“Bon­jour!”. In Eng­lish with sub­ti­tles and snip­pets from Trans­form­ers 2 weaved in and out.

More inter­views

This time from ENewsi

Trans­form­ers 2 sell­ing out

Hun­dreds of tomor­row night’s mid­night show times for Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen (debut­ing June 24 at 12:01 a.m.) are already sold out across the coun­try. A few facts from Fan­dango below:

* Sold-out mid­night show times (on Tues­day night/Wednesday morn­ing) can be found all across the U.S.A., in cities such as New York, San Fran­cisco, Wash­ing­ton, D.C., Chicago, Los Ange­les, Philadel­phia, Albu­querque, Den­ver, Hous­ton, Nashville, Orlando, Col­orado Springs, Tulsa, Fresno and Buford, Geor­gia.
* Exhibitors are con­tin­u­ing to add 3:45 a.m. or 4:00 a.m. show times on Wednes­day morn­ing to meet the fan demand.
* Cur­rently, the film is sell­ing twice as many tick­ets on Fan­dango as the orig­i­nal Trans­form­ers sold at the same point in that film’s sales cycle (two days before release date).
* The movie cur­rently rep­re­sents 87% of today’s ticket sales
* And as we noted yes­ter­day, TF 2 show­ings at 500+ the­aters in China are sold out 1.5 weeks in advanced.

Time in Moscow

Back from Moscow. Fresh from a visit to the for­mer KGB, with sec­ond in com­mand. He told me in his office I’m one of 10 American’s, one being a Pres­i­dent, to ever be allowed inside what is now called the FSB. The only rea­son was he heard I was in town and he is a fan of my films.

Last night with my crew I saw the IMAX ver­sion. Once you get used to the giant for­mat and your eyes adjust, it’s an awe­some expe­ri­ence. I have been wait­ing until the film was final to judge, and I’m really pleased. You have to make a point to see it this way — It could be the very best way to see Transformers.

C’mon guys crit­ics? Give me a break. Do you all have short term mem­ory? They killed the first one, and it still became a world-wide smash. I made this for the you, the audience!

Michael

Using Obama

Another round-up of the weekend’s Trans­form­ers 2 news stories.

UK Box Office

Trans­form­ers 2 has, as of July 19th, been released to the UK pub­lic. The NY Times report that the sequel has taken 50% more in its open­ing week­end than it’s 2007 predecessor.

You can’t tell much from the box office per­for­mance of a film on a sin­gle night, in a sin­gle for­eign ter­ri­tory. But Para­mount exec­u­tives were con­grat­u­lat­ing them­selves on Sat­ur­day over the Fri­day night results of ‘Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen’ in the United King­dom. Word had it that the movie had done roughly 50 per­cent bet­ter than its pre­de­ces­sor, which two years ago went on to take in $389 mil­lion in for­eign mar­kets, and $319 at the domes­tic box office.

With the hot start in Eng­land, com­pany exec­u­tives were pri­vately spec­u­lat­ing that the new ;ldquo;Transformers;rdquo; film had a shot at becom­ing Paramount;rsquo;s second-highest gross­ing film, behind ;ldquo;Titanic,;rdquo; which took in a mon­strous $1.8 bil­lion world­wide under a split deal with Fox.

That would be a nice start for Adam Good­man, who was named pres­i­dent of the movie group on Fri­day, as two fel­low exec­u­tives, John Lesher and Brad Weston, were ush­ered out. Both were offered pro­ducer deals. The bet­ting here is that Mr. Weston will accept, while Mr. Lesher strikes for greener pastures.

Shia on The Tonight Show, June 19th

As part of the TV press tour Shia appeared on The Tonight Show last Fri­day with Conan O’Brien. Cour­tesy of Shia Videos

Ramon Rodriguez on Jimmy Kimmel

Ramon (Leo Spitz) talks stunts and Revenge of the Fallen on last Thursday’s edi­tion of the show:

Cast Q&A

Com­ing Soon have posted a tran­script of the Revenge of the Fallen Ques­tion and Answer ses­sion. The responses are all very jovial and do not give too much away about the movie. If you’re not one for read­ing, try out this handy video playlist from the same session:

Q: Are you already think­ing about the third film?

Bay: I don’t know. We’ll see how this one turns out.

Q: How many min­utes of deleted scenes might be on the DVD?

Bay: I don’t know. We’re fig­ur­ing it out right now. Seven or eight?

Q: Are you going to be shoot­ing more in IMAX?

Bay: I regret not shoot­ing the head scene in IMAX. But IMAX is very expen­sive. Just spe­cial effects in IMAX is expensive.

Q: Do you think you’ll be doing IMAX for all your future movies?

Bay: I don’t know. If the movie serves it.

Q: What else can we expect from the DVD?

Bay: This one is done by Rid­ley Scott’s DVD guy. We’re gonna have a lot of stuff on this. We’re gonna have a spe­cial IMAX ver­sion where it’ll open up the top and bottom.

TV talk show schedule

Thanks to TLAMB,

The sched­ule, sub­ject to change:
Th 6/18: Ramon Rodriguez — Jimmy Kim­mel Live (ABC)
Fr 6/19: Shia LaBeouf — The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien (NBC)
Tu 6/23: Isabel Lucas — Jimmy Kim­mel Live (ABC)
Tu 6/23: Tyrese Gib­son — Chelsea Lately (E!)
We 6/24: Josh Duhamel — Jimmy Kim­mel Live (ABC)
Th 6/25: Megan Fox — David Let­ter­man (CBS)
Th 6/25: Shia LaBeouf — Jimmy Kim­mel Live (ABC)
Th 6/25: Shia Labeouf — Live with Regis and Kelly (syn­di­cated)
Fr 6/26: Megan Fox — Jimmy Kim­mel Live (ABC)
Fr 6/26: Megan Fox — Live with Regis and Kelly (syn­di­cated)
Mo 6/29: Josh Duhamel — Live with Regis and Kelly (syndicated)

Crew screen­ings

Michael Bay answers ques­tions about when the cast and crew can watch the final feature:

Press is ask­ing about crew screeings

They seem to want to know about my crew screen­ings. Not sure why the press is inter­ested? We had 2500 crew mem­bers from many parts of the US and some in the Mid­dle East and Lon­don. We have an IMAX crew screen­ing Sun­day night. We have an ILM screen­ing Mon­day night and Para­mount invited some of my key crew mem­bers to the LA pre­mière I think Tues­day we are putting together a crew screen­ing which is being planned at Para­mount. Thurs­day we have an IMAX screen­ing in Wash­ing­ton for the Pen­ta­gon peo­ple involved in the film. And we have one set up in Jor­dan. BTW the press is not invited.

Michael Bay in the NYTimes

Bay dis­cusses the Trans­form­ers fran­chise and why he decided to take it on in his lat­est NYTimes interview:

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.

Read full interview

Shia and Megan on La Grand Journal

Whilst in Paris Megan and Shia appeared on this French show, quite an enter­tain­ing video, but not com­pletely Trans­form­ers related. Thanks again to Shia LaBeouf Video.

Another round up of the inter­views, press arti­cles and what­not that keep­ing pop­ping up here there and everywhere.

Michael Bay’s Film Weekly Podcast

This inter­view comes from The Guardian’s “Film weekly” inter­view with Michael Bay and was posted to the offi­cial Michael Bay site.

Bay is not quit­ting Transformers

Some inter­views recently spun the “I’m tak­ing a break” stance Michael Bay has on Trans­form­ers 3 to give the impres­sion he was quit­ting the fran­chise alto­gether. This is not the case and in all like­li­hoods Michael Bay shall direct Trans­form­ers 3, due for release in 2012.

GM pro­vided 67 vehi­cles for Trans­form­ers 2

USA Today have a short arti­cle on the Transformers/GM rela­tion­ship and an inter­view with Michael Bay.

“They were respon­si­ble for build­ing the cars, and I was try­ing to get my check because we built the cars, fronted them the money, and they were late on pay­ing us,” Bay says. “I was like, ‘We bet­ter get our check fast before they go bankrupt.’

Chevy won’t reveal what it cost to pro­vide cars, but spokesman Steve Janisse says 67 vehi­cles were used, and 52 of those were “non-salable,” spe­cially built pro­to­types used for test­ing, engi­neer­ing and display.

[…]

Bay says the cars them­selves become like celebri­ties, some­thing he wit­nessed while shoot­ing in a remote part of the Mid­dle East. “The money they spend is pen­nies for the amount of good­will. Bum­ble­bee is one of the most famous cars in the world,” the direc­tor says. “Lit­er­ally, we’re in this poor lit­tle town in Jor­dan, and all these kids sur­rounded (the car). They all knew Bumblebee’s name.”

Nascar 18 wrapped in M&Ms and autobots

Num­ber 18 has been cov­ered in an M&Ms and Trans­form­ers themed coat — full gallery avail­able at Joe Gibbs.

Shia has “The Touch”

Shia per­forms a ren­di­tion of Stan Bush’s “The Touch” to much amuse­ment and pain.

Obama in Revenge of the Fallen

The movie in some way includes Obama, to which Bay com­ments, via Dig­i­tal Spy,

Bay said: “The Obama thing? I met him in an air­port where he was car­ry­ing his bag by him­self and we talked about movies and appar­ently he likes my movies. So I fig­ured we’ll just put him in.”

The direc­tor joked that he was able to include the up-to-date ref­er­ence because he had only com­pleted mak­ing the film last Wednes­day [June 10th].

Michael Bay in Gui­ness Book of World Records

Michael Bay is now in the record books for the largest explo­sion filmed whilst actors are present. It was shot in New Mex­ico. The NZ Her­ald, from whence this news came, offer up and expan­sive overview of Trans­form­ers 2 and have some tid­bit inter­view com­ments from Megan Fox and Shia as well,

“If Michael Bay can make me look that good in shorts, then I don’t mind if peo­ple think I’m being exploited. And it gives me an advan­tage because even if I do a mediocre per­for­mance, peo­ple don’t expect any­thing of me, so they’re impressed.” And inci­den­tally, although she is adorned with tat­toos, claims to be bisex­ual, and does her best to come across as “dan­ger­ous and dark” à la Jolie, she insists it is not cal­cu­lated. “It’s more of a curse than a bless­ing to look like Angelina,” she says, straight-faced. “Seri­ously, there are a lot of films I’ve had to pass on because I don’t want peo­ple to think I’m try­ing to emu­late her.” (Appar­ently she was offered the next Tomb Raider but turned it down for this rea­son.) As for Lebeouf, an edgy lead­ing man and an exam­ple of the core audi­ence of a film like this, says, “Trans­form­ers is escapism in the same way Star Wars was for its gen­er­a­tion. If you want magic tricks, theme park rides, the roller coaster vibe, Trans­form­ers is for you.“

Film Jour­nal talks with Orci and Kurtzman

After recov­er­ing from the Star Trek press tour, Orci and Kurtz­man answered some ques­tions from the folks at Film Jour­nal. Points include the story’s emo­tional core, the strike and the inspi­ra­tion for the sequel.

“For us, the action always emerges from the char­ac­ters; the audi­ence tunes out ran­dom action scenes that don’t move the plot for­ward or take the char­ac­ters in some new direc­tion,” Kurtz­man says. “So in Revenge of the Fallen, there are sev­eral sequences that we pitched to Michael in detail as part of the char­ac­ters’ sto­ries and he ended up shoot­ing them almost exactly as we pitched them. Of course, he also comes up with great ways to embell­ish the sequences and no one is bet­ter at that than he is.”

That infor­ma­tion will come in handy as the duo makes their long-planned tran­si­tion to direct­ing. “The plan is to find the right film for us to direct in the next cou­ple of years,” Orci reveals. “We’re happy being the guys that write the words, but we want to try every­thing. It’s pos­si­ble that we’ll each direct our own projects, but we might be too jeal­ous of what the other is doing and so we’ll both have to do it!” While nei­ther claims to have a dream project right now, there is one fran­chise that Orci says he’s hop­ing to see real­ized on the big screen some­day. “I’d love to see [Nintendo’s] The Leg­end of Zelda done right.”

Film Jour­nal

Video game pre­views and walkthroughs

More Revenge of the Fallen video game pre­views have sur­faced at Game Trail­ers, includ­ing Art Direc­tor and Pro­ducer inter­views, a Side­ways and Dev­as­ta­tor walk­through and an Opti­mus Prime down­town walk­through. Fol­low­ing these there are tow YouTube videos, includ­ing the open­ing scenes and a Break­away train­ing routine.

Human Alliance video review

Not strictly press, but not really big enough for its own post, another Human Alliance video review:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another quick round up of some Trans­form­ers 2 arti­cles that are hit­ting the press at the moment.

Michael Bay’s earn­ings from first Trans­form­ers movie

via Yahoo,

Shia LaBeouf received an upfront sum of $500,000 for his role in the first “Trans­form­ers.” How­ever, Bay’s deal passed on a fee for direct­ing and exec­u­tive pro­duc­ing in exchange for a slice of the prof­its from all the film’s rev­enue sources. The film, which cost the stu­dio an esti­mated $155 mil­lion to make, earned over $700 mil­lion world­wide and was a top-selling DVD. Bay’s final take from the movie: some­where in the neigh­bor­hood of $75 million.

LaBeouf is get­ting a raise for the sequel, “Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen.” His pay­check is esti­mated at about $5 mil­lion. Bay will once again get a cut of the prof­its, which could take longer to accu­mu­late since the bud­get for the sec­ond movie approached $200 million.

ROVE inter­view Isabel Lucas

Matthew Mars­den injured in Heli­copter stunt

The Sun­day Mer­cury caught up with Matthew Mars­den to find out about his near death encounter with a heli­copter on the set of Trans­form­ers 2:

“It was a night­mare,” recalls Matthew, speak­ing from his home in Los Ange­les. “I had a very close shave when a heli­copter crashed and missed me by a foot. I stepped out of the way a sec­ond before it hit the ground. The stunt went off too early, I should have been some con­sid­er­able way away. I didn’t seri­ously injure myself, apart from shear­ing off one of my bot­tom teeth. There was a bit of blood, but my adren­a­line kicked in so I didn’t feel it.

“I just remem­ber the direc­tor, Michael Bay, shout­ing, ‘Oh my God! Every­one look at Matt!’. One of the crew rushed up and said, ‘Dude, do you have any idea how close that was?’. I said ‘As long as I look cool, I don’t care!’. Peo­ple will prob­a­bly think that it’s a computer-generated spe­cial effect, but I can assure you it was very real. It’s fine, I’m still here with all my fin­gers and toes, though not all my teeth.”

Insider inter­view Shia

Isabel Lucas interview

Sky News inter­viewed Isabel Lucas at the Tokyo world première:

It is Lucas’ first [press con­fer­ence] and admits it’s over­whelm­ing. ‘It’s been a whirl­wind,’ she says. ‘I’ve worked on five pro­duc­tions since Home and Away and this is the first one to be released, so I haven’t ever expe­ri­enced doing a press jun­ket or a pre­mière, so this is like really being thrown right into the midst of it, into the deep end.’

Spiel­berg, who is an exec­u­tive pro­ducer on the new Trans­form­ers movie, sug­gested her to direc­tor Michael Bay for the role of Alice after work­ing with her on the HBO mini-series The Pacific, which he also pro­duced. One suc­cess­ful audi­tion later and Lucas had landed the biggest movie role of her career.

‘I was really intrigued by the char­ac­ter because there is more than meets the eye — lit­er­ally,’ she says. ‘She’s a lay­ered char­ac­ter, and that’s inter­est­ing for any actor to play really some­thing dif­fer­ent from your­self and to under­stand and relate to her even though she might have darker inten­tions. She’s fun to play.’

She describes one par­tic­u­lar scene with LaBeouf which required an atten­tion to detail that she’d never expe­ri­enced before. The shot was so spe­cific for a cer­tain CGI effect that they were try­ing to achieve and the cam­era was about 30cm away and he (Bay) was like yelling at me so specif­i­cally to tilt my head down! Tilt it to the right! Tilt it down again! Now lift it slightly! But he really is an amaz­ing visual genius, and the fin­ished prod­uct you under­stand why he was being so spe­cific with details.’

‘They know that this genre of film is not really what I’m drawn to, I’m drawn to scripts that are unique and have mean­ing. But that’s what is so won­der­ful about being an actor, is the diver­sity of the kind of films you can be a part of. I’m just hon­oured for the oppor­tu­nity, and if it opens other doors career-wise I’ll be very fortunate.’

As expected, the cast of Trans­form­ers 2 are appear­ing left, right and cen­ter as part of the Revenge of the Fallen press explo­sion. Here’s a quick round up of the arti­cles and fea­tures we know about.

Megan Fox and Opti­mus Prime in EW

”If I’m still mak­ing Trans­form­ers five years from now, I might not be so überex­cited. But there’s noth­ing spe­cific that I need to accom­plish. I just want to still be working.”

Warn­ing: do not try get­ting your hair caught up in barbed wire at home.

”Peo­ple are well aware that [Trans­form­ers] is not a movie about act­ing. And once you real­ize that, it becomes almost fun because you can be in the moment and go, ‘All right, I know that when he calls Action! I’m either going to be run­ning or scream­ing, or both.”’

Trans­form­ers turned you into an overnight star. Look­ing back, how do you feel about the movie?
I’m ter­ri­ble in it. It’s my first real movie and it’s not hon­est and not real­is­tic. The movie wasn’t bad, I just wasn’t proud about what I did.

What was it like the first time you worked with him?
I was actu­ally an extra on Bad Boys II [in 2003]. There’s a club scene, and I was one of the club kids. I was in a stars-and-stripes bikini and a cow­boy hat, danc­ing under a waterfall.

You’re a big­ger star now than when you did the first Trans­form­ers. Did they beef up your role in the sequel?
The humans are still sec­ondary to the robots because it’s a movie about robots. I feel like the part is ade­quate. I feel like we do some­thing that’s watch­able on our end and then ILM makes it phenomenal.

You don’t sound con­vinced that this is the great­est movie on earth.
It’s not try­ing to be the great­est movie on earth. It’s going to be the best action movie of the sum­mer. Hands down, it will win that. But it’s not try­ing to be a Golden Globe-nominated film. It’s a badass pop­corn sum­mer movie.

You up for a third Trans­form­ers?
Sure. I mean, I can’t s— on this movie because it did give me a career and open all these doors for me. But I don’t want to blow smoke up people’s ass. Peo­ple are well aware that this is not a movie about act­ing. And once you real­ize that, it becomes almost fun because you can be in the moment and go, ”All right, I know that when he calls Action! I’m either going to be run­ning or scream­ing, or both.”

Shia and Megan talk tril­ogy with MTV

Megan Fox on Trans­form­ers 3

“I’m really happy to have been a part of these films, obvi­ously, and if they wanted me to come back for a third one, I would. I owe them,” she laughed. “I owe them my career, really.”

Roberto Orci on Trans­form­ers 3

“I’d like to see some ver­sion of Gal­va­tron,” said Roberto Orci.. “I would like to see Uni­cron, too, and really any­thing that ends in the word ‘ron.’ Dinobots! I think, even­tu­ally, the Dinobots are going to have to happen.”

“It’s totally pos­si­ble that, just for the ben­e­fit of ‘Trans­form­ers’ to stay cool and awe­some, we should have to let new peo­ple come in and do it,” Kurtz­man said.

Shia on Trans­form­ers 3

“I don’t think [we’ll make ‘Trans­form­ers 3′] right away, but I wouldn’t kill it either,” LaBeouf explained, say­ing that just like Michael Bay, all the stars need a break from the giant robot fran­chise. “I don’t think we’re going to do one any­time soon. I think we all need a break from each other and a break from the project. We just need to col­lect our­selves and come back to it. They’re hard to make, man.”

Shia talks Revenge of the Fallen video game

“I’m a gamer. Always have been — always will be. This one looks a-w-e-s-o-m-e! ”

Read the rest of this entry »

MTV have the exclu­sive on a new Fallen image, show­ing the char­ac­ter, for the first time, in detail. They’ve also posted a video inter­view with Shia which I have embed­ded below. Said video also includes a look at the Fallen.

Shia explains Trans­form­ers Revenge of the Fallen

Game Trail­ers has posted a new inter­view with Peter Cullen (the voice of Opti­mus Prime) and Frank Welker (Mega­tron), wherein they dis­cuss work­ing together again on the new Revenge of the Fallen video game.