Dark of the Moon COLLIDER.COM watches 20 Minutes of film & interviews Bay for 2hrs

[Marvin]

This was posted on collider.com

It includes a spoilery 2hr interview with Bay himself about the film and his thoughts on the industry and the push for 3D.

http://www.collider.com/2010/12/08/michael-bay-interview-transformers-dark-moon-edit-bay-visit/

It seems the initial point of the set visit was to address the rumors concerning the use of 3D in the film and it evolved into bay showing and telling much more due to how happy he is about the footage.

Steve has always been a bay enthusiast and Breaks(from aint it cool) less so, but their reactions and commentary seem genuinely positive when put in context. That being said Edit Bay reports are almost never bad. Take it for what you will. I for one think this is yet another positive sign as to the quality of this last film.


some excepts form the interview.

Bay: People were going on the Internet, saying we didn’t do any 3D and there’s all this talk, so we’re just trying to set the record straight, you know? So… I don’t know… I’m sure you guys will have questions.

(Bay shows us the teaser trailer)

Bay: What do you guys think of that?

It’s a good sales pitch.

Bay: Is it? I’m just trying to spin it a little bit. We have a more serious story this time and I’m trying to make up for movie 2. (Laughter)

Spoiler

What do you think Neil Armstrong is going to have to say, or…

Bay: Well, Buzz, he’s involved in the picture.

In the modern day?

Bay: Yeah. If you can get through his stories while he pitches his books, you know, once you get past the two-hour sales pitch for me to direct this movie. I definitely know they landed on the moon now, because the way that old guy – don’t call him this – but he is a stud of all studs to go up there. I said, because I wanted to know exactly about the Hasselblad cameras. And I said, ‘When you brought back the cameras…’ And he was, ‘Brought back the cameras? We didn’t bring **** back, we had to throw it all out! It’s a junkyard up on the moon. We could barely get off!’ So I knew it was real, just by studying actors. So anyway… It was cool to have him involved.

Bay: Depth, you can’t really appreciate 3D because you need like 3 or 4 seconds, most people do, to really feel 3D. You can’t really appreciate it when you’re seeing like a quick teaser. Cause the shot is kind of, teaser cut length. But it’s actually changed my style on this movie—I’ve got many more wides, the camera’s not wild. So it does change my style a bit.

So why did you decide to use 3D on Transformers 3?

Bay: Contrary to opinion, the studio did not force me to do anything. They suggested, “Would you be interested in 3D” and I’m like “huh.” I don’t know, I’ve had (Jeffrey) Katzenberg call me all the time, Jim (Cameron) call me all the time—“You’ve gotta do 3D, you’ve gotta do 3D, you’ve gotta do 3D.” I visited Jim on Avatar and I just saw all the blue screen and the big cameras and I’m like, “This is so not me,” so it’s kinda scary alright? Especially ‘cause I do real world stuff, [as opposed to] the blue screen stage where it’s all air-conditioned, no dust and you can manufacture so much and you’ve got these big rigs that go with the umbilical cord into a lot of this brain power stuff. So we first investigated conversion companies, it took about 5 months of investigation, I mean literally breaking it down. We had them all come pitch to us, how they would do it, and so thought, “Okay, well what if we spent a lot of time on conversion?” You can do really successful conversion, but it just takes a lot of time. And then I kept thinking, “God I’ve gotta try these cameras” and we got Jim’s space, his camera systems out there. And this is really hard for me ‘cause I’m a die-hard film guy, anamorphic old school lenses, and there’s just nothing more beautiful than anamorphic lenses to me. So going digital was like, “umpf”, it’s just kinda crass for me and in close-up it’s terrible—just for me, that’s for my taste. So we brought the camera systems out, and you hear horror stories on all these movies, they would do 20 shots, 10 shots a day, and I usually do 40-50 shots a day, and I’m like “Well this is bad on a, you know, $200 million movie, this is gonna just exponentially increase the shooting days, it’s a disaster.”

How’d the cast like working with 3D?

Bay: They loved it. Cause you can keep the tape rolling. The actors like it cause you can do take after take and just keep the camera rolling. So you get in a rhythm, which is helpful. It just makes your memory storage go way up and all that.

I actually really enjoyed it. I was very curious how engaging or less engaging a dialogue scene would be. There’s stuff where it’s subtle stuff with Shia talking, and it’s just kinda cool, I mean you see a little thing but you’re still focusing on him. I think it’s good for a third movie. We tried to learn from the second movie. On the second movie we got burned. We had a writers strike, we had to agree on a story in three weeks, and then we knew they were going on strike. It was a ****ed scenario all the way around, it wasn’t fair to the writer, it wasn’t fair to me, it wasn’t fair to anybody. It was still an entertaining movie, but I think we failed on certain aspects. What we did with this movie is I think we have a much better script, and we got back to basics. I think there’s some really cool action on this movie, there’s some very cool conspiracy, there’s great robot stuff in this that people were missing in the second one, you’ve got great robot conflict. So I’m excited about this movie.

It’s more serious. I got rid of the dorky comedy, I mean we’ve got two little characters, that’s it, but the dorkiness is not there. Dork-free Transformers. It’s much more serious. It’s still entertaining, it’s big looking. I think it’s much more compelling, what we did, how we funneled our action, what we’ve got our characters doing, they’ve got a lot more to do.

one of the most intersting parts personally

Would you say that the action set pieces are the biggest of your career?

Bay: My take on this movie was that I wanted to make the fighting a lot more personal. In the past two movies the cavalry has always came in, this time the cavalry isn’t coming. It’s black hawk down, a small group; they’re ****ed. It makes it more intimate. It’s just different.

The government played a large role in the first two movies, now that transformers are out there and everyone knows about them, does the government still play a large role?

Bay: You feel it but you won’t see it as much. There’s a national security advisor, but we don’t spend a lot of time with that.

Can you say how many Autobots and Decepticons are on each team now?

Bay: No, but we have ones that we are highlighting now.

alot more at the source
a very promising read.

 

[TheVileOne]

Why did the producers say they were not doing it all in 3D then?

 

[Figs]

If all that is true and Bay isn't bull ****ting us then I'm actually a bit excited for this film.

 

[ChinoXL]

Of course they sounded genuine the guy basically wine and dined them so it probably swayed their opinion to the positive side more then the genuine honest side

but from reading the interview - it sounded like a lot of 3D talk more then the actual transformer movie itself

 

[craigdbfan]

Can't believe Bay did an interview for that long. Thats really nice of him that he ate with them too.

Keep remembering Bay at the Lakers game looking sad and confused sitting with them at their bench. Nobody was saying anything to him. lol

Not that he's the greatest director but damn I'd be taking the chance to talk to him if I were one of the players but then again I'm not a 7 foot diva.

Apparently Bay was so happy he actually showed them more than 20 minutes (although not all of it was finished footage). Paramount was actually pissed on how much he was showing. Looks like he is proud of this one.

 

[Ipodman]

Glad there's gonna be less army stuff... the robots are what we are here to see.

 

[knowsbleed]

The military involvement did seem a bit much in TF2... and the way that Duhamel and Gibson played their military roles were pretty unrealistic. I'd like a little less focus on the military and that time devoted instead towards the teamwork of the Transformers themselves.



... on a side note that most of you won't care about, it was pretty ridiculous how Tyrese's character went from an E-6 (TSgt) to an E-9 (CMSgt) in the span of 2 years. That's impossible.

 

[Avengers-Report]

If all that is true and Bay isn't bull ****ting us then I'm actually a bit excited for this film.

Since when has Bay ********ted.....oh wait. I have 0 confidence in anything the man says.

 

[Golgo-13]

The military involvement did seem a bit much in TF2... and the way that Duhamel and Gibson played their military roles were pretty unrealistic. I'd like a little less focus on the military and that time devoted instead towards the teamwork of the Transformers themselves.



... on a side note that most of you won't care about, it was pretty ridiculous how Tyrese's character went from an E-6 (TSgt) to an E-9 (CMSgt) in the span of 2 years. That's impossible.

As impossible as giant robots from an alien planet bringing their battle to Earth?

I just figured, since he was part of that special NEST unit, he made rank quickly because of his high security clearance and whatnot after TF1.

 

[Marvin]

Since when has Bay ********ted.....oh wait. I have 0 confidence in anything the man says.

I'm actually pretty curious when?
He's always come off as straight shooter to me, even inspite of himself.