops, I didn't see it, sorry."
Doing this highway scene, we shot it on a freeway, near Riverside.
I've done a lot of car stuff in my day. We did this in two days.
We're actually launching cars off a car carrier that are dropping
onto the ground and the Bay Buster is actually ramming into these cars.
It's a special thing that I built on Bad Boys 2. Go see that disc,
and then you'll learn all about it.
So on this freeway, you can see all those people standing up there?
They heard that Transformers was shooting
in the neighbourhood. So those are real fans actually watching us shoot.
Right here, this is done with a special go-cart and then we transition
to the Porsche Cayenne camera and we tilt down and we pull away.
Two different moves and we seamlessly blend it in together.
So I wanted Bonecrusher, right here, as he slaps through,
I wanted him to look like a hockey player. So I had the...
Right here, this looks like a hockey player
and then we go to a football tackle, right there.
That was my favourite shot in the whole movie, right there.
This was over a freeway and we had the bigger moving crane.
We blocked this doing plates and whatnot.
What I realised in the animation is the animators are not fight choreographers.
Fight choreographers have been working 20 years and been doing this.
So they spent forever on this stuff right here, you're seeing right now,
and they were never getting it right.
So what we did is, once I got these plates, these shots,
I actually used real fighters that had different abilities,
different fighting skills,
and I would videotape them by a pole or whatnot,
and kind of imitate these angles. And we actually had humans
fighting this out at the same beat, at the same time as these plates.
And it wasn't motion-capture, but they were able to copy
what these fighters were doing in the time they were doing it.
So that became a very effective way for us to work.
The voice of this little Frenzy guy,
he's just got the most amazing human voice,
and we were able to overlay some mechanical sounds over it.
It's amazing that humans can actually talk like this.
But it makes it quite funny.
If you listen really closely, he's saying the word "Tutankhamen."
He keeps saying "Tutankhamen,"
I don't know, it's just a funny thing, if you listen to it.
Here we are at Edwards Air Force Base,
where they're actually going into real F-22s,
unlike Die Hard, where they had to use fake F-22s,
because, I don't know, they just don't have the juice.
But we got real stuff.
That's because I got the phone number to the Pentagon.
Doing this downtown stuff, I gotta tell you,
is one of the harder things that I've done
in terms of keeping all these different storylines going simultaneously.
And unfortunately, what made it harder for me is I was not able to shoot
on one block consecutively. I literally had to be shoved around LA
to different blocks, and so I had to use basically three different blocks.
One in Detroit, two in LA... Actually four. One on the Universal back lot.
And blend them all together as if they're one.
So some of the geography shots, I don't really have,
because I was never able to do it. Because they were different blocks,
and it would give things away. So it made it very tough on me
to figure out some of the stuff. But one of the helps was
we had to shoot on the weekends, so I was able to assemble
what we were shooting, so I can keep track of everything.
You know, it's just...
It's really hard when you've got multiple stories going on.
Especially this is like a 25-minute ending action scene.
This is one of my favourite moments, here.
This was shot on the Universal back lot, this shot.
With a real truck, we moved it on cue.
Right there, we kind of shake it because I'm counting it out.
We kind of walk it out for Shia, how fast Bumblebee will be moving.
It's just beautiful animation right here, and how he's straining, right there.
See that arm going down and the head shaking, right here.
You can really get into the fine detail with these animators.
That was Universal back lot, right here and then the shot with Josh
in the close up, that was downtown. So it's just...
You gotta remember exactly what piece you shot that you need in another place.
That's the Universal back lot, right there.
And again, Universal back lot.
DreamWorks kept having meetings on the Universal back lot,
they kept hearing explosions. Now we come down to downtown.
And now we're in the back lot. See how you can go back and forth.
You really can't tell. That's the back lot, and now we're downtown.
Coming up here, these are some of my favourite shots, right here.
This just takes it to a whole new level. I wanted these robots not to be,
what I call "Clunky, fat, f-ing robots."
That was the lingo on the animator's desk.
So we looked at a lot of ninja movies, karate movies, samurai,
things like Gladiator.
We just wanted them to be warriors that can jump and spin.
If you look at this scene, right here, coming up, where he's shooting,
there's gonna be something right here on the roof, right there,
it says "Takara Sushi."
There's actually a whole bunch of things.
If you actually pause at certain cars, random cars, you'll see things
on licence plates. You'll see Easter eggs all over this movie.
You'll see different shop signs that say certain things.
You'll even see my address to my house on one of these things.
I'm not telling you where it is.
Got the tail number to my plane, it's 4500 XRAY.
We needed a tail number, so why not use mine? Sounds good, too.
You always want to re-do things in movies
and that prop of the Cube is kind of lame.
You know? It's just...
It's just not what it should be. But you can't catch everything
because you've got so many millions of parts moving on.
Those Black Hawks that are flying through downtown,
it was the only time in my life
I've wanted a religious service to end quickly,
because we were not allowed to fly them close to downtown
while this religious service was going on, right where Shia is running towards.
I was even thinking of offering donations
so that we could continue shooting. They didn't wanna buy that.
When you watch this movie, right here, when you see this,
you're actually rooting for a truck. I mean, isn't it silly? But it works.
And this we did digitally, with the Porsche Cayenne coming around.
Kind of like that shot that I did on Bad Boys where I spun around the guys.
And I've done it subsequently in The Rock and Armageddon
and why not do it with Optimus Prime here?
Now, Megatron was not a big gun because I just didn't know
how I would explain him being a big gun.
Just doesn't make sense.
Shooting that hotel thing, we shot it with a little, tiny little helicopter.
With, like a lawnmower engine, it can take a tiny little camera up
and two guys with remote controls control it.
We got a lot of flak for the face of Megatron.
He was a little uglier than he is now.
And the fans, rightly so, complained about it.
And we kind of fixed the face. I think he's pretty cool.
He looks menacing.
This was done down in Detroit and then smashing into a real set
here with stuntmen diving out. But shooting the deli shot,
it was very complicated because we had to shoot it against a bluescreen.
We had to rip up the car, violently, and we had to throw it,
once it ripped up, into the window.
So we shoot it, first with people inside the deli,
then we have Shia run past the deli window, several times.
Then we rip up the car and we pull it into the window, right here.
Then we marry them all together to make it look very dangerous.
This shot with Starscream landing, those are real cars
that are getting flipped violently.
Simultaneously, they're being pulled by giant cranes on these canister rigs
that are just extremely violent when they pull things.
So imagine no robots there and just figuring out timing
of how long that plane's supposed to transform to it flying out.
I mean, you really, as you're operating camera,
it's a little bit of guesswork trying to fit it in.
There's Ron, you just saw him there,
the African-American sitting in the chair.
Ron is homeless and a very intelligent homeless man.
We offer him money, he doesn't want it. But he is a huge fan of movies.
And what he does, he knows everything about the film industry.
He knows so many people in the business,
and he literally becomes a mascot of the set.
He followed us wherever we went. He actually rented a car,
or hitched a way, got a bus ticket, and he made it to Detroit.
And we were all surprised to see him there.
And I told Ian, "We gotta get him a hotel room."
And he didn't want it, but we forced him to take it.
But Ron's gonna be in all my movies from now on. He's a great guy.
That was the train station down in Detroit.
It's now gonna be, I think, destroyed, so this is the last movie to be shot there.
So we're doing this scene with these gigantic metal prongs
that are off the tow truck, and we're actually backing up
that tow truck and the driver is Cory who is dressed as a girl.
He's got a little, cute pink top on. He looked frightening as a girl.
And that shot, where we're flipping the cars up, we have these car flippers
and it gets as close to possible and it triggers the car flippers
as the car comes up.
Now this scene, where we did downtown on this rooftop,
it's about 20 storeys tall. Shia is escaping from Megatron,
and he climbs on one of these statues and Ian Bryce, my producer, goes
"Well, you gonna do this bluescreen, right?"
I said, "No, I wanna do it as real as possible, let's do it real."
Let's hang Shia out there, let's hang him by a wire.
This is a Black Hawk, actually, hovering right over an LA building.
It's kind of an interesting sight having Black Hawks flying through Los Angeles
at such low altitude.
Right there, that's the real tail of a helicopter mock-up
that comes past Shia.
It's safe because Shia's ducking down,
but that thing is actually busting plaster, concrete and whatnot.
But those are the type of shots that I like to involve the actor in.
'Cause it just gives more intensity and realism to the scene.
I said to Shia, I said, "Shia, I'm gonna hang you out on this building.
"And there's not a lot of foot room up there, but you're safe with wires."
And he says, "Okay, all right, I'm cool, I'll do it, I'll do it."
Well, literally the moment before he was supposed to go up and get on
this very secured statue and totally safe wire,
even though you can't see it, it's on either side of his hip.
He goes, "Mike, come here. I can't do this."
I said, "Are you kidding me, Shia? You're gonna embarrass yourself
"in front of the whole crew."
Now, mind you, in my own mind, I would never go out there.
But I'm a director so I can tell people to do things like that.
With all the machismo and whatnot.
"Dude, you're gonna go out there, and you're gonna like it.
"You get paid way more money than those kids on Fear Factor.
"So get the hell out there." So of course he did it.
It was an awesome shot, because it's totally real.
And three minutes into doing it, Shia just loved it.
I was actually supposed to be hanging out of a Mercedes,
grabbed by Megatron, and climb out of the sun roof, which I did.
And they had me wired by a cable where they pulled my ankle up,
and he was supposed to yank me. But in light of not doing that shot,
I was the guy that got flicked by Megatron and goes into the cab.
So that is me.
Doing the aerial shots, basically I'm having my helicopter pilot
fly with a Vista Vision, which is a much wider negative,
larger, so you can move it around a bit. And he's flying as fast as he can go
through these buildings and around.
It's kind of, very much
how we did some of our Pearl Harbor stuff.
And I had actually some of the same plane animators that worked on Pearl
work on this.
When I went to test screen this movie with the studio,
we did it in Arizona, and we were doing a family theatre
where it was a bunch of kids at 5:00, with parents.
And then we were doing an adult screening with adults
at about 8:00, and they were both 500-person houses.
So they're very large. What I do when I put my movies together
is I actually will put a small group in a screening room.
Different-aged kids, where they'll watch a very rough cut, give me some ideas.
It's very good to just have to show your movie up on a bigger screen
so you can see it and put it in front of people.
You can see where they get confused, what they're liking, what's not working.
So I did that twice. First started with nine-year-olds to 16.
And then I went from 16 to 25-year-olds.
And it prepared me for my studio screening.
Even being a final cut director, it's still intense.
Because they come there
with 30 people from Paramount and DreamWorks.
Everyone is nervous.
They determine what they're gonna spend on advertising.
That very moment, you get numbers. So we watched it with the families.
It went well, they were laughing at the different jokes,
they were not laughing at some of the adult jokes.
There were several applause through the screening.
And I'm like, "That's kind of fun, but odd.
"They're applauding three or four times during the screening."
Then I quickly ran over to the adult theatre.
So I saw the adult one start up, then I ran back to the kids one
where we did a focus group, 26 people.
Guy stands up saying, "I have nothing to do with this movie.
"How would you rate this movie?"
Excellent, blah blah blah, very good, poor, good, whatever.
All 26 hands raised at "Excellent." And I'm like, "Well, okay, it's a fluke,
"it's a family thing, whatever." Then I ran back to the adult screening.
And I sat next to this guy, I was just sitting in some random aisle seat
where I had a little sound box where I got to control the volume
because the volume is not really precise because it's not fully mixed sound.
It's a little abrasive at times. And the guy knew I was a director
because I told him, 'cause he asked what that box was.
Halfway through the movie, the people are really enjoying it,
you can see the adults are laughing. And I asked this guy, he was about 30,
I said, "So do you like this kind of movie?"
And he looked at me and goes, "Not really my thing, not really."
So I'm thinking, "This movie sucks. It's just going to be a kids' movie.
"All right, fine. It'll be a kids' movie." Every emotion goes through your body
when you're a director sitting there and watching
500 people at a time see your movie.
And they don't care who you are, what you are, nothing.
They'll tell you, they'll be frank as...
It can be a brutalizing experience, because they will tell you
how bad or good your movie is. Then we did a focus group
with the adults and we had a huge round of applause
at the end of the movie. And I'm like, "That's kind of odd.
"These are adults. This is a robot movie.
"What are they applauding for? I thought that this was a kids' movie."
So we go to this focus group.
And this woman who is, I gotta tell you, she was like 40.
And she says... And this was after they raised their hands,
which out of 26 people, 24 of them raised at "Excellent" and 2, "Very good."
And I'm thinking,
"Well, that's kind of odd, 'cause that just never happens."
That's a lot of people saying "Excellent."
And this woman raised her hand.
She says, "I was dragged to this movie. I didn't want to see this movie."
And she goes, "But you know what?
"This movie, it reinvents the superheroes."
She goes, "I'm tired of the capes and the suits and all that stuff,
"and this totally is something new and different that I've never seen before."
And that's when it kind of hit me.
And then we got the numbers from the kids' audience
which was a 94. That's a huge score. I've never had that score in my life.
I mean, that's a massive number.
Then we got the adult score.
It was the exact same, 94.
So obviously the studio is doing cartwheels.
I guess it was a good experience as far as movie testing goes.
The parents here were something that the audience,
they all felt, what happened to them? So this is an additional scene I shot
just to let people into what happened to them
and that they're keeping this conspiracy going.
Likewise, they also wanted to know what happened to Starscream.
So I added it again, where you see him go back into space.
What they told me in that test was I had to fix this ending.
And a lot of times, if they don't like the ending, an audience,
they'll actually be harder on the grading of the movie.
But somehow, there was so much goodwill to this movie, that they...
They still gave it a very high score.
I had to fix some issues with the Cube.
I had to show... It was very vague for them to understand
what Sam had to do by pushing the Cube into his chest.
So we had to do something by the observatory
with Optimus showing the spark. And talking about,
he'll put it into his own chest. And then we had to do a few more shots
with Sam pushing it into Megatron's chest,
just to clarify the ending.
It's been a bizarre experience travelling with this movie
to so many different countries.
And even Japan, where I just saw a screening with 4,500 people.
In Japan, it's funny, they'll tell you, "The movie's so funny, it's so funny."
But you watch it, and you wanna kill yourself.
Because you got 4,500 people sitting there, not emoting at all
because it's impolite to laugh in Japan when you're watching a movie.
But then they gave it huge applause at the end,
which is something that they don't do as well.
And Japanese theatre people
that are distributors there, they were just saying, "That's a very good sign."
So it opens in Japan... I guess when you get this DVD
it will have already opened in Japan, but this is a week before it opens.
In the Asian countries, it's just been phenomenal.
I mean, Korea, it's the number one movie of all time,
at $50-million something.
Malaysia, it's the number one movie of all time.
It's the biggest opening in China of all time. It's just crazy.
Transformers was the most fun experience I've had directing a movie.
It was definitely challenging, but a lot of my movies have been challenging.
It was a new experience for me in that working almost like
on an animation movie with live action.
I can't wait to get started on 2. The experience of it coming out
and the way it's been accepted around the world has been staggering to me.
The fans have...
The death threats stopped. I'm very glad, you know?
I think I've made a lot of the fans very happy.
I mean, I know I have. They've told me.
So many have said, "Thanks for making my childhood dreams come true."
It's like they've all dreamed of this movie.
So that's a really nice feeling. But it's an even nicer feeling to see older people
that knew nothing of Transformers to actually really enjoy this movie.
And I'm just proud to have worked with the people I've worked with.
And I can't wait to do it again.
It was a delight to work with the writers.
Kurtzman and Orci, I don't know if they're going to write 2,
because they don't know if there's any magic left.
They've gotta be wrong with that, you know?
So I'm about to hear many, many pitches.
But I know that Transformers 2, if I do it,
I definitely want to take it to a whole other visual level.
I think this movie has definitely raised the bar of visual effects.
In terms of realistic visual effects and what can be done.
It's almost anything what a director thinks can be done, nowadays.
It's amazing how effects jump every single year.
I'll look forward to doing it again. So thanks for listening to me.
Some of it, I hope I'm not blabbing. It's hard to sit in a dark room, right here,
with a microphone in front of you and talk for three hours.
Till next time, see you.