Michael Bay says making a movie about toys was a tough sell: My friends would say, Why are you doing that movie? The Transformers concept is simple: In the blink of an eye, some innocuous thing a car, for instance morphs into an alien-whupping killing machine. Director Michael Bay has undergone his own transformation, and while it s hardly as dramatic as what happens in his new movie, his turnabout does suggest that he is about to have a much sunnier summer than his last time around.
When Bay previously was putting the finishing touches on a summer movie, he wasn t having that grand a time. The year was 2005 and the movie was The Island. Bay was battling with DreamWorks over the advertising campaign, but ads were only part of the problem.
Moviegoers didn t seem to know what the movie s title meant (there s no island in The Island ) and the $125 million anti-utopian drama was opening on the heels of three box-office hits: Wedding Crashers, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Four. The Island was routed. It sold just $35.
8 million worth of tickets in its domestic release, and while it grossed more than $124 million, it was Bay s first flop after an uninterrupted run of solid and whopper hits ( Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys II ). Still, he went back to work three weeks after The Island opened and closed. Rather than make a more personal movie as he has long talked about, he jumped into Transformers with two of the same screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci who penned The Island, and he was returning to DreamWorks, the studio behind The Island (and which is now owned by Paramount Pictures).
Bay didn t have a screenplay or a cast, but a July 4 release date had been set and it was looming. He wasn t all that familiar with Hasbro s Transformers toys. And he knew he would be following massive sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean, Spider-Man and Shrek.
But Bay thought he could make a Transformers movie work. I just thought it could be something new and different that I could do well, he said. It was a certainty he didn t always feel.
Why should I do this movie? Bay found himself asking repeatedly, both of himself and his collaborators: Kurtzman and Orci, and producers Steven Spielberg (who came up with the idea to make the film) and Lorenzo di Bonaventura. My friends would say, Why are you doing that movie?
Is it animation? Is it a cartoon? They didn t get it, Bay said.
(The toy line previously anchored a 1984 animated TV series and a 1986 animated movie.) But the more time Bay spent with the toys he even attended Hasbro s Transformers school the more the movie s themes coalesced. Bay, with a sometimes feared reputation for being demanding, envisioned Transformers not as a toy movie but as a live-action spectacle loaded with visual effects.
Yet he wasn t as certain about the film s narrative and emotional hook. Our take on it was it s about a kid finding his adulthood through his first car, Kurtzman said. The director says he spent no time ruminating over any possible lessons The Island could have taught him.
You know, I think the movie works, he said. But I never thought it was going to be a smash. On Armageddon, I had a feeling gut feeling that there was something big.
His enthusiasm for Transformers is more tempered. Bay realizes his latest film is no easy sell. We are still the underdogs, Bay says.
Michael Bay says making a movie about toys was a tough sell: My friends would say, Why are you doing that movie?
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