IGN Interview of Michael Bay

IGN has posted an interview with Michael Bay and producer Tom DeSanto about Transformers. The highlights:

- "Steven [Spielberg] called me I think a year ago last April, and my first thought was, 'No, I'm not interested,'" says Bay. "Just because I thought, 'O.K., how am I going to do a toy movie?' And then when I went to Hasbro I realized, 'O.K., start over and go for the realistic alien invasion robot movie on Earth.' So with that thinking in mind, that's how I went about it."

- "The thing that attracted me to Transformers at first was they're great characters," says producer Tom DeSanto. "You just instantly got pulled into the mythology. Optimus Prime and Megatron weren't robots. These were almost Shakespearean type characters that had all this drama and all this background. And that's the great thing about this world, that it's not just about robots."

- The movie is PG-13 but according to Bay is "pretty edgy for a family film."

- "You've got to go through… First you write down what all the character points are in your head," says Bay. "It's a tough thing. With Cullen, he's not an actor actor. He's a voice actor, so when you see his face, he's got a great voice, but I need to hire another actor to do his (expressions). He's going to do the voice and I'm going to have another actor study the video when he does how he's going to say it. They're actually going to have to work in tandem. They do this on animation features as well. We did a very funny study where we did De Niro and Hugo Weaving. We put our Optimus to Hugo and De Niro. Hysterical. I mean, it looks just like them!"

- "It's not fully like a human face but it does have certain human things to it, you know," he says. "Otherwise as humans we wouldn't associate with it as much. We did a lot of different studies; if you do nothing, it kind of like doesn't hit us. … If they're just frozen robots, pure metal that doesn't move and like the eyebrow kind of thing -- we have these eye slits that can kind of move and the eyes, how they move. And it's got to have some human things to make it sort of successful to us. Because, you look at the cartoons, that is ninety percent away from where we have to go. Right now they're just big glowing eyes that have no emotions. It's what I keep trying to tell the fanboys is that this is gonna be so much more realistic than what they've seen in the past. But you know, they're angry about everything anyway." (ooh thats going to piss those angry guys off)

Click here for the entire article.

Interesting bit about hiring someone to do the face capture for Prime (think Gullom in Lord of the Rings). I wonder who? I just hope they have prepped a crap load of "how they do that?" extra features for the DVD set and not the "lets sell this movie and pat ourselves on the back" features usually see but a real Lord of the Rings style behind the scenes documentary (for lack of a better word). The Rhythm and Hues montage when Superman came out is an excellent example of using a "how to" to both sell a movie and present how something was done in an entertaining fashion.