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

More inter­views

This time from ENewsi

The full “Kitchen Bots attack” scene has been posted online, here’s a high qual­ity HD ver­sion of the clip:

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.

This TV Spot con­tains some spoil­ers as to one character’s des­tiny — how­ever it also intro­duces Side­swipe, show­ing his trans­for­ma­tion from the Corvette and his slip and slide tech­nique in full. Embed­ding on the video is dis­abled, but you can catch it in HD on YouTube.

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 »

Chief robot spot­ter Daan con­tacted us to tell us about a new robot spot­ting in Eng­land. The video below may shock you. Scum British teenagers steal a scooter and mess around with it, before receiv­ing an abrupt sur­prise when they try and set fire to it. Best viral video so far.

Real Eff­ing Deal

Kelv rag­ging this scooter we nicked. Well funny hes show­ing off to the girls. But WTF hap­pened when we tried to torch it! Havent seen Kelv since. Sucker. But checkit!

Dan­ger­ous toys

Another viral video, in French this time, love this one as well.
Real Eff­ing Deal

Robot in Egypt

Real Eff­ing Deal
Can you spot the robot’s shadow? Click the image for full screen.

Rooftop Robot

This next scoop comes via Giant­Eff­in­gRo­bots, “Rooftop Robot Spotted”

Ancient Power

I’d con­sider this one a bit spoi­ler­ish. Side­swipe attack­ing Side­ways quite viciously, “they’ve been here a long time”, Mega­tron on the pyramids.

Every­thing

Lit­tle new snip­pet of The Fallen in this one. “Don’t freak out!”

Bum­ble­bee

Lots more of Devastator’s transformation.

We recently posted the third exclu­sive BD Live clip, “We’re going to die”, but it had no sound, instead replaced by an atro­cious high pitched squeal. Here’s a quick update with proper audio via Trailer Addict. We’ll refrain from com­ment­ing on the irony of the title in com­bi­na­tion with the three sur­viv­ing (and com­ing out seem­ingly unharmed) what would ordi­nar­ily be a fatal crash.