Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Writers Interview

Here’s more from the Los Angeles press day for Michael Bay’s highly anticipated Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. We sat down with producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, Visual Effects Supervisor Scott Farrar (ILM), and Screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman who talked with us about the creative process behind their new film. Here’s what they had to tell us about the film’s storyline, aggressive visual style and high-octane action sequences:

Q: Can you talk about coming up with the concept for this? Was it originally going to culminate at the pyramids or did that come along later in the writing process?

KURTZMAN: I think that we knew that there would be an expectation of the sequel to go deeper into the mythology of the Transformers. So the idea, looking back at the comics and at the cartoons, was that they’d been unearthed for a long time and there was a deeper connection between humans and the robots, and that led us to think, well, if you go back to early, ancient civilization, what’s the first thing that comes to mind and that’s how the pyramids came into it.

Q: I was really happy to see Sound Wave in the movie and that Frank Welker came back for it. I was curious why you didn’t go the whole 9 yards with it?

SCOTT: Those were the ideas that Michael wrestled with. I think it’s probably screen time that has a lot to do with it. It just had to move forward with the storytelling and that’s what happens.

LORENZO: The problem is there are so many fans and so many different characters they want and so you can only service each one of them so much. Each time we were hoping to expand the number of characters and that’s really the goal there and we try to be as true as we can to it.

KURTZMAN: You’re talking about the voice specifically? We actually tried it and we had his voice like that for a long time and what we found in the mix was that it was almost impossible to understand what he was saying so we ended up having to filter it.

LORENZO: He delivers really important information in the movie too because if you can’t understand him, you’ll have some real serious plot issues.

Q: In what way does the military bring credibility and realism to this film?

LORENZO: The way to look at it is if you’re going to fight these 32-to-125 foot robots, who else would you fight it with? We just went through a whole international tour and they were asking us a lot about why the American military and our answer was, “Well, if we were living in one of their countries, we’d be using their military. Michael has a long history of meeting with the military and having them in his movies and all of us have had some different experiences as well. What they bring to it is actually – obviously it gives a sense of reality to the movie, but also for us, what is most interesting about it is our actual interaction with them, because you actually get to see these people who’ve made a life choice, and the honesty of that choice comes through each and every time you meet these guys. So, for us, that’s the really exciting thing. We get to hang out on the base and see the joy they get out of being a part of us and also see us get affected by their level of commitment, because we’re in Hollywood, and we’re a bit more spoiled than they are.

ORCI: It’s the human military that are the heroes. The technology is a cautionary tale in terms of why the – part of the reason why the Deceptacons all tend to take the form of military machinery, the idea being that you must not separate the humanity from the machine or then you have a problem.

Q: Scott, can you tell us what makes these even bigger, faster robots?

SCOTT: I think the main beat for us were there were 40 odd plus new characters and part of the film was going to be in IMAX which means higher resolution, bigger movie, more rendered space on our farm to do the shots, higher complexity on ever level. I’ve been telling folks that the simulation of Devastator on top of the pyramid with all the blocks being thrown down is the largest simulation we’ve ever done at our company, and we’re trying to hit new levels of realism and every single thing we do, whether it’s the render of the robot or the physical environment that they’re reacting with, it’s just like upping the game on every level. So it was a pretty complicated show.

KURTZMAN: We went down to ILM last week and visited Scott, and they were telling us when they were rendering the Devastator shots, there was so much information in their shots that the computer literally exploded overnight.

SCOTT: We did, we lost some machinery that night. Little puffs of smoke, just like in a movie.

ORCI: Blew the computer’s mind.

Q: I noticed something about the script…

ORCI: What script? [Laughs]

Q: There was a lot harsher language in this film – the dialogue was a little more adult.

ORCI: [Steven] Spielberg, when we were talking about this movie, said that the first one was in a way thematically about losing your virginity and the second one is about stepping into adulthood. So, part of that gradient difference is a reflection of that move. … and Bay has a filthy mouth.

KURTZMAN: I think also Goonies actually was a movie that really stuck us when we were about 12 years old, because they were swearing for the first time. And it was allowed, and all of a sudden it was cool and frankly that’s how kids talk, and there was something that legitimized the whole experience of it. Because this one falls very much in the spirit of the Amblin movies that we grew up on, I think there must have been some borrowing of that as well.

Q: I don’t know how many moving parts the Transformer toys had, but in comparison to how many moving parts to these characters, is there any kind of numerical relationship? Also, is it a natural flow from the car to the final robot? If we slowed the film down, will it actually move into the places we want it to?

SCOTT: The first part, the number of parts used, it’s up into the thousands, and what I want you to know is every shot is dressed to camera, so we have a lot of moving parts and a lot of pieces that are all finished up. But every single time that we set up a new camera position, the camera swirls around to the back, and we say, “Darn it, there’s some pieces that are unfinished, we have to repaint them and get them so they can be animated.” Optimus Prime was made out of 10,000 pieces, while Devastator is about 8 times that, and they only move if we need them to move. And it’s all up to the animators frankly to lay down the movement first, we try to free it up to be creative.

Q: But if you slowed it down, could you tell that the fender becomes his left cheek?

SCOTT: Yeah, you can. If the camera were on the back side there might be some things that are flying around a little bit, a little bit more freeform, but essentially the movement is correct and all this has to be bought off also by the Hasbro people, because we want to have the essential shape of the transformation fit to what the toy will do.

Q: Can you talk about the use of the SR-71, the Blackbird? Did you go to the Air and Space Museum and say that’s the one?

LORENZO: When we were in there, we didn’t have it in the script as that, I don’t think. When we went there on location, we saw that thing and went, “What a cool plane.” There was a lot of ideas that came out of the Smithsonian that we couldn’t use, because you see some of the classic things, the lunar module, we tried to put a few of them in there. It’s such a cool looking thing and the idea of turning this character into an old guy just felt right.

Q: Michael’s a great fan of Blu-ray – what’s going to be on the DVD?

LORENZO: I don’t think Michael has had a moment to think about the Blu-ray to tell you the truth. We finished the movie last Saturday morning, seriously, so we really haven’t spent any time – it will have a lot of additional things. Like in the process of any movie, there’s a lot of scenes we weren’t able to fully incorporate and we’re going to make it as exciting as we can for the fans. But we’ll be turning our attention [to that] after it opens to what we’re going to do to the afterlife.

Q: Doing the screenplay for this second movie, were you asked for more specific rewrites?

ORCI: Well, one benefit is that now you’ve seen it and now we’ve been inspired by what ILM has done and everyone knows it works and now it’s not a question of should they talk or not, and are people going to believe it or not, so you can really just jump right into it. The first movie was very much a mystery, that by the time the Transformers arrive you want them, you’re hungry for them. We don’t get that benefit in the second movie. Everyone knows who they are, now they want to see them from the beginning, so that helps. On the other hand, now everyone knows what Transformers is so everyone is caught up with all of us, as the filmmakers, so therefore everyone does have stronger opinions about Transformers. But there’s no such thing as a bad idea. You should be able to hear any idea from anybody and evaluate it. You can never hear too many ideas.

Q: Where do you see the franchise going? Will there be a Transformers 3? Will you have the origin of Bumblebee?

LORENZO: We don’t really think about the movie until after it opens up. To be honest with you, we’re all a little bit superstitious about it, and also there’s sort of an arrogance about a presumption of success, obviously a movie like this is going to be out there and the audience is going to come and one presumes that there’s going to be a certain level [of success]. But, on the first movie, we felt the same way and we never talked about the second movie script, until well after the movie had opened and we’re going to do the same thing with the third. You get two advantages by waiting, one is you get to find out what the fans really liked and if there are things they missed, and if there are things that didn’t land properly. And the other is, you can focus all your creative and all your emotional energy on this one.

ORCI: But I’d like to see Optimus Prime run for the senate.

Q: With Optimus Prime being the most important character for the fans, why choose to focus more on the human characters and less on the Autobots?

ORCI: Because the audience is the human characters. So the idea is you want to see it through their point of view. I remember a lot of fans questioned whether or not there should be humans in the first movie at all. And we always felt it was if they’re robots in disguise, they have to be hiding from somebody. So the idea itself prescribes a human element.

KURTZMAN: I think also you have to use Optimus in a very targeted way. The most important thing for us is to make sure that the integrity of the voice of the character as was created by the cartoons a long time ago is very much in place and we spent a lot of time talking to Lorenzo and talking to Hasbro about how everyone perceives him very much as an Arthurian knight. So, I think making sure that his voice was clear, that his story in relation to Sam’s story was very parallel, was important, and ultimately Optimus relates very much to what happens to Sam in the movie, and Sam has to essentially rectify a mistake that he made. So Optimus plays a presence in a big part of the movie even when he’s not in the scenes with Sam.

LORENZO: And also, if you think about the movie, when we sat down to discuss the first movie, there were a lot of people who didn’t know anything about Transformers and the only way they get an access point was humans. In a way, for the hardcore Transformer fans, or the loyal Transformer fans, it might have been enough, but for this one we made a decision that you needed something else to relate to, you needed that. And they’re expensive as hell, so the more you use them, the more it costs.

Q: How do you feel about using GM cars now that they’ve gone into bankruptcy?

LORENZO: We like GM. They’ve got some cool cars, we like their cars, they’ve been very supportive of us, we hope that we can help them out of their trouble in some small way by highlighting the good things about their cars. They didn’t do anything wrong to us. I’d like a Bumblebee.

Q: How often did the studio intervene saying there were too many action scenes?

LORENZO: Intervention, I like that word. It presumes far too much control.

KURTZMAN: We’ve never gotten a note there’s too much action before. Michael never had that note for us. Here’s the thing, we never start the script from a place of action, we never sit down and go, “Alright, here’s our action scenes.” We say, “What’s the character story here?” And then once you start talking about the character’s story, the action scenes evolve out of it. And I thing we always feel, as audiences, that the actions scenes are only as good as the audience’s investment in the character, so if you’re not invested in the character then the action is just a lot of noise. And our goal is always to try and make sure that that scene serves some plot point. Michael obviously likes his action scenes, and he has very strong instincts about what he wants to do, so a lot of our job collectively is to figure out how to keep the story alive in that.

LORENZO: But when you think about it, just to expound on that a little bit, the design that these guys came up with in the first one is boy-gets-car-gets-girl, so there’s a rite of passage that all of us can relate to some version of that and if it wasn’t about a car it was about something else. The design here is what is it like to become an adult, break away from the nest, all the things these guys built into the story, so you’re constantly feeling I think related on a personal level to some aspect of that journey, so when it gets interrupted by the action in a sense you’re invested in what’s going on.

KURTZMAN: Yeah, like the sequels that we loved growing up were Superman II and Terminator II and Aliens, and the common denominator in all those movies, aside from the fact that they stood on their own, you didn’t have to see the first movie to see the second movie, was that the hero was challenged in some very fundamental way. The best sequels are always a refusal to the call story and the consequences that follow, and that’s what we build Transformers on.

Q: Scott, can you talk a little about shooting the underwater sequence with the robots? Was that the most challenging CGI do to?

SCOTT: It is. We were on land and sea and air in this film. Every environment is a challenge. Underwater, it gets a little bit into the software stuff, we had a person come up with an underwater look, it’s an underwater plug in and what that means is it’s all about light. Everything that we do in our world is all about the light. It’s not just building the robot but it’s how it co-mingles with all the light sources. It might be ambiance. If they’re really deep in the water, how much light do we give them? How much internal lighting should they have? It’s all those questions that are very artsy and then you just keep working on it and working on it. We had a lot of deep sea underwater research photos that we looked at and we sort of gleaned from that how clear do we want to be, how much plankton and spinnotchi we called it floating in front of the camera do we want? All these little tricks to try and make you believe you’re really underwater we have to employ. And it was challenging.

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” opens in theaters on June 24th.