By 2011, Transformers had completed
a trilogy of films.
The franchise had been so successful.
Made a lot of money.
Once upon a time in Hollywood,
that was enough.
But when your last film netted over $1 billion,
you'd better have an encore.
We might as well crank out a couple more.
Michael Bay's ambition
had minted the franchise.
What is it like working with the director, Michael Bay,
who from all accounts appears to be insane?
Camera's not rolling, too bad.
Now he'd lost a leading man.
- It's over. - Shia was out.
A leading lady.
She called him Hitler.
He's infamous for being a sort of tyrant.
And almost someone's life.
One of those freak accidents.
If Transformers was to keep going,
Can we even go bigger than the last one?
They would need to expand their horizons.
Paramount was after that Chinese market.
Hong Kong, you can't lockdown streets.
So you're in live traffic.
How's that gonna go?
Chaos.
The franchise had crossed into
dangerous new territory.
The triads, they sent some guys to come down
and do intimidation stuff.
My bodyguard front kicks this guy.
Hong Kong was great.
After a triad of films,
the fourth would extract a toll.
Fourth one is like a root canal.
Would anything be left standing?
That's a real house, and they blew it up.
You can't believe how dangerous that was.
Or should that be any one?
It's just too tough.
But I hit the panic button,
So it really was shit raining down on me.
Following Dark of the Moon
there were dark rumors surrounding the fourth Transformers
and director, Michael Bay.
I heard him saying, he wasn't gonna do it.
You say that sometimes when you are sick and tired of it.
For Michael Bay,
Transformers had been a wild ride,
and maybe it was time to give someone else a turn.
I heard some rumors of another director doing it.
That was not Paramount's preference,
and it wasn't Bay's either.
He probably just thought, "We can't stop now."
But Bay had one condition
before he did the heavy lifting on Transformers 4.
Michael wanted to do a small movie
before he does another big one.
Something where he could flex
a more modest creative muscle.
It was gonna be Michael's low budget film.
A small art house indie.
For $30 million.
A Bayhem.
It's called pain and gain, Rusty. Don't be a little bitch!
A movie based on a true story
about criminal bodybuilders.
I gotta get a pump.
Yeah, take a moment.
That's it, get it.
The speculation online is
that Paramount turned around to him
and said that, "Look, we'll let you make that film,
but you have to make another Transformers film for us."
And then Michael was back to doing it.
We got the gang back together.
With Michael Bay back for the fourquel,
Transformers: Age of Extinction ,
Paramount focused on exporting American Bayhem
across the Pacific to a potential audience
of almost 1.4 billion.
That Chinese market was super-duper aware
of American films, and it wanted its hunk of it.
Following Dark of the Moon's
$165 million in Chinese box office,
Hong Kong was the place to be.
Paramount was after that Chinese market.
Paramount announced it had partnered
with China Movie Channel
and Jiaflix Productions to co-produce the film.
Paramount turned to us to help them launch in China.
But changes weren't limited to locations,
even the bots were getting an overhaul.
One of the challenges for me has been to keep up
personally with the sort of evolving style of the robots.
Designer Ben Procter had been there
from the beginning,
and even he couldn't keep his bots straight
for the fourth film.
I started off with a more sleek,
more robotic looking design,
Michael didn't like it at all.
What, did you forget how to design a transformer?
I'm like, whoa, okay.
I guess I haven't been paying attention
to how the style has evolved over time.
I gotta catch up.
The robots were becoming less robotic.
We're getting into much more kind of
human characterizations of the Autobots in particular.
What the hell are you saying?
Less like car parts.
Well, at least we're picking cooler cars than this.
More humanoid.
- Ah! - Like a person.
You all think you're the center of the universe.
Like okay, we really are pushing
toward this very human face
kind of embedded into technology.
The bots now had more facial expressiveness
than many human actors.
The goal of that is just to give
more expression, more relatability,
all the classic things that you get out of the human face.
Human beings, bunch of backstabbing weasels.
A little bit of a redesign of Bumblebee,
he got more heroic-looking.
Come on, B, take him out.
He wasn't quite so cute.
Oh, hell no!
If the bots were getting
an attitude adjustment,
their disguises needed an upgrade too.
Michael wanted to somewhat adjust
the whole mood or persona of the Camaro.
There was a new graphic package
and new arrow devices.
Just look at that winning smile.
Very much like theater makeup
give it a dramatic look about it.
And just like any actor,
they're all looking for that big break.
In every film we have a continual new deck
of unused potential from the franchise.
Hasbro had ideas for toys,
I mean, characters to go in the films,
and it was this man's job to get them on screen.
I am Galvatron!
We knew after working with Michael,
he's always like eager for what's coming,
what's new, what's cool.
But Hasbro needed to convince Michael Bay
to cast the toys it wanted to push.
We kept throwing Hound out there.
It's a bad idea.
Hound finally made its way into a film.
Hell yeah, boom guy.
Transformers movies had effectively
become the shop window for Transformers toys,
meaning Michael Bay was the shopkeeper
calling the shots on Hasbro's toys.
He wanted a bounty hunter
that was gonna come and kill Transformers.
- He's mine now. - Lockdown.
Lockdown was one character
receiving a promotion, hastily repurposed at Bay's behest.
We had made that character for a cartoon.
Hunting trophies.
And we were like, "Here's the guy."
That was an example where we knew he had a need,
and we put the right card on the table.
Michael Bay even began to transform
the way Transformers transformed.
Michael was like, "Let's do something different."
My first reaction was,
it's not really transforming a car.
Huh!
But I liked it because it was different.
We can build them ourselves.
This is not legal, this is illegal experimentation.
Amongst all these newcomers,
the Age of Extinction was reanimating a breed of OG bots
not seen since the Reagan administration.
If only we had some dinosaurs working for us.
The Dino Bot's something that people wanted.
You've got to be kidding me!
A strange idea, dinosaur robots.
No way, no way!
That is also super-cool. I had them when I was a kid,
I loved them, didn't have to make sense.
And if you don't have to make sense,
you can do anything.
That was a particularly tricky one
because they changed shapes so much,
they seemed to like rotate quite a bit.
That was one of the little tricks that ILM did.
I was expecting a giant car.
Perhaps the biggest extinction
in Age of Extinction was the disappearance
of Michael Bay's leading man.
I'm gonna go. Shia was out.
Shia LaBeouf was moving on.
If you breathe a word of what you've seen here,
we'll do time for treason.
Poor Shia LaBeouf, that's all I have to say.
But I'm sure that Michael drove Shia crazy.
Suddenly, without the leading man
who had carried the franchise all this way,
Bay needed a new hero to come to his rescue.
Superman! Well, not quite Superman,
but his savior was a man whose acting muscles
Bay had certainly noticed on Pain & Gain.
That's what I'm talking about.
But Wahlberg would feel the pain
of fatherhood in his new role.
Dad!
Coming.
As the franchise's first leading dad.
I am your father, okay,
and I have been busting my ass to take care of you.
It was more of a love story between him and his daughter.
This is a non-dating household, okay?
You don't date, I don't date, that's it.
Maybe you should.
And then he was thrown in this Transformers world.
- I'll kill you! - Don't shoot, don't shoot!
I think with any reboot, they're trying to
appeal to a different audience to get going.
Nobody wants to go to the dance with their dad.
Not the case for dad
and the newest Transformers cast member, Titus Welliver.
When I told my sons,
my cool quotient shot through the roof.
They were beside themselves.
It was a golden opportunity
that went by the name--
James Savoy, I'm a federal agent.
And in this world he was in esteemed company.
The age of the Transformers is over.
But the age of top shelf acting talent
in Transformers was just beginning.
Kelsey Grammer is a ruthless guy.
You have no idea what you're involved with here.
If you had to do a Star Wars analogy,
he's the emperor, and I'm Darth Maul.
His world as he knows it is gone.
Perhaps something a little more violent.
Stanley, extremely funny.
LOL. That's funny.
This was a franchise now attracting
Hollywood's best actors. All part of the plan.
Michael's also smart, right?
In the scope of the unbelievability
of everything that's going on.
He populates those films with serious actors
rather than sort of action stars.
Do it!
And it lends a credibility to it.
But whether that credibility would add
weight to the franchise remained to be seen.
For Transformers fourth film, the Age of Extinction ,
a seasoned crew was assembled alongside a new cast
with some fresh faces.
And it was great with Mark coming in, a amazing actor.
And he said, he's like...
Don't work all night.
And he said, he's like,
"How about those trailers we have?"
And I said, "Yeah, they're really nice."
And he said, 'Yeah, we're never gonna be in them."
New cast, new crew, same Michael Bay.
And he said, Michael's amused...
You think you've finished a scene,
and then all of a sudden he throws you into another scene.
I said to him one day,
"You're a bull that carries around his own China shop."
Some different people that have been on prior Michael Bay,
"I'm never working with that ever again."
They come back.
Well, not quite everyone.
After the tragedy on the set of Dark of the Moon ,
It was an unfortunate mishap.
Bay's stunt guru, Ken Bates,
opted not to return.
That meant his replacement, Mike Gunther,
was coming in cold on a production that was coming in hot.
Okay, fire.
Most of the crew had already done this movie,
everyone kind of knew how he worked.
His process,
he works at just a different speed.
Just wondering what you're doing standing around.
Let's get to work.
And I had come off of a huge franchise.
All right, we're good to go.
That you never turned your back on family.
Mike thought his work on
The Fast and the Furious was fast,
but compared to the speed of Bayhem.
- Fast was like... - Ah!
And Michael Bay was like--
That was a huge learning curve for me.
So a lot of it was just homework.
Three, four, five, like that.
And to get up to speed.
Ride or die.
I mean, it is a huge difference.
Bay was operating on a whole different level.
Michael has a tendency,
he can see what's not there, and that is an adjustment,
'cause on a regular practical movie, you can see everything.
The Transformers were now literally
more than meets the eye, invisible on set,
but still cast a massive footprint
that was impossible to ignore.
This CG character is stepping on cars and throwing cars.
And most of it is in Michael's head, right?
But 20 foot invisible robots were the easy part.
This was the hardest part for me.
In other movies, it's like, "Hey, this is what we want,
this is what we mapped out",
his is more like, "Ah!"
Michael Bay liked to work off of a schedule
that actually only existed in his head.
You go there, you think you're prepped,
you have everything lined up, you've rehearsed,
you're like, "Yep, we are ready, bring it."
And he's like, "Nope, we're not shooting that."
You just kind of take a deep breath--
Count to 10.
Well, you gotta be kidding me.
Michael's a pisser to work with,
and it happened right away.
And what happened was,
Titus Welliver found himself on security detail.
And so this was day one.
Security blanket detail.
He goes, "Where's Titus?"
And I go, "Hey Michael, I'm right here."
And he goes, "Oh, okay." So we'd shoot that.
And then, "Where's Titus?" "I'm right here, Michael."
"Are you gonna be doing that for the next six months?"
"I'm always going to be at arm's length."
And he laughed, and he is like, "Good, good, good to know."
And if Bay could improvise,
then his actors would have to, as well.
We'd be getting ready to shoot a scene,
and he'd have the script in his hand and he'd go,
"I don't like any of this stuff that you're saying.
What do you wanna say?"
And I'd kind of go, "Ooh, I don't know, I mean--"
I'm seriously pissed we're not getting paid for this.
"Think of something."
You got 10 seconds.
And we're just gonna shoot it.
Seven seconds.
- Okay. - If I have to.
Much of the chagrin of the writers that were in earshot.
Afraid not.
And then Titus delivered
the zinger heard around the world,
or in this case, the set.
The big line that I improvised
that people quote to me on the street all the time is...
You don't have a warrant?
My face is my warrant.
If you're wondering if Michael Bay
sometimes goes too far in pursuit of perfection...
He's a perfectionist.
...we need to go to Texas. Why Texas?
Texas is where we accidentally burned up that house,
but... Yes, you heard that right.
We burned a house.
But it was just a set, right?
Do you wanna see the property?
- That's a real house. - That's the real house.
Somebody's family home
made the ultimate sacrifice for Transformers.
They blew it up.
Ah!
They blew it up.
The smoke was coming from where it shouldn't be.
Caught the house on fire accidentally.
Sorry, I shouldn't be laughing.
And as long as it was happening on the set,
Michael Bay was going to direct it.
Michael Bay's downstairs yelling,
telling the fire department to go there, go over there.
The owners must be really like...
Su casa es mi casa.
We're gonna lose the casa.
It didn't ruin the house, but just damaged it nicely.
- In other words... - We had to rebuild it.
...total Bayhem.
Bayhem. Things happen.
That's a Michael Bay film.
No location was safe
from Bay's creative vision.
They did a lot of extensive filming
at GM Design for the fourth movie.
Like the shoot at the General Motors
Technical Center in Michigan.
Every one of General Motors future products
were presented to the board of directors
in this presentation room since the 1950s,
so it's very hallowed ground.
But for Michael Bay,
hallowed ground became ground zero
for pure rubber burning Bayhem.
No, no, you gotta calm down!
- It's crazy! - Stop!
We did not know.
B, stop going psycho!
That Michael Bay was gonna do those donuts
in our historic building.
You can smell the burned rubber, is full of smoke,
and there are guys trying to chisel
the melted rubber off of the floor.
But no, these chisels weren't able to get it off.
Michael Bay to GM, "Just put it on my tab."
So Michael Bay just paid for a whole new floor.
In pursuit of automotive grit,
Michael Bay took his crew into Motown's darkest recesses.
- After all... - Michael, he's a car guy.
And this was a car movie
as much as one about robots.
What kind of cars are those?
- They're so scary. - But...
You had to be really careful in some of these places,
there were still asbestos and lead and everything else.
The former Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit
was so rich in history, you could taste it.
We had to wear masks sometimes
where it's not good to breathe.
It wasn't Chernobyl.
Well, since we are talking about Chernobyl,
Who's got the factory shade?
Out of curiosity, I Google it.
It says, considered to be next to Chernobyl,
one of the most dangerously toxic places on the planet.
And Bay's a total germophobe.
So I go over to Bay, and he has this habit,
he does this with his T-shirt,
when he is thinking he goes like this.
He chews on his shirt.
So I come over and I go,
"Hey, Michael, did you know this?"
And he goes, "Ah, that's not true."
And I go, "Yep, here."
And I show him on the iPhone,
and he looks and he goes,
I bet you wish you could see my face right now.
Are you kidding? If we were wearing gas masks,
I don't think we're safe.
If Titus was hoping for safety.
Kill them all. Pleasure.
Where Transformers was headed next.
Up on the top of that building,
there was a bit of a chase up there.
Would only be a disappointment.
You can't believe how dangerous that was.
Leaving a trail of destruction in its wake,
Age of Extinction moved to Asia.
Plenty of time for improvements in China.
And as Paramount tried to tap
into the sleeping giant.
Paramount was after that Chinese market.
Even their Chinese partners
could only smooth the road so far.
China has a different set of rules.
Especially when it came to filming
action sequences in the island metropolis of Hong Kong.
Hey, hey, hey!
In Hong Kong you can't lockdown streets.
So you're in live traffic,
that is a different experience too.
That was bad enough when shooting cars,
but shooting supercars, that was gonna be Bayhem.
We kind of come up with the plan,
and this is how it's gonna work.
You're creating a rolling block,
you'll have three or four cars in front
and three or four cars in back
that act as your moving roadblock.
And then you're shooting everything
in the middle in live traffic.
I don't wanna die like this!
And if Hong Kong called for
gorilla style filming, Bay was ready to answer.
Bay goes, the way that we're shooting this,
it's gonna look like you're doing 50, 60 miles an hour.
Titus would be doing his own driving,
and the good people of Hong Kong
might be doing their own stunts.
Right before the first AD comes up and goes,
"Those will not be stunt people or background performers,
those are real people."
That's great right before the take.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm trying to book it,
but I'm being hyper-careful.
is on her tail.
At one point a lady steps off the curb.
Get off, you- And I'm like,
around her,
but I gotta have my Savoy face on.
So it's just chaos.
Camera operator, Jacques Jouffret,
had a front row seat.
Bay says to him, "That was killer! How was it for you?"
- Great time. - He's French.
He too make like Steve McQueen in the car.
He said, "I was shitting my pants."
Lots of fun, lots of fun.
- So I guess I did my job. - Box them in.
Jacques's job was to capture all the Bayaos.
- Bayhem. - Uh, right, sorry.
I can't shoot there.
We gonna shoot there, rolling on the ground.
And he's doing his things.
"Ah, looks great, let's go."
And then, okay, we go over there quickly.
Okay, done, let's go over here.
Hong Kong was great.
Ah!
But if Bay and company thought they
now had control of the Hong Kong streets, they were wrong.
The triads control a lot.
Triads being the notorious Cantonese mafia.
No baksheesh had been paid to them,
so they send some guys to come down
and do intimidation stuff.
Ah!
Extortion at the hands of a Chinese gang
sounded like something out of a movie.
And outta nowhere this guy appears,
and he's got an air conditioning unit,
and he just launches it at us.
Ah!
My bodyguard front kicks this guy,
and the guy sails, just flies.
Classic Kelsey, it goes.
I've merely staked my life.
Oh my!
What's this all about?
Several of them came down
and they approached Bay on the set.
And these two gangsters weren't recruiting
Michael for a love triad.
And one of Bay's bodyguards was a former SAS guy,
literally picked this guy up
and planted his head into the concrete.
And I don't know, after that everything seemed to be fine,
kind of the cost of doing business there.
And the one thing more dangerous
than Hong Kong streets? Hong Kong rooftops.
Wahlberg and I, we tried to do
as much of our stunt stuff within reason.
Very difficult to shoot that, very dangerous.
Very small, very crowded.
We barely had six and a half feet
between us and the ground.
When you're working in the States,
and you're rigging something, you'll have rock and roll truss,
and you build this whole truss system to keep people safe.
In Hong Kong they don't have that, they have bamboo.
They string it together and when you're 25 stories up,
and you're like, "Oh, hey, is this bamboo gonna hold?"
They were running on essentially rooftops
of little tiny apartments that people actually lived in.
They had to go in and reconstruct
with some plywood sheeting,
so that it was strong enough,
so that the stunt guys could run around
on the top without falling through.
Like what, this is wild.
Wahlberg goes, "This, I really don't like it at all."
And he's like, "Yeah, I don't either."
Mark is an exceptionally good athlete,
he's a very physical guy,
and I think audiences pay to see his face
opposed to the double coming in.
You gotta be kidding me!
That's a long way down.
He goes, "Would you rather do this scene,
or you and I do a kissing scene?"
I'd rather do a kissing scene with you,
as long as it was on the ground floor.
Bay squeezed all the action he could
from his leading men, but someone always wanted more.
I was sent a script.
That proved to be crucial for Titus Welliver
and his blossoming career.
My manager says,
"You're gonna meet with the producers of "Bosch."
And I said, "Oh, to play what?"
- And he went, "Bosch." - Bosch?
I read through it and I went, "Wow, what a great character!"
Enter a dramatic conflict
of the kind no actor likes.
It's in conflict 'cause there was a scene
that was gonna shoot in Shanghai.
If you change your mind over the weekend, let me know.
Will do.
This was a conflict with Michael Bay,
and more terrifying than a triad with an air conditioner.
Ah!
I step on an elevator in Hong Kong,
and there's Michael Bay and Ian, executive producer.
And Bay goes, "Hey, he's just talking about you."
He said, "This Bosch character, is it a good character?"
And I said, "It's a great character."
And I said, "Any actor would give
their blood supply to play this character."
And he said, "So you wanna do it?"
And I went, "Very much."
And he went, "Okay."
And he turns to Ian and he goes,
"We don't need Titus in Shanghai."
And he goes, "Go call your reps and tell them
you're free to go do Bosch."
Mariachi Plaza.
So it was partly thanks to Transformers
- Chief? - Titus was able to become...
Bosch.
And while his story had a happy ending.
So it goes.
ILM's was about to take a hit.
I could see that we weren't gonna make it.
After a 10 month shoot,
Age of Extinction was set to become
the biggest Transformers movie yet.
We're going to prove who we are.
Great for the marketing department
with a summer release only months away.
What we're about to do is gonna be kind of scary.
I could see that we weren't gonna make it.
Visual effects supervisor, Scott Farrar,
- had a big problem. - IMAX.
Even if it measured only 70 millimeters.
Is 70 millimeter film,
it's eight times the amount of space
compared to that original 35 millimeter frame.
The processing time of this larger frame,
one frame would be 138 hours to render. One frame.
So I thought, we're not gonna make it.
But release deadlines didn't care
about special effects render times.
We absolutely had to be sure we would hit the finish date.
I hit the panic button with the company.
So Scott called for backup.
We had to bring in extra processors,
we rented stuff from Disney,
we used stuff
across the bay from Pixar.
It got concerning.
We charge together.
Sometimes it takes a village.
Transformers: Age of Extinction
the fourth film in the franchise was released
on time in June of 2014.
Oh, man!
I'm still gonna patent this shit.
But all the pain was worth it
for the cast and crew.
I think it's badass.
Love it. Well, I hate it.
Fourth one is like a root canal.
Yeah, it's not good.
Sequels and remakes, bunch of crap.
Listen, honestly, I could barely get through it, so.
But fans loved Michael Bay's root canal enough
for it to become the biggest grossing film of the year,
netting more than $1 billion from its $210 million budget.
Now that's a transformation everyone likes.
This time Michael Bay didn't hesitate to resign,
and the studio was looking a long way down the track
while they had Bay onboard.
I think the Marvel Universe sort of spurs on
The Transformers Universe to keep creating new movies.
If Paramount was going to compete with Marvel,
it would take some planning,
after all you don't build a universe in a day.
Paramount had said,
"We're gonna have just a bunch of writers come in
and do roundtable with the next five movies."
Transformers had gone
from a simple animated series.
You just gave me a great idea
Do the classic trope.
A boy and his car.
But by the time the films had
Optimus Prime riding a T-Rex...
Okay, here's something we haven't had
in any of the movies yet, so let's do this.
...it would be a surprise to no one
when the fifth movie was set to go medieval,
with knights...
Ah!
Kings specifically.
King Arthur, exactly.
And yes, circular furniture.
Medieval England.
Like, what?
But his writers assembled to push play.
God, I thought that the fourth one was gonna be the last.
Others hit pause.
And some people didn't come back.
They're like, "Hey, it's just too tough."
It's tough, it is.
I had my moment.
Everyone it seemed was taking a breath.
The fifth one came about,
and Michael just had to have Camaro as Bumblebee.
It could not be another brand.
We're able to put together a good deal.
This was also going to be a big deal
even by Michael Bay's standards.
For him his expectations were,
"Hey, we're going bigger."
And I was like, "Man, can we even go bigger than the last one?"
That remained to be seen.
Okay.
But at least the big stars were back,
including a pumped Mark Wahlberg.
Mark told us he was so excited.
We were hesitant.
We were like, "Are you sure?"
And we're like looking at each other.
I'm like, "Did he forget?"
Also back in the frame.
I wasn't in four, and I thought that's it for me.
A man who thought his time with Transformers
- had come and gone. - They were moving on,
going in a different direction, which I got.
But then they called me for five.
Let them know up top that we lost control of the weapon.
You never know, it's Hollywood.
This time Bay was casting for laughs,
and there was one actor he couldn't resist.
Brother Simmons, fear not.
I never had a brother.
Feels nice.
He loved working with John,
and yes, he gets a great kick out of John.
Beach time, ready? Whoo!
Glenn Morshower was also reporting for duty once more.
Well, that's fantastic.
"Ready to do it again?" You bet, let's go, roll camera.
Stanley Tucci returned in a less menacing form
with his John Cleese influenced Wizard, Merlin.
- It is I, Merlin. - Oh, we're doing that?
He's just one of those guys that's really quick on his feet.
Big personalities just sort of clashing and...
When it comes to his craft.
And even cinema royalty was joining the cast.
Hello there!
Sir Anthony Hopkins.
At last, Cogman, it begins,
He loved the way Michael worked on shoot.
But even acting royalty might not be enough
if Transformers comic turn turned out to be
striking the wrong note.
Cogman? Hello!
You ruined the moment again.
And with the likes of period heavyweight,
Jim Carter, lending his voice to Cogman...
I was making the moment more epic.
...the fifth film was betting big on a concept
that went all the way back
to the very first Transformers movie.
Hey!
No, not that one. This one.
This thing, this monster planet.
You remember Orson Welles?
I am Unicron.
He put it so beautifully.
Unicron.
And Unicron is the big bad guy
slash evil entity within the universe.
Or as its originator called it--
Unicron is the ultimate black hole
that absorbs everything and lets nothing out.
Not sure I can think of him that way.
The point being--
But he is the biggest evil entity,
and he's like one of these epic characters that--
You exaggerate.
That it's almost unrealistic to think
that they should show up because they're too big
and too powerful.
Perhaps I misjudged you.
Robots, even big ones were one thing,
but cosmic entities.
You had problem with a 30 foot robot
talking to a six foot human.
How do you take a planet character and interact?
This is my command.
So we always like to talk about Unicron at Hasbro,
but we never really wanted it in the movies, per se.
Unicron was back in the movie.
Excellent!
But no longer a black hole.
The place you call Earth
has another name, Unicron.
It remains to be seen if it sucked like one.
The fifth installment in the Transformers franchise
had an experienced venerable cast.
I am what they say.
The Last Knight even had a real knight,
but special effects makeup guru, Howard Berger,
was very hands-on dealing with one cast member
who was a robot in need of a disguise.
Cade, what's with the C3-PO rip-off?
Don't kill the messenger.
Well, Cogman was always gonna be CGI, but--
Ah!
I know how hard it is to do interactive.
Ouch!
This bot was only 4'5",
and his very human scale created a very human problem.
Cogman is touching things
and handing things to people.
And you know if you're a CG creature,
this starts to become very, very difficult.
He's playing the pipe organ.
What?
Yeah, that's not a metaphor.
So we had green sticks and things like that.
It wasn't working out.
I'm so clumsy.
CGI hands were hard,
but digital fists hit the VFX team even harder.
There's a big fight where Cogman fights Mark Wahlberg.
Man, what's your problem? No, no, no. No more!
And I'm watching it, I'm like, "Hmm, it doesn't quite work."
But I do so very much want to crush his windpipe.
They were doing green screen hands,
and I'm like, "That's gonna be a nightmare."
Ah!
And I was friends with Jason Smith, the VFX supervisor,
and I went over, I said, "What would make your life easier?"
Having hands.
I have those.
And Howard decided to lend a hand.
- Wait a minute! - In fact a whole arm.
Gotta have practical stuff like up to the shoulder,
so we built these full gauntlets.
Whoa!
Whoa man, slow down!
It worked out great.
While Howard and his team struggled
with integrating practical and digital effects.
Ah!
You, drop it!
Josh Duhamel was dealing with
something so analog, he could smell it.
I would come home after work every day
on these big battle scenes.
But I remember driving home from work,
I'm like, "God, I smell like poop."
You sure she didn't just fart?
Since the first Transformers movie,
the formula for Bay's explosions
required specific ingredients.
They would pack these square sort of
cylinder looking things with dirt
and cork and soil and all these things,
so that when they blow up,
dirt's flying everywhere.
Never thought much about it.
Did the second one.
Did the third one.
By the fifth one I was like, I still smell that,
like the vague odor of feces.
Smells good.
I realized that they put actual like manure,
like fertilizer manure into these things,
so it really was shit raining down on me.
You mother couldn't have used anything else but manure?
Well, that's that mystery solved.
I'm not dropping shit!
And while cow patties dropped on Duhamel,
Michael Bay dropped his leading man into situations
that threatened to flatten him into a pancake,
especially when it came to the climactic final scene.
When Mark is getting beaten up like crazy.
Ah!
From all the water.
I was looking at his face
and it was starting to get like swollen in here
from getting hit so much with...
Holy sh--!
Like all right, maybe we should stop in a little bit
'cause Mark's actually getting pummeled by the waves here.
But there was no respite,
they wanted the final battle to be bigger than God.
Come on, we gotta get to the top!
Like it's all, there's all the water
and all this crazy stuff, and he's fighting a Decepticon.
That meant it was a rush,
both onscreen and off.
We shot that for weeks.
Which sounds like plenty of time.
But only at a certain hour because of the lighting.
And we would shoot on stage all day long,
and then at four o'clock we had to be out there
standing out in the back lot.
It was all for the sake of a golden hour
or two in the Detroit sunshine.
It went on and on for weeks,
and it was every day at 4:00 'cause that light,
that light was so beautiful,
and we only had like two hours, that's why.
And Michael would be out there like,
"Let's go, roll, roll. We gotta do this!"
You're talking about this incredible platform
that was built.
Hold it!
Hydraulic pumps that were left and right,
and you had the water.
I can't even wrap my head around the amount of planning
and engineering and building
that it took just to pull that one bit off,
but that's big movie making.
No, that's Michael Bay movie making,
trademarked with his signature Bayhem.
I see it, I see it!
Oh, you arrive on the set, you arrive in a city.
Okay, what can we blow up?
Oh, we can destroy that.
Okay.
Definitely do that a lot.
Bay and his crew did it so much in fact
that nothing was off-limits,
not even a World Heritage Site.
- Genius! - That's Stonehenge.
Michael kept saying, we were gonna shoot at Stonehenge.
I was like, "How's that gonna go?"
I mean, isn't that kind of sacred?
They wanna do what?
The script called for Stonehenge
to receive enemy fire,
and Michael Bay could feel history beckoning.
Of course, they have to blow it up.
Okay, that is the dumbest idea you could possibly have.
And Stonehenge, they said, "Oh, you can't be here."
I mean, this is Stonehenge.
Gotta shut it down!
But it's also Michael Bay.
When it comes to making his movie, he is determined.
Of course, let's not forget Michael's mantra.
We're going bigger.
This is so insane.
But Michael picks these places,
and then he makes them happen.
It's fun to watch the chaos that ensues,
but it's a fun chaos.
It is beautiful!
And what's more fun than bombing Stonehenge
back into the Stone Age?
I wonder if anybody that watched the movie
when they first saw Stonehenge on the screen thought,
"Oh, they're definitely blowing that up!"
They definitely were,
just not the real thing.
I mean, they built a fake Stonehenge
that we could then deal with.
And deal with it, they did.
From the ancient fields of Sussex,
the Bayhem moved to London.
With time running out,
Michael Bay was about to do something
he would only do in an absolute emergency.
From the south of England,
the shoot moved to London where filming would be a breeze.
It's really difficult to film around London.
If you've ever been to London,
it is the most insane traffic.
I just have so much road rage.
The chase sequence, we had to maintain a certain height.
Westminster.
Yes, we did a car chase there, yes.
But what made this chase riskier
was the time they didn't have.
The sequence is really written for like two days,
and we're trying to do it in two hours.
The other thing they didn't have, a director.
Bay was stuck in an edit suite
thousands of miles away in LA,
so the director made plans to do something he loathed.
He does everything. There's never a second unit.
Let someone else shoot the movie.
Spiro Razatos is the authority on shooting car chases.
He worked with Bay on Bad Boys II ,
so Spiro already knew one very important rule.
Nobody shoots second unit, nobody's gonna shoot second,
I'm the only one that shoots my action.
But even Michael Bay has a limit,
and he had reached it.
He was exhausted, I mean, he was editing
all the way till the middle of the night.
He'd say, "Listen," he goes, "I'm super-tired, I trust you."
Trust was a good thing because--
We had expensive cars that you couldn't wreck.
Michael Bay, which it better look like
you're wrecking the cars, and you're not.
And you were in a place
that if you crashed hitting one of those buildings,
would've sent us packing or in jail.
The buildings in question were located
in the heart of London's Trafalgar Square.
Get outta the way!
And this being a Michael Bay film,
those arches weren't going to be driven through
so much as some, well...
Let's see if I'm the authority on the matter.
He wanted to crash the car into the arch.
- Of course, he did. - You're outta your mind!
So why not just do this all in post?
The audiences can tell.
So the only way we could crash into these gates
without damaging them was to add
our own wall in front of it,
pad it up really well, and then decorate it and paint it,
so that it looks like part of the wall.
Don't let us get caught, Cogman!
It had to fit the Michael Bay crash,
but at the same time it couldn't damage the arch.
B.
I could see myself never working again in this business.
Everybody was just on top of their game, but--
Only one man's opinion mattered now.
Because it's Michael,
I'm just waiting for him to look at it,
and I'm kinda like putting my head down
waiting to see what he's gonna say.
- Bay gave his blessing. - Good boy!
With The Last Knight in the can,
all that remained was to see,
if fans would give their blessing
to what was the biggest Transformers production yet.
When The Last Knight was released in June of 2017,
fans and critics agreed, size isn't everything.
It was a lot of movie, I think, for two hours.
I think he was just like, "Hey, I'm going big."
There was no doubt it was bigger,
but was it also bloated?
They could have, I think could have paired it back maybe.
First one and the second one performed so well,
and I think they were trying to figure out
somewhere to go with five.
I wish we had a more core story spine.
If we just throw more and more in,
we have more opportunity to do more stuff.
And at at its core, you're not giving a full story that way.
Throw everything at the wall, see what sticks.
And nothing in that film was really good,
nothing really landed.
The box office spoke for it,
the rating spoke for it,
the fans spoke for it.
The Last Knight grossed
just over 600 million worldwide,
and is believed to have lost Paramount around 100 million.
That raised an obvious question.
Hey, so are we nearing the end of the road with this thing?
Was the Bayhem finally at an end?
Do you need a new voice coming in?
He's probably tired of seeing robots after awhile too.
So what was Bay thinking
after five films spanning 10 years?
You think there might be anymore Transformers ?
I would've expected Michael to go,
"Really?"
Paramount wasn't laughing
or snorting over a movie
that had become the first Transformers film to lose money.
I hated that film.
It was one of the only films in the cinema that I watched
that I nearly walked outta the cinema for.
With audiences walking away for the first time,
franchise fatigue appeared to be creeping in
to Paramount cinematic colossus.
There's a point where you do get burned out,
and Transformers are awesome,
but in a way they are a one-trick pony.
Five films down, Paramount needed to come up
with a new trick to avoid The Last Knight
becoming the last time for Transformers.