Roberto Orci has answered another round of fan’s ques­tions over at TFW2005 — answers are often vague, cryp­tic or one-liners, but a num­ber of answers are inter­est­ing. The new set of answers start around page 226 of the thread (all Orci posts — need to be logged in).

Some of the high­lights are listed below, as col­lated by TLAMB:

Will Barricade’s dis­ap­pear­ance be explained in ROTF?
Explained is a very spe­cific kinda word… implied may be more like it

Will you guys seri­ously rethink about stay­ing on?
Time for fresh blood!

Just to be clear, what is your rea­son for not writ­ing it? If the other main play­ers comes back and they don’t see a need for fresh blood, then why would you?
Not clear who is com­ing back yet, but the main rea­son we would move on is because we risk get­ting stale and com­fort­able. If you only sing one song for too long, you miss the oppor­tu­nity to sing news songs. We’ll see.

who thought of the name for the movie? you, michael bay, alex, or some­one else?
Alex.

how many fans do you think saw past Michael’s “no Mega­tron” announce­ment? And sec­ond, is he aware that his com­ment about Megs only appear­ing in a flash­back kind of con­tra­dicts Hugo Weaving’s hint that the Allspark shard has some­thing to do with Megatron’s res­ur­rec­tion?
god love him

Did the fallen enslave the Egyp­tians to build the pyra­mids (which actu­ally are space bridges)?
Hmm. Get­ting warm

Did the Egyp­tians seal the fallen within his own design?
Also very warm but not quite.

Did you ever intend for Black­out and Brawl to speak?
Yes.

Would you con­sider a giant bat­tle in the Grand Canyon?
We actu­ally had a giant bat­tle in the Grand Canyon in the very first draft of the first movie.

Is there really still time to add stuff and how much stuff can be added at this point?
On the first movie, we were re-writing dia­logue until about 2 weeks before release!

can you let us know how many Auto­bots can fly in the movie?
very few

I know very early in devel­op­ment Mike Bay said that there would be a geri­atric robot. Was it already set there and then that Jet­fre would be that bot, or did you and the writers/Bay decide later that Jet­fire would suit that type of char­ac­ter?
We decided Jet­fire would fit after the idea came up to have a geri­atric robot.

Would you con­sider this movie the “Empire Strikes Back” of the Trans­former movie line (dark, feel­ing of hope­less­ness, crazy reveal/twists/turns)?
yes

Bay men­tioned in pass­ing that about 40 bots are in the movie. Sound about right or less/more?
sounds about right

Will The Fallen have any dia­logue?
Yes.

Can you name the 3 scenes that were filmed in IMAX for­mat?
Yes.

Will Prime sur­vive the movie?
Prime’s spirit can never die.

which of the 2 movies was more dif­fi­cult to get along with the story.
Movie 1 was the hard­est thing have ever worked on. Period. Nobody could imag­ine what it was, every­one thought it was just a silly car­toon or a toy com­mer­cial, the stu­dio wasn’t sure if the robots should talk, we had to come up with a story that would attract some­one like Bay, and we had bud­getary con­straints that made it nec­es­sary to gen­er­ate a sig­nif­i­cant human story which was coun­ter­in­tu­itive to some Trans­fans. By the sec­ond movie, the par­a­digm of the fran­chise was clear.

what are your feel­ings towards the idea of Leonard Nimoy doing the voice of the Fallen?
Would love it. I actu­ally talked to him about it, given the odd coin­ci­dence that he is Michael Bay’s cousin through mar­riage, but fan out­cry has also put Welker in the running.