Looking at the legions of fans mourning the loss of Michael Jackson, one might think celebrity worship is a modern phenomenon. But from the gods on Olympus in ancient Greece to the bobby-soxers swooning over Frank Sinatra in the late …
As Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” chases box office records after grossing $60.6 million on opening day, the filmmaker took time out to talk with BFD about the business of blockbusters, the impact of piracy, and the virtues of sharing risk with studios. …Last night, I tried to sneak in the side, but somebody noticed me and then they’re lining up for pictures. …You work on the movie for nine months and then right before you shoot Joe Roth says, “Mike, I’m going to take away your fee.” …There is so much waste in this business, directors who have big shows like this one, who keep a second unit for the entire time. … We don’t build $3 million sets and then the director walks in and says, “Fuck it, I’m not going to use that set.” The stories I hear from my crew members, of waste on other pictures, of directors shooting a six- or eight-hour day, it’s just staggering. Some directors will look a studio executive in the eye and say, “Sure I’ll come in at this budget,” and then they behave like terrorists. … The thing that “Pearl Harbor” taught me was you’ve got to become a partner with the studio and deferring makes you more invested in that. …BFD: You have final cut as director and producer, but that’s also going by the wayside. …I am not one of those people who hold out my final cut; I think that’s ridiculous. I can think of examples where it allowed me to put some comic moments in these films. The studios have always been very good with me and never demand I take anything out. They suggest, sometimes I say no and then we see if the whole audience laughs and I was right. … But you’ve got to be able to listen to your audience and to producers who look at your movie and bounce things around with you. That’s the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer dynamic and any director needs those people because you are just too close to it. I still feel if I could have had two more weeks on “Transformers,” I could fix a lot of stuff. … At studios, you deal with people who have their own agendas and you have to keep this agenda-free and all about the movie and the experience. …How did that impact you and what does it mean going forward on the next film? …BFD: Three days before shooting, Sony scrapped “Moneyball” after Steven Soderbergh threw a curveball to Amy Pascal and turned in a rewrite that veered from the movie she was willing to finance. On “Transformers,” do you feel an unspoken agreement to the studio to deliver the film exactly as they expect since they aren’t watching dailies? …Steven [Spielberg] called me up and said, “Mike, you’re shooting a lot of stuff that’s not in the script.” I said, “Steven, some of it is going to suck, but some of it will be gems in the movie.” … I will say it made them nervous until they saw the final result, how much the audience liked it and the tone that it set for the franchise. …I shoot fast enough that I was able to devote several hours to having fun with that scene and make more than what was on the page. …BFD: Much was made of a memo you sent to Paramount fearing that “Transformers” wasn’t registering as an event film because of the marketing. …At the time, they were so focused on “Star Trek” and I was like, “Hey, we’re the four-quadrant movie just sitting out here. …Bay: I will always do these films with a studio, because it’s good for you when the studio has skin in the game when they’re releasing a big picture for you. But maybe it’s going to be half of the skin in the game next time, and the rest will be independent financing. I’m absolutely thinking along those lines right now, because studios don’t have as much money and they’re spreading it around to take as many swings at the plate as they can. …BFD: Considering your development on this movie was interrupted by the writer’s strike and you risked being shut down any moment by shooting after the expiration of the SAG contract, what was the hardest thing about making “Transformers: The Fallen?” …I said, “We’re going to start prepping this movie at full force, scout places I think are going to be in this movie and try and put this together as best we could.” There might be an actor’s strike, but I told the studio we’re going to shoot this on June 2, come hell or high water. We took a gamble that the writers would come back from the strike in time and we just made it. … It was scary because so many people were out of work and you hear your crew say, “Wow, I might have to move out of my house.” …BFD: Considering that all guild contracts will expire in 2011 and Paramount and DreamWorks want the third film in 2011 or 2012, how does the likelihood of more labor trouble influence the next film? …There was fear and all the studios were playing for a strike that never happened. I felt in my heart that the strike would never happen because I saw where the country was going and felt, how can you strike in a time like this? Look, the next one’s going to get made when it gets made, no matter what. …I’m worried the economy is going to make it only one type and that’s going to be really boring. …How do you get someone to commit to leaving their house and going to the theater, when they’ve got all this stuff on the internet, and social networks. … I don’t know the answer, but sometimes I hear about movies they’re making and say, “How is that going to get someone out of the house?” I’ve got some small projects and several big stars are talking about working with me. …Bay: The benefit of being in both Steven and Jerry Bruckheimer’s orbit is they are such sage advisors. They’ve taught me so much about the business and been supportive as they allowed me to do my thing. It’s fascinating for me to remember being a kid and seeing “Top Gun” and saying, “I’ve got to do this,” and seeing “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and saying, “I’ve got to do this.” …There was one of them, maybe in Norway, and this guy looks me in the eye and says, “Don’t you think piracy is about sharing?” …Bay: Some of that is just posturing, trying to fake everyone out and make better deals for the studios. … But the idea that these pirates can somehow get a print that’s a good copy, that’s where payola starts and where the crime world can get into it. … html .fb_share_button { display: -moz-inline-block; display:inline-block; padding:1px 20px 0 5px; height:15px; border:1px solid #d8dfea; background:url(http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/images/share/facebook_share_icon.gif? 8:26981) no-repeat top right; } html .fb_share_button:hover { color:#fff; border-color:#295582; background:#3b5998 url(http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/images/share/facebook_share_icon.gif?
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This coming weekend could make Hollywood history for Michael Bay, the movie director behind the big-budget epics “Armageddon” and “Pearl Harbor.” His latest release, the $200 million action-adventure movie “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” is poised to possibly become the biggest opening in Hollywood history, with estimates that it could gross more than $200 million by Sunday’s end—rivaling the record-shattering totals for last summer’s “The Dark Knight.” But the 44-year-old director, who has a predilection for massive budgets and pyrotechnic explosions, has already set his sights on a radically new goal: making an art film. The Wall Street Journal: This film features even more talking robots—based on the Hasbro toy line—than the first “Transformers.” …The first film was really about us setting up the situation, and this movie is about us discovering what we could do better with that situation, how to make this most out of these special effects and these characters. Did Hasbro force you to conform the aesthetics of the robots to match the style of its toy line? Did you have to make any compromises on characters for the sake of promoting Hasbro’s stable of pre-existing Transformers characters? …I told [Hasbro] that I was going to do my own thing, and they really let me go off on the designs. … But I still listened to people who were in that world when they asked things like, ‘Can we make Optimus’s ears a little longer so he appears more in character?’ … And a lot of the artists and people that we hired were fans of Transformers growing up, so having so many fans working on my crew really kept me on point. There are things that I invented—the creaky geriatric robot that is always grumpy, for example, or the little wheelie guy, he’s not in the Hasbro lore. But kids love that stuff—this little guy as a pet on a chain. …So, now that you’ve finished the sequel of “Transformers,” are you ready to direct the third installment of the franchise? I just want to take some time off. It’s been almost three years that I’ve devoted myself entirely to this world of robots. At some point, enough is enough—and I literally carried this movie on my back. … It was a tough movie for me to finish—especially with the writers strike, the possible SAG strike. At one point, we were the only union movie in America shooting—Hollywood was so messed up from those two events. So you don’t want to do another sequel? I don’t know who [would] want to take on my shoes with this franchise. …I’ve been talking to some big actors right now about something that is totally different. A small dark comedy, a true story, with actors just acting, no effects. I’m done with effects movies for now. When you do a movie like “Transformers,” it can feel like you’re doing three movies at once—which is tiring. It’s interesting that you want to focus on acting. Megan Fox, one of the leads in “Transformers” has criticized your films for being special-effects-driven and not offering so many acting opportunities. …Well, that’s Megan Fox for you. She says some very ridiculous things because she’s 23 years old and she still has a lot of growing to do. You roll your eyes when you see statements like that and think, “Okay Megan, you can do whatever you want. … Nick Cage wasn’t a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in “Armageddon.” Shia LaBeouf wasn’t a big movie star before he did “Transformers”—and then he exploded. … Nobody in the world knew about Megan Fox until I found her and put her in “Transformers.” I like to think that I’ve had some luck in building actors’ careers with my films. With all the recent emphasis on 3D and technology in movies, do you think we’ll see some directors emerge out of the special effects houses? …Bay: People have come before from the special effects houses and have not done well. People can come from anywhere—but its really about telling stories. Either you’re born to do this or you’re not. Speaking of effects, What about 3-D? … Will we watch the third “Transformers” movie in three dimensions? …I’m not jumping to do 3-D at all—it’s a pain in the neck to shoot it and I actually like the flat image. I’ve heard that some people can’t even see 3-D and, moreover, that a major side effect of watching it is feeling exhausted. Can you imagine how you’d feel watching one of my movies in 3-D? You really shot all those scenes [in ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”] at the real pyramids? One of the things that I pride myself on is that in situations where people say, “You can’t do that,” somehow I am always able to pull it off. I did it with “Pearl Harbor” and I did it with “Armageddon,” with the space shuttle, and luckily [Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities] Dr. Zahi Hawass, who runs the pyramids, was a fan of the first “Transformers”—so he let us film there, even though we’re the first film to do so in 30 years. … Share
Here are behind the scenes video’s of Michael M&M ads. Share
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Paramount’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is on its way to scoring one of the top five-day openings of all time at the worldwide box office. The film’s opening-day bow of $60.6 million from 4,234 runs at the domestic box office was the best ever for a Wednesday release and the second best of all time after that of “The Dark Knight” ($67.2 million). Early estimates for Thursday show “Transformers 2″ grossing another $27 million, bringing the two-day domestic cume to a bfo $87 million. Overseas, sequel’s cume through Wednesday was a whopping $59 million from 11,500 locations in 58 territories Wednesday, putting the worldwide tally at a hefty $146.6 million. Foreign total includes early grosses from the U.K. and Japan, where the film opened over the weekend. “Revenge of the Fallen” opened day and date virtually everywhere else on Wednesday. Pic hasn’t opened in India or Italy. “This is the best opening number I can ever remember. It shows there is a huge fanbase for the movie. The audience loves the movie,” Paramount prexy of international distribution Andrew Cripps said. Directed by Michael Bay, the “Transformers” sequel has drawn poor reviews in the U.S., but that doesn’t seem to be slowing down theater traffic, with out-of-school kids primed for an action tentpole. Source: Variety Share