Michael Bay’s Next Project Is Producing Documentaries for Discovery
68Once upon a time, Michael Bay was one of the busiest men in Hollywood. Averaging a movie every two years from 1995 to 2019, which was a lot of output for someone renowned for their eye-popping, explosive action films. But since 2019, Bay has only done one film—Ambulance, the heist thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Eiza Gonzalez. During the Transformers: Rise of the Beasts red carpet premiere in Brooklyn last week, Collider's Steve Weintraub asked Bay a very important question: what has he been up to?
"I was taking a little time down," said Bay. "I prepped a lot of documentaries, I've gotten into the documentary world, and we're shooting some of those currently, right now. The strike has put ruin and a full hold on several things that I'm working on – one with a big producer – but I don't want to go into all these different things."
Bay has a very distinct visual style. A former music video director, in which everything has to be eye-catching, he made the natural leap to cinema, where his eye for a camera angle, close-up shots, slow motion, and explosions made for a thrilling visceral experience. The prospect of bringing that style into documentaries is certainly an intriguing one, particularly when taking into account different genres, although his desire to get going is clearly evident, notwithstanding the ongoing WGA strike.
"I just sold five shows to Discovery, it's a serial killing family, okay? It’s a story you've not heard before, and there are two others," he went on to explain. "But I’m itching to shoot, I’m telling you. I'm really itching to shoot, and the strike needs to happen, but it's going to be rough for a lot of people."
Returning to Transformers
Weintraub and Bay were chatting while discussing the recently-released Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, on which Bay is serving as a producer. The franchise, based on the animated series of the same name, was kick-started by Bay in 2007, and he would go on to helm the next four sequels as well. While content to be sitting out on the spin-off, Bumblebee, Rise of the Beasts marks the first direct Transformers sequel on which Bay is not its director. However, as producer, he was more than happy to lend his expertise to the project. Bay shared:
"I talked to the different teams, different effects teams, and the head animators, and lighters and whatnot, giving them tips, and they asked a lot of questions and through the process, I would have different meetings. So, it's a machine. It's a lot of people, you know, and it's a mathematical machine. You’ve got to keep the machine moving, you know?"
Having worked on the franchise for over a decade, handing the reins over to someone new—in this case, Steven Caple Jr.—would have been a strange situation for him. Weintraub noted that Bay had visited the set of Rise of the Beasts in Peru, and inquired as to how it felt stepping back into a world that he was responsible for, but without that control anymore, as he had done previously with Bad Boys 3, another franchise in which he stepped away after initial success.
"I’ve got to tell you, when I visited Bad Boys 3, it's kind of sad. I mean, it's like you love other people doing it, but it’s like, “Ah,” you know? But it brings back a lot of memories because this is like my baby, one of my babies, and I've left two. You know, Bad Boys was my first one, and, you know, I did one and two, and then this one, I've done five movies, but it's good to pass the torch. And I've helped both directors that have done the other movies, and I helped just in terms of advising on editing this, that. It needs a lot of people when you do these movies."
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is playing in theaters and IMAX now.
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