NY Times' Bay Interview

A new article with Michael Bay (via his site) from the New York Times discuss his approach to making Transformers and why he took on the franchise. Many of the questions are a retread from the first movie but there are a few new questions. Parts below, full interview is here.

And you created other characters that weren’t established in the toys, the comics or the animation?
We wanted to get into the deeper lore of it. At one point, I’d already been shooting the movie, and we were doing this scene in space. And I asked these Hasbro experts on Transformers, I said, “So, how are Transformers born?” And they kind of – dead pause. “I don’t know.” “What do you mean, you don’t know? Isn’t that one of the first things you figure out?” [laughs] So I created how they’re born.

How are they born?
They’re in a special sac. They’re called hatchlings. It’s quite nice.

You’re helping to design all these nice new toys for Hasbro. Do you get a percentage of the toys they sell that are based on your designs?
Well, I’m not allowed to say. But things that come from my mind are now becoming toys. But it gets touched by all these artists. There was a woman on the Hollywood Foreign Press tour, and she goes, “Michael, don’t you ever want to do a movie that’s more artistic?” I knew what she meant, but there was a poster of Bumblebee behind me, and I said, “There’s something to be done with a movie in the south of France, whatever, at a winery or a vineyard. But when you look at Bumblebee behind you, it took so many artists so much time. This is something that doesn’t exist in our world. And it has emotions now.” That’s a whole skill. So it is art in its own way. The thing that Ridley Scott always says, and I totally concur with him, his favorite thing to do as a director is to create a new world. That’s just what I love to do.