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A box office titan, Michael Bay knows how to deliver thrills and spills to cinema audiences, and send himself up as he does so. FOCUS finds out more.
If you know anything about Michael Bay, the man behind movies like Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and Transformers and its current sequel, it's that he likes blowing stuff up.
And he's jolly good at it too, but if you were to assume that huge pyrotechnics and equally massive audience appreciation make him a tad one dimensional you'd be wrong.
Bay can laugh at the image that critics who have little appreciation for his directing talents have bestowed upon him, he can afford to after all with his latest film scoring 200 million dollars worldwide and still rising.
He's even gone on the record to have a laugh at his own expense.Click here to watch
Not that his core audience will care too much about the tit for tat sniping between Bay and his critics, he makes epic adventure tales that push the boundaries of what we thought was possible on the big screen, to be enjoyed between fistfuls of popcorn.
He is a blockbuster director, which is ironic as a blockbuster was originally a piece of artillery designed to do just what Bay has earned his reputation for - blowing things up.
His latest film, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, delivers such sights and doesn't stint on spectacle but Bay's assiduous attention to detail is not reserved for marathon post production sessions that make every computer generated element come together at the last moment. When his stars and their robotic friends and foe do battle against the rugged beauty of the pyramids in Egypt and the equally historic site at Petra in Jordan, Bay and his crew really filmed there.
"Dr Zahi Hawass runs the antiquities in Egypt," the director explains, "and he thought that the idea of shooting there would be particularly good for tourism. So he allowed us to do some of the first aerial shots around the pyramids and shoot there. With Petra it was the same thing, the King was a fan of the Transformers and he helped us immensely in shooting on the top of Petra."
It's all said in such a matter-of-fact fashion that you might assume these are regular locations for film crews, but this is not the case.
"Well, the top of Petra has never been shot for a movie. It was difficult to do, we needed to get 36 helicopter loads of stuff up there. It was tough all round, because we actually went from Arizona to San Diego to Egypt over the weekend, we were shooting on the pyramids the next day, we went to another town in Egypt and then we flew to Jordan and were shooting at Petra the day after that. It's like a massive, moving circus."
Conscious of the responsibility incumbent upon him not to damage any of these important historical locations Bay shot some sequences himself. Where some filmmakers would have happily delegated such chores, or chosen to blend in a second unit travelogue with studio shot action sequences, Bay went as far as possible for the real thing.
"There's zero green screen on this film," he says, adding that that computer generated transformer characters are represented by metal poles that the actors can reference to make sure their eyelines are correct, as if they were really talking to the sophisticated shape shifting characters in the movie. Computer boffins bring them colourfully to life in the long months of post production.
It's only two years since the first Transformers came out, silencing nay sayers (and there were plenty in the industry) with immense box office figures and eye popping spectacle. Even in this short period of time technology has moved on, but Bay points out that creating these images - including the climactic destruction of a pyramid - is still a labour intensive process.
"I think we really pushed the limits from the first one to this one in terms of the advances that people would notice," he explains, "it's all about lighting, reflection, and complicated algorithms. In making the pyramid come apart, that was 100,000 rocks that we individually moved in the computer programme and that took one guy six months to write the code to do that."
It certainly makes for a spectacular sequence, one that Transformers 3 - if it happens, and the exhausted Bay is understandably non-committal - will be hard pushed to top. A more pressing priority will be to discover whether his film has found favour with those kind souls who gave him permission to shoot in those precious historical sites.
"I remember Dr Hawass put his arm around me and said: 'don't hurt my pyramids!'," Bay smiles. "I didn't actually tell him that the top of it was going to come off, digitally. But I do have a gift for him, this amazing, incredible aerial footage of the pyramids. So hopefully, when he sees the movie, he won't be too upset." Who knows, even he might find the results awesome.
ANWAR BRETT
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