Bay: Transformers 4 will Have "No Goofiness", Set Visit Tease

In an interview with Yahoo Movies that seems to have been done when Transformers: Age of Extinction was filming at the Detroit Hong Kong set, Michael Bay discussed how he changed his approach compared to the previous three films. Also Entertainment Tonight Canada teases their own set report from the set that will air sometime next week.

“I wanted the first Transformers to be very suburban and less cool,” Bay told us from the Detroit set of this fourth chapter. “This is a much more cinematic one. I focused on keeping this one slick. There won’t be any goofiness in this one. We went a bit too goofy [on the last one].”

But despite Optimus’s updated design, Bay is quick to point out that this really is the fourth in an ongoing series – “reboot” is a dirty word here. “It feels like a new chapter, this movie,” he says. “But it’s not a reboot. This movie lives in the history of the 'Transformers' movies, and this one starts three years after the last. It feels fresh.”

“I do big setups,” he says, with some understatement. “I like to do ‘runners’, where [the cameras are] with the characters in the war. We’re in the thick of it with Mark Wahlberg and Stanley Tucci, and we’ve got all these things going off.”

[From a 15 minute reel]: Wahlberg plays a wacky inventor – think Doc Brown, but with firmer abs – and overprotective father to Nicola Peltz’s Tessa. We watch as he discovers a Transformer and gets drawn into a conflict that has taken its toll on Earth – a sign saying 'Remember Chicago' hints at the destruction at the end of the last film. And then we see Wahlberg get distracted by the arrival of his daughter’s race driver boyfriend, played by Jack Reynor.

As for the action: what’s most remarkable about what we see is that we can see anything at all. Bay’s special effects guru, John Frazier, has worked on movies like 'Apocalypse Now' and 'Spider-Man', and he says the Transformers films, despite being full of CG, are at least 50% practical. “Yeah baby,” he says. “It’s kind of a dying art in Hollywood – nobody does anything for real. John’s one of the grand masters of physical effects.

“When car makers heard we were making this fourth one, they’d literally drive cars to my office,” Bay laughs as he leads us to meet this movie’s cast of vehicles. “I’ve driven the Veyron – it’s pretty cool,” says Bay. “They all want to be Autobots, too – no one wants to be a Decepticon.”