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.

Col­lider man­aged to grab Michael Bay at the Fri­day 13th pre­mier and have a chat with him about TF2. What’s on the cards? — A darker, more epic, more emo­tional Trans­form­ers 2 with improved tech­ni­cal abil­i­ties and IMAX scenes with maybe a third come ~2012.

In sum­mary:

He says they have done 3 scenes in IMAX
He talks about Trans­form­ers 2 and what he likes about it – says the robots have a lot more per­son­al­ity and he was able to get emote much more than the first movie
Also says it’s going to be darker and epic in scale – says the human char­ac­ters go on a ride with the robots
I ask about the run­ning time – says right now it’s 2 hours 20 min­utes but he still edit­ing
I ask if he will do a third Trans­form­ers movie or does he see him­self doing another fran­chise – says he could see him­self doing a third but he wants to take a year off no mat­ter what

AICN’s Quint has had a chance to speak with Rainn Wil­son, and in the con­ver­sa­tion the topic of Trans­form­ers 2 appro­pri­ately popped up along­side work­ing with Michael Bay:

Quint: So what are you work­ing on now? You have some stuff com­ing up?
Rainn Wil­son: Well, I just did a very small cameo in TRANSFORMERS 2.

Quint: Cool.
Rainn Wil­son: That was kind of a blast. I got to work with Michael Bay and I was a big fan of TRANSFORMERS.

Quint: I spent a few days on the set of the first movie and some­thing I noticed was that Michael Bay, I think he has an AD, but he doesn’t need one.
Rainn Wil­son: He does every­thing himself.

Quint: He does every­thing and he’s not afraid to be the task mas­ter on a set.
Rainn Wil­son: I saw him and he was lit­er­ally giv­ing the focus puller notes. The focus puller was like “No, you have to do it like this…” and Michael Bay is like “No no no, do it like this and hook this here and you can turn this here and you can get the focus this way…” Some­how I believed Michael Bay knew more than the focus puller. He even ran cam­era a cou­ple of times. He did his own cam­era work.

Quint: That must have been fun. I don’t imag­ine that you are in any scenes with any robots, but it would still be fun.
Rainn Wil­son: No, I wish I would have had scenes with explo­sions, but yeah the only other thing is I have a bunch of film irons in the fire out there.

Whilst Megan Fox recently spoke to IGN about TF2, I’ve extracted the inter­est­ing bits:

Q: How is Trans­form­ers 2 going?
Megan Fox: It’s going good. It’s gigantic!

Q: Com­pared to the first, you’d say it’s way big­ger?
Fox: It’s twice the bud­get, so yeah.

Q: Can you say where this movie picks up for your char­ac­ters?
Fox: It’s two years later, so when it comes out it will be present day. Shia [LaBeouf, who reprises his role as Sam Witwicky] and I have been dat­ing for two years, so it’s kind of like old news. There’s no big love scenes or any­thing like that – you kind of get into the cou­ple bick­er­ing now. That stage, like the old mar­ried cou­ple. That’s all I can say!

There’s also another inter­view with Megan Fox by Scifi​.com

Matthew Mars­den plays a lead role in Revenge of the Fallen as SAS Gra­ham, this is his first inter­view since that announce­ment. The inter­view is all rather generic — giv­ing away no secrets or even lit­tle teasers, very lit­tle prob­ing done by the interviewer.

“I’m part of a multi-national force. What’s going on right now is I’m a British Spe­cial Forces offi­cer that’s attached to Lennox’s team. Well, there’s two of us ini­tially. And we’re bat­tling the bad guys.”

[…]

I just try to be real. My char­ac­ter is not an amus­ing char­ac­ter. He’s a sol­dier, so all the stuff that I did is very much rooted in real­ity and what I know from the expe­ri­ences of my friends [who are in the mil­i­tary]. So, it’s just very real and noth­ing über-spectacular.

We went to Penn­syl­va­nia and shot at the Beth­le­hem Steel Plant, which was really amaz­ing. We had this scene where it’s, like, ‘That’s where he is!’ and you have to shoot at him. ‘He’s going that way!’ It’s quite a far dis­tance away, so we had to use a laser pointer [to stand in for the robot]. It’s all fun; I love that stuff.

There are bad guys there and we have to go and get them. That’s basi­cally it.”

[On Shia and Megan Fox]

“They’re work­ing with the Auto­bots, [so] they’re def­i­nitely going to know some of the strengths and weak­nesses of dif­fer­ent robots. So, if they’re work­ing together with an alien life-form, which they didn’t ini­tially, then obvi­ously they’re going to know more. In the first one, they were actu­ally find­ing out what they were because they didn’t know. … Now they’re aware of what they are, and we’re part of the task force specif­i­cally to go and deal with them. … I just know that I’ve got a big chunk to come, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of action in it.”

MTV have been speak­ing with Trans­form­ers star and FHM’s sex­i­est woman in the world, Megan Fox.

“As big as the first movie was, this is 10 times as big, 10 times as many set pieces, explo­sions, and acro­batic stunts,” she told us about “Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen. “Shia and I make out a lit­tle bit; I don’t know if any­one wants to see that.”

“You know, we’ve been hav­ing script meet­ings, and we’ve been rework­ing the script, because they wrote it fast because of the writer’s strike,” she explained. “And, we’ve just been going through and try­ing to do some char­ac­ter stuff for Shia and myself in the mid­dle of this crazy world that they’re in.”

[…]

“I can tell you that we’re on loca­tions in some really exotic places,” she added. “It’s just going to be a badass movie. It’s just going to be a popcorn-visual-spectacle, sum­mer film.”

[…]

As for Michael Bay’s main direc­to­r­ial input to his lead actress, Megan had this to say: “His main note to me is just to look hot; so I try my best.”

As we can see, she doesn’t find this too difficult:

In speak­ing with MTV, Michael Bay has stated that Trans­form­ers 2 will not fol­low suit with recent trilo­gies and sequels — it will not be a film that promises a lot before leav­ing you wait­ing for a third movie and con­se­quent resolution:

“You know how those sequels they do the sec­ond one so you go see the third one? [“Trans­form­ers 2”] is it,” he said, indi­cat­ing that “2” would be its own story free from the duel shack­les of set-up or res­o­lu­tion. “First one was just intro­duc­ing, set­ting up stuff, so we can go a lot far­ther. Let’s just say [this] is not a lame sequel.”

If “Trans­form­ers” was all about intro­duc­tion, then “Trans­form­ers 2” will be all about esca­la­tion, with reports that upwards of 20 robots will do bat­tle in the block­buster sequel. But for Bay, it’s not the num­ber of robots present, but how they’ll be more fully and indi­vid­u­ally real­ized that has him excited, he said.

In an inter­view with IGN, writer Roberto Orci con­firmed that fan favourite Sound­wave would be mak­ing an appear­ance in the sequel:

Q: What’s the sta­tus of Trans­form­ers 2?

ORCI: That starts shoot­ing in three weeks.

Q: What do you want to do that builds from the first one?

ORCI: We want to fol­low some of our lead char­ac­ters which we thought were so suc­cess­ful. Shia’s char­ac­ter; where is he two years later? His girl­friend, where is she two years later? But for fans, I guess I’ll address this more for the fans, because I think if you didn’t know Trans­form­ers at all and you came in and you liked the first movie, you’ll like the sec­ond one. How­ever, some of the die hard fans, which we were a mem­ber of that group, felt, well, maybe it’s a lit­tle light. Maybe it wasn’t sci­ence fic­tiony enough. And I think the sec­ond one will deliver on a true Trans­form­ers story. You know, the first one, we had a lim­ited bud­get for what it was. Every sec­ond of Trans­former time is a mil­lion dol­lars or what­ever the heck it is, so this time, because we were able to prove through the whole thing that it’s a viable live-action movie, we have a lit­tle more free­dom this time to actu­ally learn about the Trans­form­ers, see them, hear them. It’s a bet­ter bal­ance between the humans and the Transformers.

Q: Is there one par­tic­u­lar Trans­former, good or bad, that you absolutely had to get into the sequel?

ORCI: Yes.

Q: You’re not gonna tell us.

ORCI: I’ll tell you. We had to get Sound­wave in there.

Q: Nice. Where Sound­wave goes, will Rav­age follow?

ORCI: Per­haps! Who’s Rav­age? … I’m kid­ding! You know, we had Rav­age in an early draft of the first movie and Sound­wave, and we couldn’t do it right and I think this time hope­fully we’ll have the abil­ity to do it.

Shia has been hap­pily dis­cussing the new Trans­form­ers movie adap­ta­tion with British pub­li­ca­tion Empire, although keep­ing the secrets to him­self it seems:

“It’s going to be bad-ass. We’re not mak­ing another one unless it is, and Mike is def­i­nitely not rest­ing on his lau­rels — he’s doing insane shit again. And the pre-vizes that I’ve seen… it’s just mas­sive. If the first one was any indi­ca­tor of how mas­sive mas­sive can be, this is going to blow that out of the water. It’s insane. Mike’s mind was just kind of made for this — it’s amaz­ing. There’s going to be a lot more char­ac­ter­i­za­tion with the robots, which I’m excited about. […] There’s gonna be new robots on both sides. I can say that the war isn’t over… It’s hard to do inter­views when you’re not allowed to talk about the movies. It’s like I give two or three things away and then I get rep­ri­manded for it. It’s never fun to get rep­ri­manded by these people”.