Four months ago, on a scorching hot August day, I joined a small group of journalists invited to the set of Transformers: The Last Knight, which at that time was about a third of the way through its planned 130-day shooting schedule. Knowing a little about the legend of director Michael Bay I dared to hope we might see a few explosions, possibly even from the director himself if rumors were to be believed. While Bay was incredibly friendly and even-tempered all day, he did not disappoint with regard to the literal fireworks.
As we walked onto the vast outdoor lot behind Michigan Motion Picture Studios in Pontiac, MI, we passed what looked like an eight-foot-tall Styrofoam sculpture in the vague shape of a robot head lying on the ground unattended. We saw a freestanding, multi-story glass elevator set we were told had been shot on just a few days before. Most impressive was a 300,000-pound platform balanced on a massive gimbal. Earlier in the shoot that platform had been raised to a 23-degree angle (though it would eventually go all the way up to 45) to send star Josh Duhamel and more than 30,000 gallons of water rushing to the bottom. Before we left for the day we were also given a chance to walk through several truly massive, Transformer-scale interior sets built for the film.
An exclusive set photo of star Josh Duhamel working with director Michael Bay on Transformers: The Last Knight
We got to speak with Duhamel, whose character from the first three Transformers movies, Lennox, re-appears in Last Knight after being absent in the fourth. In the new movie he’s still with the military but he’s no longer in charge of his previous unit, the Non-biological Extraterrestrial Species Treaty task force. "N.E.S.T. is not in this," he said. "There’s a different group. N.E.S.T. was a group where we worked with the Autobots.” So his new unit appears to be, at least at first, in some way working against the Autobots.
The military once again has a big role in Transformers 5, but that role may now be secondary to a more overtly antagonistic paramilitary element called The Transformer Response Force or TRF, which seems to pick up where Kelsey Grammer’s vicious Cemetery Wind group left off. At various times in the movie, we were told, the military will find itself working with and against the TRF, including at one point when they go to investigate what Duhamel called, “a massive anomaly at the bottom of the sea.” “It’s so crazy to talk about,” joked Duhamel. “It’s all based on a true story by the way.”
Santiago Cabrera joins the cast as Santos, a former Navy SEAL now working as a contractor for the TRF. According to Cabrera, “The TRF has been formed to fight the Transformers, so my orders are I don’t care if they’re Autobots or Decepticons, we gotta stop this war. So I’m a team leader and I’ve come with my team to fight them and what I find, and when I see [Mark Wahlberg's character] Cade Yeager is harboring them, he becomes the enemy basically.” He added, “I’m gonna be the guy you love to hate.”
Santos appears to have been fighting Transformers for a while, long enough that his prominent forearm tattoos have long since gone out of style. “I wanted them to be like tribal because he’s a guy who’s been around for a while," he said. "These inks are like from the late ‘90s/early 2000s. This is from the fourth movie," he said, motioning to a symbol tattooed on his arm. "Titus [Welliver] had it but you never saw it in the film. But basically this would show that I’ve been fighting these guys for a while.”
A sweaty writer poses on set with new Transformer Sqweeks, who appears somewhat the worse for wear.
We got to speak to two other new cast members, Laura Haddock (all but unrecognizable in Guardians of the Galaxy as Star-Lord’s dying mother), and relative film newcomer Isabela Moner. Moner pays Izabella, a streetwise homeless girl who has befriended the new Transformer Sqweeks. “She’s a tomboy, she’s spunky, she’s homeless and she joins Mark and the team in defeating the Decepticons,” said the 15-year-old actor. “She also has her own little sidekick named Sqweeks, who is a mini-Transformer Vespa, super cute. He says ‘Chihuahua’; that’s like the only thing he says.” As photos released by Paramount online have shown, Sqweeks begins the film in bad shape. “He got a little bit messed up so he can’t transform fully. So he’s getting there; I’m trying to fix him,” said Moner.
Haddock plays Vivian, a “smart, sophisticated English woman”, according to co-star Wahlberg. Wahlberg's character, first introduced in the previous film, Age of Extinction, meets Vivian under circumstances that make him something of a fish out of water. As Haddock put it, “I am picked up from my family home by my car that is a Transformer that takes me to a castle where Cade Yeager is, and then I’m told I am somebody who they need to save the world, essentially.” The two don’t get along at first, leading to some comedy between them and the introduction of Sir Edmound Burton, played another notable British actor joining the cast, Sir Anthony Hopkins.
Stars Wahlberg and Haddock chat with Bay between takes.
Bay himself commented on their (at that time) upcoming shoot in London where Vivian is introduced, saying, “We’re shooting a lot of authentic, very old stuff. Castles that are very rarely filmed in. We’ve got some places that have never allowed any filming before, which is pretty neat. And because of the name of the movie, we got into Downing Street. I don’t know how that happened. But that never happens.”
We also learned that the crew would soon be shooting an epic knights-on-horseback battle set somewhere in Earth's past, which stunt coordinator Mike Gunther likened to something out of Braveheart. (In case there's any confusion, those would be actual flesh-and-blood horses as opposed to robotic ones.) The confirmed medieval scenes and news reports of ties to Arthurian legend coupled with the Nazi-era settings would seem to explain what the production team meant when they said The Last Knight would explore the concept of "Transformers Through Time", and the question of why these giant alien robots keep showing up at various points in earth's history.
As we chatted with the cast the crew was preparing the set they’d be shooting on for the rest of the day: a large area mounded with piles of loose black asphalt and burning debris, on which a downed V-22 Osprey (or rather the shell of an old CH-47 Chinook helicopter, fitted with Osprey internals) lay on its side after a crash landing.
Continues
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire