Last month, Paramount Pictures released the first teaser trailer and poster for director Michael Bay‘s forthcoming entry in the Transformers franchise, Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Considering the widespread vitriol that the previous installment triggered in many a critic and a good amount of die hard fans, the teaser trailer received fairly good reception, and people seemed to have some of their faith in the franchise restored.
While Shia LeBeouf has been quite forthcoming about his feelings towards Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Bay has been relatively (and uncharacteristically) quiet when it comes to his fledgling Transformers sequel. Can you blame him? It only made $836 million world-wide, despite its detractors… what an embarrassment?!?
Bay recently had a little tête à tête with the folks over at the LATimes and spoke about RotF. Bay agrees that it was a mess, promises to make up for it with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which he says is better than the first two big-screen adventures of the Robots in Disguise.
“It was kind of a mess, wasn’t it? Look, the movie had some good things in it and it was entertaining and it did very well, but it also failed in some key ways. I learned from it. And now with this third movie we’re going back to basics and I absolutely believe this is going to be a much better film than the second one. I’m still having fun and especially with this movie. Look, we got burned on the last movie. The big thing was the writers’ strike, it hurt the film and it made it hard on everybody. We had three weeks to get our story and, really, we were going into the movie without a script. It’s tough to do that. It was too big of a movie. There were too many endings or too many things that felt like endings. There was so much animation [in the visual effects post-production work], too, and we ran out of time. We used the schedule of the first movie for the second movie but on the second one way more labor was needed for the animation. And then it felt like we were writing the script in the edit room, trying to put together a story.”
Bay was also kind enough to drop off a picture for the fans (below) of Shia LaBeouf and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley working on the set, with Bay himself in the foreground.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon hits theaters on July 1st, 2011 and stars Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Kevin Dunn, Julie White, Ken Jeong, Patrick Dempsey and Alan Tudyk.
