The article:
Question: What is the balance you have to strike between the needs of characters and creating visual set pieces for Michael Bay?
Orci: The hardest balance actually was tone. Honestly, people are going to come at this thing. It's a cartoon, it's a toy line, it's for kids. It's not a movie. One of the ethics was trying to make it as realistic as possible. And yes, it's Transformers and there's a long history of fun in it so it all had to be fun. Those two, realism and fun, are complete opposites so the hardest part was walking the line in tone.
Question: Was the comedy the most fun you had?
Orci: That was fun. But it was also hard. It was the icing on the cake. Everything else had to be sort of in place before we could kind of get to that moment. We had to make sure that the structure of the movie was a solid paradigm that you could hit with a hammer and it wouldn't fall apart before we fully committed to what the humor could be. But it was always implicit in the process. It had to be fun.
Question: Was it your intention to cross age groups?
Orci: Certainly that was the studio's intention. From our intention, it was to try to be true to what the situation is which is you have this boy and everything that he brings to it. You have this world event happening in terms of how the government would react. If the kid's there, he's got parents so a lot of the things are dictated by- - as opposed to trying to fit some kind of a formula, it was more about starting from where we're starting from and trying to extrapolate it realistically and yet as fun.
Question: What would happen if there were snakes on a Decepticon plane?
Orci: I think we'd have a bigger hit. I should have thought of that.
Question: Is the military pleased with this film? What was their input?
Orci: First of all, it was amazing to get their help. The production value makes it such that the production value is far and beyond what the actual budget is thanks to their help. I was a little bit surprised by the fact that they were willing to jump in so readily because there is a slight thematic complexity in terms of what the military's role is. They get a terrorist scenario wrong. They assume it's the wrong people. They blame the wrong people. The only person who figures it out is a woman among all the men. So that was definitely part of something that we wanted to bring to it. So for them to jump on was very, I think, gracious. However, obviously, they also get to show off their stuff so I think both of us got something out of it.
Question: Did they have script approval?
Orci: They didn't have script approval. They can decide if they- - they suggested a few little things but nothing- - there's nothing they wanted to change pretty much that compromised too much. At the very end, the one thing that we went at them over was at the very end, we were going to say that the Defense Department had decided to hide everything. I'm not even sure what's in there now. The wording was such that it sounded a little more sinister than it turned out to be. Put it that way.
Question: How do you write for a director like Michael Bay?
Orci: The first great step is to make sure that he's not involved until you've written two drafts. So we wrote two drafts before we actually showed him anything. That was in order so that we would be confident that again, the structure would be solid enough that he could come in and play and we wouldn't be developing something based on an idea that was half formed. Also it helps when you have Spielberg as the producer. This is our second movie with Bay so we got to know him pretty well. We are able to predict essentially and very much we wrote this movie in a way for him and for Spielberg and for ourselves.
Question: How much did you take from the John Rogers draft?
Orci: We kept the idea of going after the Allspark. The basic idea that they're fighting for this artifact was in his draft but we kept that idea.
Question: Did Michael bring the "boy and his first car" idea or was that you?
Orci: That's something we came up with with Spielberg. Spielberg asked us to do the movie and we were very concerned it being a giant toy commercial with no humanity. We came in and we said, "Listen, we'd love to do the movie but we don't know what it is. Take your movie Close Encounters. It's a great alien movie but it's actually about a guy whose family is disintegrating through his obsession. Do you guys agree that this is a human thing?" And he said, "Yes, and here it is, a boy and his car." That's all he said. That was enough for us to go, "Ahh, okay, now I know what it is." Thus we developed a draft off of that.
Question: You address every possible fanboy thought, but why not try an EMP blast?
Orci: Well, there was an EMP blast at the bass. Not against, because everyone uses an EMP. They use it in Oceans 11. The minute you're in Vegas with an EMP device, aliens... So we did think of it. Maybe you're right.
Question: And there's no reason the aliens wouldn't be impervious.
Orci: Exactly. We considered EMP and we're like, "Nah."
Question: Is this a pre-9/11 action movie?
Orci: In our conversations, that same conversation with Spielberg, when we got off on Boy and his Car, we were like, "Well, we love"- - this is something we'd been wanting to talk to him forever, "We love the old Amblin days. The movies that I saw when I was targeted for this age group, when I was between 11 and 15, Back to the Future, ET, all those kinds of things." So we had literally a conversation about trying to bring back the old Amblin ethic. In a way, this movie was primarily written for what we wanted to see, what we thought Spielberg would want to see and what we though Michael Bay would want to see, hoping that if we succeed in all three that then the audience would want to see it. It's very much a mix of Spielberg/Amblin in a way and Bay/modern day action. That's kind of where it ended up.
Question: Was it good to have certain producers off Transformers?
Orci: No, I love them. We learned everything from them.
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