Transformers Fought MPAA
Shia LaBeouf, who stars in Michael Bay's upcoming Transformers movie, told SCI FI Wire that executive producer Steven Spielberg had to appeal a decision by the Motion Picture Association of America to give the film a dreaded R rating. "Spielberg fought back and got the PG-13," LaBeouf said in an interview. "It's just because of the intensity. There are not a lot of breathers. It's like whoosh!"
It's not clear if Bay, the action director known for such adrenalin-pumping movies as Armageddon and The Island, cut anything to get the lower rating. La Beouf said that an early cut of the film earned an R rating simply because it was so suspenseful. "We went to get our MPAA rating, and this movie is for the masses, and we got an R rating because of the tension," LaBeouf said. He added: "Not because of the curse words or nudity, but for sheer intensity. It's aneurysm-inducing."
LaBeouf stars alongside Jon Voight, Anthony Anderson, Josh Duhamel and John Turturro in the movie, a live-action update of the 1980s toy, TV and comic franchise, about warring alien robots who bring their battle to Earth. (LaBeouf talked about Transformers at a screening and party at Sony last week for his upcoming animated penguin surfer movie, Surf's Up.)
LaBeouf said that Transformers' computer graphics are out of this world. "No one has ever seen animation like this," he said, adding that the technical people at the visual-effects company Industrial Light & Magic were astounded about the amount of CG they had to do. "The people at ILM said this is the most intense graphics in the history of the company," he said. "Everyone says they did some pretty magical and wild things. Just Megatron's arm has 15,000 moving pieces that all converge like [a] Rubik's Cube. And add to that Michael Bay's chase scenes? And then you have two 40-foot machines on the 405 [freeway] boxing. It's nuts! It's never been done like that. It will be fun to see what happens." Transformers opens July 4.
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