This August I was among a handful of writers invited to watch a day of shooting with Michael Bay and the cast and crew of Transformers: The Last Knight. You can read all the new details we learned about the upcoming blockbuster here as well as what the future of the Transformers cinematic universe is here.
The explosions and action sequences we saw were of course amazing and it’s always fun to talk to movie stars. But none of that was surprising. What surprised me and I daresay many of my colleagues was how open and available Bay was, spending at least an hour talking with us throughout the course of the day. To give you an idea of how unusual that is, most other interviews lasted about five to fifteen minutes because everyone was busy keeping up with Bay’s notoriously fast pace. Yet somehow Bay kept finding his way back to our small group to chat about movies (he sees all of them without exception), filmmaking (he's REALLY into 3D and IMAX) and whatever else was on his mind (though he doesn't have any inside info, he personally thinks Bad Boys 3 will never happen).
Michael Bay talking with some pleasantly surprised genre reporters.
Bay has a reputation for being a demanding director. While there may be some truth to that -- he gleefully bragged about putting his team through up to an astonishing 90 different shooting setups in a single day, twice -- what I saw on set that day didn’t seem harsh in any way. While it's not impossible the director was on his best behavior as a result of the media presence, he seemed cheerful, patient (in his own relentless, hyperkinetic way) and genuinely warm.
Returning star Josh Duhamel put it best when he talked about not being involved in the last Transformers movie, Age of Extinction: “[It] was a little sad because I’d done the first three," he said. "But I was fine with it. And then they asked me to come back. And I was like, ‘I’d love to do it again.’ It feels like, and this is a testament to Michael, 80% of this crew was there from the beginning, from the very first movie. So you see all these faces you worked with almost 10 years ago. Most of this crew is back. People can say what they want about him, but these people love him. They hate him at times, but they also love him.”
Duhamel isn’t wrong. Most of the people we talked to, including Special Effects Supervisor John Frazier and military advisor Harry Humphries -- who oversees all the real-life retired special forces operators who appear in the film -- had been working with Bay for over 20 years. They have tremendously high opinions of both the man and his ability, though they also know how high his standards are and how fast he likes to move. When asked what it’s like to work on a film with Bay compared other directors, Humphries asked if we’d ever tried walking through a forest fire, which I took to mean you better move faster if you don’t want to get burned. Frazier said that in his 20 years with Bay it hasn’t gotten any easier, but it has gotten better. He said, “Michael has a vision, and he's somewhat of a mad genius, a frustrated genius.”
Bay taking out some frustrations
Everyone we talked to seemed to share the same opinion of Bay: He’s one of the best in the world at what he does and he expects nothing less from everyone he works with. Laura Haddock, who plays Vivian, said nobody makes movies like the way he does. "He does everything as well," she added. "He’s behind the camera, he’s gaffering things to walls with tape, he’s sweeping floors, he’s holding lights, he’s doing touch-ups on makeup, he just jumps in and gets involved.” Stunt coordinator Mike Gunther joked about how Bay likes to change things on the fly, “That’s a lot of Pepto-Bismol man! I’m gonna tell you, it’s the Super Bowl every day, fast paced, hurry up offense.”
During a break in shooting the crew showed us a hand drawn betting pool in which everyone paid five dollars to guess what time Bay would call an end to the day’s work. He had promised a short day (they’d been working a lot of long days recently) yet most of the money seemed to be focused on the late evening hours. Indeed when we left around 7:00 and most of the crew was at last enjoying a pizza dinner in the fading daylight, Bay and company were still busy ratcheting stuntmen into the air on camera.
So about those stories of Bay being tough on set? The most we got were a few anecdotes that, while amusing, hardly paint the picture of a creative monster behind the camera.
Duhamel recounted a moment from a previous day’s shooting atop a giant outdoor gimble in sweltering heat. Just when it seemed they had finally finished and could go cool off, Bay decided to set up another shot. Duhamel expressed his exasperation to himself but Bay heard it anyway. Duhamel told us, “And I didn’t realize he had the earbuds on. And he’s like, ‘What was that? What did you say? You got it real tough up there, don’t you? You actors got it real tough. Look at the guys around you.’ And they’re all SEALs. And he’s like, ‘Why don’t you tell those guys how tough your job is?’”
The best story I heard was classic Hollywood. When the topic once again returned to Bay’s tough rep, he put an arm around a young crewmember and asked him to describe a scene they were filming together a few years ago. A piece of fabric needed to have a hole cut into it for some reason. When Bay began shooting, he noticed the fabric had been torn instead of cut and was now unusable. He got on the loudspeaker and demanded to know who was responsible. The crewmember sheepishly stepped forward, explaining he tore it because he didn’t have anything sharp. Bay immediately fired him. Then, with a devilish grin, Bay finished the story: After the young man began the long march off the lot, Bay told the guard at the front gate to send him back to the set. At that point, the young crewmember proudly showed us his pocket knife, which he said he was never without after that experience. Bay laughed for a moment, then told everyone to get back to work.
So did Bay ever blow his top while we were on set? Only once and only for a moment when one of the machine guns being used by a SEAL didn’t go off. Bay had half a dozen cameras running, including one mounted on a crane and another on the roof of a moving pursuit vehicle, tons of pyro and smoke effects effects going off and a large number of cast running and shooting. When the gun didn’t go off, Bay did. He cursed and raved for a few seconds but he didn’t yell at anyone. And when we asked what went wrong, he calmly explained the manufacturer had switched to a less reliable design and he just wished they had gotten that shot. That was it. It was a bit of a let down, to be honest.
Fifteen-year-old newcomer Isabela Moner who plays Izabella in the film further deconstructed Bay’s mythic harsh exterior, saying “[O]verall he’s just a really cool guy. I think there are two modes that he has. When he’s on set, he gets very serious about his work, and then off set he’s a very different person.” So much for the monstrous Michael Bay.
Transformers: The Last Knight opens June 23, 2017.
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