So I get this phone call, July 30th, 2005, from Steven Spielberg.
He calls me up in his jovial self and he says,
"Michael, I want you to direct this movie called Transformers."
I'm like, "Okay, Steven, well, that sounds great.
"Let me think about it, and I'll get back to you."
I hung up the phone
and in the 30 seconds everything that goes through your brain.
"Is that that little robot toy movie?" "Is that like a Small Soldiers movie?"
"That was just Steven Spielberg calling me up. Oh, my God!"
"This is one of my idols, wants me to direct a movie
"that he wants to be involved in."
So I thought about it.
I called Adam Goodman, president of the studio at DreamWorks.
I said, "Adam, so what is this Transformers movie?"
He goes, "Why don't you think about it?"
Adam convinced me to go to Transformer school,
which is in Hasbro in Rhode Island.
And I'm like, "Okay, well, let's make the trek."
So the next morning we went into Hasbro.
You pass this hallway of all the famous toys we all grew up with.
We sat in this big conference room.
I mean, they must have had 25 people in there,
all trying to convince me to do Transformers,
and they started with Transformer school
which is, they basically take you through the entire lore of Transformers.
Now, I have been offered a lot of comic book, superhero movies
in my short film career.
And I have always said no because it really hasn't appealed to me.
But one thing I did spark to recently was Japanese anime movies.
I just love their visuals. It's just a really unique type of cartoon.
And I'm sitting in this Transformer, I guess, like, lecture.
I kept looking at this artwork of just a multitude of images
and there was something from this Japanese artist.
He had some amazingly dark, cool images that...
That just right there in the room inspired me.
I kept thinking to myself, "I need to make this very real.
"I need to make this cool."
I kept thinking about cars transforming at 80 miles an hour.
Action images would just kind of come to my mind,
of, like, "Why would I be interested in doing this movie?"
I did like the lore of Transformers.
It's very noble, it's got good morals, it's interesting.
But it's like, how do you make Transformers
understandable to an adult
who has no knowledge of what Transformer toys are?
We broadened the story in terms of bringing in the American military.
It's this big story, but it kind of comes down to this little story on Earth,
which is all about Sam and having these glasses.
This is kind of how the birth of Transformers happened.
I have always had the lucky fortune of working with military equipment
before anybody else, such as these Ospreys right here.
They have never been used in a movie,
and I don't think many people have shot that Stealth 117 either.
So I've got this hotline to the Pentagon.
I've got this relationship with the film liaison, Phil Strub,
who helped me on Armageddon where we worked with the Air Force.
And Pearl Harbor, where we worked with the Navy and all the branches.
And I called Phil up and I said, "Phil, I'm gonna be doing this movie.
"It's a fantasy movie called Transformers."
And he goes, "Oh, the kids' toy, huh?"
He said, "Well, Mike, you know, if we did have alien robots on Earth,
"I think the American military would be involved.
"And we will bring the fight anywhere we have to.
"So let me read the script. I'm excited to read it."
And I guess the rest is history. He loved it.
And then it's a matter of me going to different bases
and trying to convince bases to be...Imitate Qatar,
which is the forward command for the whole Middle East.
And we found Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico,
which kind of has these white sands
which are test missile ranges for, I think, the Army.
Right here, this was done at Edwards. These are two F-22s,
which are the brand-new planes that are costing $1 30 million each.
They can take out six F-1 6s before they can even be spotted.
They are just deadly lethal,
and of course, I was the first to use those as well.
Why does the military let me use this stuff?
Because they look good at what they do in my movies.
And working with these men and women...
You know, I have done many years of working with them, in movies,
and, you know, they are really great people.
And they're really dedicated.
And I really admire them for the service they do for the country.
And, you know, they don't work for a great wage,
but they're just so dedicated to the country and...
You know, so, like, just diligent and just, you know...
I find many of them so intelligent,
and it's always been a great experience when I've worked on these bases.
And I really have fond memories of it.
And very much, they're impressed with our film industry
because we work very much like the military works,
in terms of the different hierarchy and how it works on our sets and crews.
And they are always very skeptical when we show up,
because they think we're going to be a bunch of Hollywood...
But they always come away with, I'm sure, with a great respect.
And they tell us that,
that they come away with a great respect for what we do,
because they see it so similar to the military.
So this was our first transformation here.
And the transformation was... "How are we gonna do this, basically?"
I had my animators do rough versions of it.
But when we had this first version up...
That was the very first version I ever saw of that transformation.
And it was done by an artist named Keiji.
He's Japanese. He speaks like no English.
He is the absolute Rubik's Cube genius to figure those things out,
of how those parts actually move and come together.
I met Keiji in a very odd meeting at industrial Light and Magic.
I had about 30 lLM artists sitting in a kind of hi-def room
where we are looking at the artwork
that my illustrators had worked for months,
I mean we're talking eight months, on.
And then I saw Optimus Prime's face in his first 3-D kind of,
I guess, iteration of him.
He looked terrible. He had this fat, ugly face.
And I'm like, "You guys got to be kidding me.
"This is awful. What happened to Optimus?"
And all of a sudden, in this small room, this guy pops up in the back,
and he goes, "That Optimus Prime is an insult to the Japanese people.
"That is an insult to the Japanese, I want to do Optimus Prime."
But you can tell someone else was obviously modeling
Optimus Prime's fat, ugly face and Keiji knew this.
And so I said, "Keiji, first of all, this is the most bizarre meeting
"I have ever been to, the biggest, funniest outbreak I have ever seen,
"and you know what, just because of that,
"I'm gonna let you work on Optimus Prime."
So not only did Keiji do Optimus Prime in terms of the 3-D modeling,
but he did the amazing Rubik's Cube
of how we were going to transform these robots.
What the military is very concerned of when they do movies
is that they just want things to be accurate.
They are very into, like, those uniforms.
If they are not Qatar-issue uniforms, we just can't use them.
Right here, I shot this in the Tank Graveyard.
These are old tanks, some are just kind of shells of other tanks,
where they actually put them out in the field,
in this white sand, and they use them as target-practice.
We actually started the shoot, the very first day was...
I shot this little, I guess, Mars rover. I shot that.
I got it assembled because I had this idea for a teaser
that was the very first teaser that came out the summer
where we just began to start... We just started shooting.
I just wanted to mark our date of July 4th and to say we were real.
The very first day of pre-production photography,
I shot in the Tank Graveyard.
My first days really never suck, but this one really sucked.
I get to the set, I'm all excited,
and I'm walking around with my viewfinder, ready to go.
And I get on set an hour before call
and the hour passes and then I'm waiting, "Okay, where's my crew?"
I'm like, "This isn't good."
My crew apparently was just eating dinner.
And normally when you get to set, you show up,
you either eat dinner before...
So my cameraman, Mitchell Amundsen, my operators, everyone's eating.
And I'm like, "Okay." And that pissed me off, the first night.
So I'm like, "Mitch, this is a big movie,
"and you're not going to be eating your burritos any more
"when I show up to set and I'm ready to work."
So I think that kind of shook the ground of everyone, the first night.
Because I got to tell you, when I come on the set
I'm like, I come in... They joke on the set,
"Bay's coming in hot."
It means I like to work. I don't like to fart around,
and everyone knows that I do a lot of set-ups every day.
An average on a movie is 1 9 to 25. I do 50, 60, sometimes 75.
And these are real set-ups.
And I shot a lot of this movie very, kind of, suburbia.
But I didn't kind of sex it up in terms of making this slick.
This is a classroom that we all know about, we have all been to.
And it's something that makes it more accessible, I think, to everybody.
And like, I have never in my life ever shot in a Burger King.
But you know what? We all eat at Burger King or McDonald's or whatever,
and it just makes it more everyday life.
And I kind of like this, kind of, sci-fi movie
coupled with this suburbia life.
I thought it was a good mix.
And casting Shia...
I actually started to look for kids and I had...
My casting ladies scoured the Earth for the best 16, 17, 18, 19, 20-year-old kid
that can play a 16-year-old out there.
And we looked from London to Australia to Canada,
and Ian Bryce was the first to mention to me Shia LaBeouf.
Or "LaBoof." I call him "Shia LeBuff."
I said, "Well, I saw him in Constantine,
"and I have never seen the movie Holes,
"but in Constantine he was playing a cab driver. He looked a little old."
So the kid came in, and he was kind of skinny
and, like, a little goofy and way over-excited.
I'm like, "Dude, you got to calm down here,
"you're just auditioning with me at my office."
And he goes, "Wow, I just...l want to be an action guy and I want to be a...
"It's just like, wow, I love your movies and I can't believe I'm meeting you."
I'm like, "All right, calm down, let's just do the audition."
And I just instantly liked his energy in the audition.
You know, we had some of our early, early written pages,
where the dialogue really needed to be tweaked and made more real.
And sometimes it's actually good to read with some clunky dialogue,
and you see how actors could fare through,
because a good actor can make any line sound good.
And Spielberg will even tell you that.
That's the art of acting, in a way.
But I started throwing some stuff to Shia,
like improv-ing with him a bit in the audition.
My thing is I love finding actors that can improv
because a lot of my film-making, we improv as we go.
I mean, we have the basis of the scene.
I mean, I kind of learned this on working with Martin and Will on Bad Boys.
Shia just had this great thing.
And, you know, I called Steven, and I said, "I met with Shia."
And Steven goes, "I love Shia." So he was all excited about that.
And I said, "Well, I really want to show you this tape."
I went downstairs and because I had auditioned a couple of other kids
and he just was heads and tails above every other kid that came in.
And I asked the girls in the office,
my assistants who are very blunt, I said,
"So what do you think of him?"
I said, "Just watch the DVD, watch his video."
They saw and they go like, "Oh, my God, he's great, he's great.
"He's so funny, he's so charming, he's so funny."
So I sent the audition to Steven,
and then I called Shia back.
And meanwhile I had to make this movie for a price.
And I actually do some of my own actor deals
because when I make a movie for a price, I make it for a price.
So I have to play a tough guy and I say, "Basically, if you want the part,
"you got 24 hours to decide. This is what we are going to pay you.
"Yes or no, give me an answer in 24 hours."
So sometimes that's the only way to get a deal done.
I must say, I'm very proud of the fact
that we made this movie for $150,000,000.
But I'll go into that later, okay?
But Shia, I guess he was my first snag on the cast.
And from there it followed to Jon Voight
and then the amazing John Turturro, who I had always wanted to work with.
I originally thought of Steve Buscemi, but Steve was busy directing something,
because I love working with Steve and Turturro is someone I've always loved.
Me being such a huge Coen Brothers fan.
It's like, anyone who can bowl and have a rose in their bowling ball,
I got to work with that guy.
From there we kind of went on to get our female,
and I looked at a lot of females. It was a very hard role to cast
and Megan Fox is someone we auditioned for a movie
I produced for Platinum Dunes for Amityville Horror.
And I remembered her and my casting ladies brought her in.
I said I wanted to see her because I really liked her look.
And in person she's very, kind of, timid and shy. She's from Tennessee.
She had a sweetness about her, and I knew I had to make her tough.
And she was very new at acting.
But I just liked something about her.
There was something that was more exciting to work
with an actress who is fresh and not done a lot of movies.
And so I had Shia come in and work with her.
And we did several auditions with her
and working with Megan, she was so timid in the beginning,
just being on this big, massive set.
But there was a good kind of chemistry between her and Shia.
Shia was able to really lighten her up,
and there were times I really had to make her tough.
And every actor has a button you got to push once in a while,
and you got to figure out what that button is when you're directing them.
And her button was...Because l couldn't get her to emote tough enough
when she was, like, cutting that little robot in half with a saw.
And it just was looking way too girly, way un-tough.
And I'm like, "Megan, remember I told you when you got this part,
"you had to be tough."
And she told me she would hang out with mechanics or whatever
to get this movie part.
Finally, her button was, I said, "Megan, we have so much money on this movie,
"we will stay here all night long to get this one shot.
"I don't care if we stay here 15 hours, we're gonna shoot it all night long.
"Because you will hate this shot right now.
"Come here, look at the monitor."
And all of a sudden that would get her angry. It would get her pissed.
And that was her button where she was able to really give me...
Like emote, and whatnot.
So anyway, I just thought she had a good thing with her and Shia.
And Shia was able to really throw a lot of things at her.
And, you know, her problem was with his improv,
she just kept laughing through the takes. So that wasn't good.
Many of the times we had to CG her face out when she was laughing.
No, I'm kidding, we didn't.
Mojo, the dog, was kind of like an idea...
I just love dogs and like...
You know what, a dog addicted to pain pills with a cast,
that's just funny.
So I said to the writers, I said, "Let's put a dog named Mojo."
So I auditioned a bunch of Chihuahuas.
And this one was, I guess, by far the best one.
Then I thought, what better than having a Chihuahua
that's stoned eating pain pills,
that hobbles up on his little penthouse of a birdhouse.
So you can imagine when I'm telling the art department,
"I want to build this little silly, little doghouse,
"but it's elevated."
Well, this gives the movie audience a laugh,
because that's just funny.
Right here, the dad right here, this is my best friend,
Robert Offer, who's my lawyer, who I have known since nursery school.
He has a problem with his kids.
He doesn't let his kids walk on his grass.
And I have always...l save things up that I learn in life for movies.
And I'm like, "What neurotic dad
"doesn't let their kids walk on his own grass?"
Well, this is Robert Offer right now.
And this right here is complete improve, where...
This is an example of how
we were playing around with Kevin Dunn and Julie White,
this amazing mom who just actually won a Tony. A Tony award.
At this time, we can't confirm whether there were any survivors.
Oh, my God.
Our bases worldwide are, as of now, at DEFCON Delta,
our highest readiness level.
We're dealing with a very effective weapons system
that we have not come across before.
But our prayers are with the families of the brave men and women...
Honey, Daddy's gonna be okay.
I've never seen a weapons system like this.
The thermal shows this weird aura around the exoskeleton
like it's cloaked by some kind of invisible force field.
That's impossible. There's no such thing as invisible force fields
except in, like, comic book stuff, right?
- Man, I don't know. - What is that?
My mama, she had the gift, you know?
She saw things. I got the gene, too,
and that thing that attacked us? I got a feeling it ain't over.
How about you use those magic voodoo powers
and get us the hell out of here, huh?
When I took that picture, I think it saw me.
It looked right at me.
All right, we got to get this thing back to the Pentagon right away.
They got to know what we're dealing with here.
My radio's fried.
- I got no communication with aerial. - Hey, Mahfouz.
- How far do you live from here? - Not far. Just up that mountain.
- Do they have a phone? - Yes.
All right, let's hit it.
Dude, are you sure we're invited to this party?
Of course, Miles. It's a lake. Public property.
This is a scene where for Shia, you know, our character Sam...
This is an experience where every guy has had this experience,
where the tough guy comes up
and kind of tries to embarrass you in front of his friends.
This moment right here is the moment where
I think every guy first of all identifies with him.
But you like him instantly because he's able to come back with comedy and wit.
This guy, John, right here, he jumps up on this tree
and I'm like, "Wait a minute, that's great, that's funny.
"I mean, what kind of kooky-ass friend would hang on a tree
"and make this kid embarrassed?"
So I wasn't gonna make this kid the geek,
because I didn't want the geek.
I wanted the geek who was sharp, who was witty
but was able to come back with humor.
And right here with this whole "coloring book" thing,
this is, I think, where you kind of fall in love with this kid.
No, it's a good book. Your friends'll love it.
You know, it's got mazes in it and, you know, little coloring areas, sections, pop-up pictures.
It's a lot of fun.
That's funny.
People were very worried about the tone of this movie,
where it was very edgy and hard
and then it had these funny kind of suburbia touches.
And, you know, that's the thing that everyone talks about,
the tone of the movie. They love the tone of the movie,
and that's what, around the world, when I did press for this movie,
everyone talks about the tone and how funny it is.
And, you know, that's just kind of what I like doing.
It's my thing.
God, I can't even tell you how much I'm not your little bunny.
Okay. You'll call me.
Who's gonna drive you home, tonight?
Hey, man, what's wrong with your radio?
- I'm gonna drive her home tonight. - What?
She's an evil jock concubine, man. Let her hitchhike.
She lives 10 miles from here, okay? It's my only chance.
You got to be understanding here, all right?
All right. We'll put her in the back. I'll be quiet.
- Did you say, "Put her in the back"? - I called shotgun.
I'm not putting her in the back. You got to get out of my car.
- That's a party foul. - What rules?
Bros before hos.
Miles, I'm begging you to get out of my car. Okay?
You can't do this to me.
You got to get out of my car right now.
So when I signed on to do this movie,
God, there was a lot of talk on the Internet about,
"Michael Bay will wreck this movie, he won't know how to do this movie.
"He doesn't know anything about Transformers."
You know, stuff like, "Michael Bay is wrecking my childhood."
"Death to Michael Bay." Boy, I had a lot of death threats, I must say.
They even actually protested at one of my offices,
but it was an office I had moved out of two years prior,
so, you know, I guess they weren't that smart, to figure out where to protest.
But I remember listening to stuff on the lnternet.
I would listen to some of their ideas that they would talk about,
because fan support is very important,
and I wanted them to be happy with Transformers.
But I was trying to introduce a world of people
that have never seen Transformers to this movie.
And, I think, in a way, it was better that I wasn't a Transformer fan,
because I was able to make this movie more accessible
to the non-fan, I guess.
So I must say right now, I am a true Transformer fan.
I have probably thought about robots
more than anybody in the past year and a half.
And probably... I thought about robots
more than anybody else on Earth for the past year and a half.
We would have artwork that would leak.
I mean, it was truly one of the most sought-after movies
and talked about on the Internet than I can remember in a very long time.
Our art server had 39,000 attempted hacks
in the month of January, in the year 2006.
And we had to literally get, like, almost Pentagon-type quality encryption.
And they actually personally hacked into my personal computer.
And they were able to steal one script.
We know who stole it, and I was able to get the script back.
But luckily it only got out once.
So there were so many leaks that l decided to actually keep the script...
Just literally, I had the only original script in my computer.
And certain actors had ones that were older
and everyone had coded scripts.
And we collected all the scripts from the crew.
We gave them out and they gave it back
and all those different measures.
And there was one script, a very old script
that got out on the Internet that everyone read,
and everyone kept commenting on, and...
But it was so old, scripts can change.
In a month you can change so much in a script.
And theirs was, like, probably five months
older than what the script was in the movie.
I mean, we had... In case the script got out,
we had names of our robots, a. k. a. names.
But there were many characters that I tried to create.
Like, let me give you an example. We were working on this movie,
budgeting this movie and they have to make these toys,
like molds and like the idea of these type of molds,
a year and a half out. We didn't even have a script
and Ian Bryce came to me and says,
"Hasbro needs to know what Transformer vehicles
"and what are you using for the Decepticons?
"Autobots and Decepticons. What kind of cars?"
And I'm, like, literally had to come to a choice with, like,
"Okay, I think, maybe a tank.
"I don't know if we can get that amazing bomb-searching Buffalo truck,
"that's brand new, that they are sending to Iraq,
"if we can maybe do that one.
"I definitely, if I can get an F-22, but I don't know if we can get an F-22."
So that's how we kind of had to decide. We had to decide very quickly.
There it is.
I had fun. So, you know, thanks for listening.
- Oh, yeah, yeah. - You... You think I'm shallow?
I think you're... No, no, no.
I think there's a lot more than meets the eye with you.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right, I'll see you at school.
All right.
That's stupid.
That was a stupid line.
"There's more than meets the eye with you." Stupid.
Oh, God.
Oh, my God. I love my car.
Hey, guys, I think the other team figured it out. Iran.
Come on, man. This is way too smart for Iranian scientists.
- Think about it. - What do you think, kid? Chinese?
No way. This is nothing like what the Chinese are using.
This is Air Force One. Level of flight, level three-three-zero.
We will hunt down this enemy. And when we do,
we'll know just what to do with them.
- Thank you. - You're welcome.
I also wanted to make other characters, like in the boom box on Air Force One.
I like this kind of character,
and I think, if we do Transformers 2,
we're gonna have a lot more unique characters,
like this but also bigger.
And just, you can imagine where the mind can go here.
I mean, I designed some...
With the artists, some amazingly huge characters
who just got to be too big, too costly, too expensive, whatever.
And it was Steven who said,
"You know what? We should probably just keep this kind of like
"six against five or something, where it's a little bit more manageable."
And I think he's right that we keep it smaller
to kind of try to introduce what's going on here.
Steven says I saved 30 grand right there by doing that little one camera move.
We had a guy grab the boom box. He's right. So I saved an effect.
Then right in here, this is our actually full-scale puppet of this...Frenzy here.
Frenzy was animated by a French artist
at lLM.
I liked this very quirky kind of movement.
And when I was directing the animation,
because I would actually every single day,
I would work with animators
where they would send me down what they are working on
so that I can actually direct them,
you know, after these shots that... We have done these plate shots
and try to direct their acting.
I got to tell these characters so well
that I knew that when another artist was working on this Frenzy character,
he wasn't the French guy.
I'm like, "Well, did you guys have a different animator working on this?"
They are like...You hear them kind of over the conference call, "Yeah."
So I'm like, "You got to put the French guy back on,
"because it's a total different character."
You know, and he says, "He's on another movie, he's working on Pirates."
I said, "Well, you got to get the French guy back.
"Whatever you got to do, you got to get the French guy back."
Someone! They're hacking into Air Force One!
We need a senior analyst.
- I think they're planting a virus. - A virus?
- It's streaming right now. - They are planting a virus
and stealing a whole lot of data from your system at the same time.
Code Red. We have a breach.
Air Force One, someone onboard has breached the military network.
I'm in the cargo hold. Clear. Clear.
- You got to cut the hard lines. - What?
- Whatever they want, they are getting it. - Sir?
Permission to take down the Defense Network.
- Cut all server hard lines now. - Cut all server hard lines now.
My theory on effects, well, it all comes down to lighting.
And I feel everyone in their brain
has something that we don't really know that's there,
but we can tell when something is not lit right.
We don't know why it's there,
but we just know there's something wrong with the shot,
and it's all coming down to lighting.
Because we are used to looking at the world
the way we see it through our eyes.
After I did Pearl Harbor, Dennis Muren said to me...
He says, "You raised the bar on effects."
And I'm like, "What did he mean by that?"
And he goes, "You have just made effects more realistic."
And the first time I went to lLM, or used them, was on Pearl Harbor.
And I had a big meeting up there where I just felt
that Lucas' stuff is awesome, but it's very pastel.
In terms of their light, it doesn't look real,
the shadows aren't dark enough,
it doesn't have enough contrast.
It doesn't have the right ripple reflections on metal.
So that was one of the big achievements
I think we worked with on Pearl Harbor,
in terms of shooting a movie at 1 2:00 noon,
and making it, not disguising it in night and showing it in broad daylight.
And making the planes as real as possible and all these other ships.
And so I think that's what Dennis was talking about.
Well, you know this, we had to take it to a brand new level,
in terms of trying to make reality here.
So we spent a tremendous amount of time
and software and just trying to invent new tricks
on how to light these robots.
They use this process called ray tracing.
When you look at a car, you go out on a parking lot...
I've shot a lot of car commercials, so...
I was trying to explain, you can't just have one quality of light
on a car, on a piece of sheet metal.
It will reflect soft light, hard light
it will have pings, it will have long lines.
Cars are, like, a nightmare to light,
in terms of if you're actually doing a total digital model of a car.
So you probably couldn't have done this movie,
I guess, as of two years ago.
So in terms of our effects,
we had Industrial Light and Magic that were heading up Transformers,
and we had Digital Domain, which is an effects company
that I recently purchased with a couple of other partners.
Those are the ones that did...
Both companies did the work for this movie.
lLM did three-quarters and Digital Domain did the last quarter.
lLM came down and they talked to me
about something that was used in Star Wars III.
It was a digital model of a character
that was kind of like a robot, and it was so uncomplicated.
I'm like, "Guys, we have to go so much farther than this."
General Grievous was ILM's most complicated digital model at the time
and it was, if you look at it, it's so simple
compared to the complexity that we needed to do our models.
They talked about these models which finally, when they were done,
Optimus Prime is made of 1 0,1 08 parts
that all have to move, not intersect,
and it's just an immensely
complicated digital model.
They say they're the most complicated digital models ever made.
My name is Sam Witwicky.
Whoever finds this
my car is alive, okay?
So this is actually Shia's first night, and you can see his nappy hair right now.
I just kept looking at his hair, I said,
"Dude, we gotta do something with your hair."
And he says, "Mike, what's the matter with my hair?"
I said, "It just looks nappy. We gotta make it cooler."
I wasn't allowed to cut it because he was still shooting Disturbia.
And this is his first scene for the movie,
and those dogs chasing him are actually killer police dogs.
And Shia's running,
and there's a man in a big dog suit who stands behind him,
and he was there with a whip, and he was calling the dogs.
Well, they actually missed the guy with the big dog suit
where they're supposed to chomp on the arm,
and they kept going after Shia.
Shia was almost killed that night, I am not kidding you.
Thank God he was fast.
It wasn't good when the guy with the whip, he says, "Uh-oh, uh-oh."
The whole crew started chasing after the dogs
with the big chains on their necks, so we were able to tackle them.
- Good, you're here. - Let me see your hands!
- No, no, no! It's not me! - Let me see your hands.
- The guy's inside. - Shut up! Walk towards the car.
Put your head on the hood.
If you have military assistance, you have to have advisors on the set
that are from the Pentagon that make sure
that we're doing things correctly.
They won't tell us, like, what lines we have to say and what we can't say,
but it's just gotta be accurate.
When Rachael here had to go into this room,
I was just gonna have her slip into the room,
but we had to have this other guy knock on the window.
That was the only way they were gonna let me do this shot,
because they would say there would be no way in the Pentagon for her
to slip into a private room like this.
So you gotta make these little concessions here and there.
And I said to the guy, "Are you sure that would never happen?"
"No way, that would be impossible. " "Are you sure?"
"No, that's impossible."
So, okay, I'm, like, "All right, this is the way we gotta block this scene."
shows North Korea doubling its naval activity.
Maybe it's a precaution, because isn't that what we're doing?
The signal pattern is learning. It's evolving on its own.
And you need to move past Fourier transfers
and start considering quantum mechanics.
There is nothing on Earth that complex.
What about an organism? A living organism?
Maybe some kind of DNA-based computer?
- And I know that that sounds crazy... - That's enough. That's enough.
We have six floors of analysts working on this thing.
Now, if you can find proof to back up your theory,
I'm gonna be happy to listen to you. But if you don't get a filter
on that brain-mouth thing, you're gonna be off the team. You understand?
Look, I can't be any clearer than how crystal clear I am being.
- It just stood up. - It just stood up.
Wow. That's really neat.
Okay, chiefie.
Time to fill her up. And no drippy-drippy.
What are you rolling?
Whippets? Goofballs? A little wowie sauce with the boys?
- No, I'm not on any drugs. - What's these?
Found it in your pocket. "Mojo."
Is that what the kids are doing now? Little bit of Mojo?
- Those are my dog's pain pills. - You know, a Chihuahua. A little...
What was that?
You eyeballing my piece, 50 Cent?
You wanna go? Make something happen. Do it.
'Cause I promise you I will bust you up.
Are you on drugs?
This was actually the very first day of official shooting right here.
New Mexico, White Sands.
Let's hope this telephone line works.
Hey, heads up!
Heads up! Hey! Heads up!
What the heck was that?
English, dude. English.
The way we made the Skorponoks work
was I remembered something we did in Armageddon
where we did these primer cord explosions that...
Primer cord's like a very stable kind of explosive device.
It's like rope.
And we put like 150 of these in a row,
and they had a computer that was able
to fire milliseconds apart from each other so it made a ripple effect.
And that's how we did this shot right here with this ripple shooting up
and the thing jumping out right behind them.
I remember doing the animatic for that shot.
I said, "You know what? That shot's a trailer shot."
And that was Tyrese's second day
where the guys actually had to run over a carpet of explosives
as the stuff was fired behind them.
I'm, like, "Guys, do not stop, do not trip,
"and we're gonna fire these things off,
"and this stand's gonna go, because it will really hurt your foot."
So that look is, I guess, one of fear and real terror, there.
A lot of these guys, these rangers here, are the real deal.
Many of them were very decorated United States SEALs and Rangers.
Hey, I need a mag! Give me a mag!
- Cell phone! - I don't know how to thank you.
Fire!
This scene right here with Josh
was something that I remember a real SEAL telling me.
It happened down in Grenada where they were trapped in a house.
They lost all their coms,
and they had a cell phone where they had to call to the Pentagon
and literally had to get a credit card to get out of the country
and link up with an operator at the Pentagon to get an air strike to come in.
And they had to vector in their position.
So something I always held in my ideas of wanting to get into a movie,
and so this was an idea of making it
kind of fun and serious at the same time.
I just like the whole chain of events
and how fast you can see this air strike come in.
It's called an Air Force Combat Controller. That's what Tyrese plays.
An Air Force Combat Controller is a job that a guy can use a gun.
He can help them in battle, but he's a very important tool
in terms of getting very deadly air support,
which is what they call "danger close,"
which is where they'll shoot missiles,
and they give a precise position where the friends are,
and they will give a precise position where the foes are.
And these missiles will sometimes come in 50 feet, 20 feet,
that's why they call it "danger close" there.
You know, sometimes you think we're "movie-ising" this thing up
where the guys are coming in with,
I guess, those laser-sighting things on their guns.
That's called marking a target.
Hey! Make way!
- What is that? - I don't know.
We need air support and we need it now.
Roll in strike package Bravo on unknown target.
I authenticate Tango Whiskey at time 0300 Zulu.
Attention, all aircraft. This will be a danger close-fire mission.
These guys on the AWACS, that was done on Edwards Air Force Base.
I told these guys on the AWACS... These are all the real guys.
I said to the guy in charge of the AWACS, I said,
"How would you run this mission?
"This is what's going down on the ground.
"This is what's happening."
And literally within three minutes, these guys were talking.
I did not add one line here.
This is exactly how they talked. That's as fast as they talk.
And, literally, we were capturing it like a documentary.
It's amazing how fast everyone's talking over each other.
And a multitude of things going on.
And what's going on, Josh, right now
is laser-designating for these missiles coming in right now,
and that's actually how it's done.
These Warthogs are, I must say, very, kind of, scary
'cause they've got a very low, kind of, sound to them
and they get very low to the ground,
and they're slow enough where you can see them
and they just got this evil whine to it, and they're just so deadly, these things.
No frigging way that