Michael Bay

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Emocionante carta a Michael Bay... Yo he llorado.

Hey Everyone,

I had the great pleasure of working with one of the few African American U.S. SEAL team members.

Remi Adeleke was supposed to be on the movie for two days—but I was so impressed by him—that I kept him on for four months.

Remi, never told me this on the shoot, but at the end of filming, he sent me this great inspiring letter.

********

Mr. Bay,

Now that filming is wrapped, I would like to take the time to extend my gratitude to you for giving me the opportunity to be a part of your family. Filming has been a tremendous blessing for my family and I, and we are so grateful to you.

Along with thanking you for allowing me to participate in your film, I would also like to thank you for inspiring me to be a Navy SEAL. I could never find the opportunity to share my story with you, so I’ll share it in this letter as a thank you, and hopefully a beacon of encouragement for you.

I lived in Nigeria until the death of my father in 1987. I was five at the time of my father’s death. Immediately after my father died my mother moved my brother and I to the United States. My brother and I grew up in one of the toughest inner cities in New York, the Bronx. Though we didn’t have much, my mother would save her money to take my brother and I to the movies at least once a month. We would get dressed, and jump on the 1 train towards the heart of Manhattan. Movies served as a way for us to escape from the reality of our upbringing.

In 1995, your first film, Bay Boys, was released. As with other outings, my mother took my brother and I out of the Bronx, and we headed to downtown Manhattan to watch the film. Out of all the movies I had seen in my 13 years of life, Bay Boys had the biggest impact on my life. See, I grew up around drug dealers, hustlers, gangs, players and athletes. Through the music I grew up on and my environment, I could only imagine becoming like those I grew up around and listened to. Bad Boys allowed me to see life through a different lens. For the first time on the movie screen I was able to see two heroes (Mike Lowery & Marcus Brunett) – who look like me, and who had my same demeanor – running and gunning, and saving the day. For the first time I thought, “I don’t have to be a drug dealer or athlete; I can be like Mike, or Marcus.” A year later my mother took us to see The Rock, and it was after watching The Rock that I knew what kind of gunslinger I would want to be if I ever had the chance too: a Navy SEAL.

Eventually the inspiration died out, and I found myself back in the streets: stealing, hustling, and eventually selling drugs. Though I chose a dark path for a while, the thought of what your films showed me I could be was always in the back of my head.

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and through a series of events, I decided that if I stayed in the Bronx, I would either end up dead or in prison. So, it was during this time of contemplation that the inspiration – first embedded in me through your films – rose back up in me. And though I couldn’t swim, didn’t have the academic scores (at the time) to be a SEAL, and weighed 150 pounds soaking wet, I followed your inspiration and joined the Navy to become a Navy SEAL. It was a tough road, but eventually I was able to get into SEAL training and make it through. In return the SEAL Teams further changed my life, allowed me to make a difference, allowed me the opportunity to serve with the greatest warriors on the planet, and allowed me to have a family.

I can’t remember where I heard it or read it, but I read somewhere that you “make movies to inspire the 15-year-old” (forgive me if I’m wrong or misquoted). Well, I was 13 when Bad Boys came out and 14 when the Rock was released (almost 15). As a Minister I try to always relay to the congregants I speak to that sometimes it’s not always about reaching the masses, sometimes it’s about reaching that one person who will not only reach the masses, but also affect generations. Your films have indeed fulfilled their mission in my life; they inspired a street kid from the Bronx to achieve heights that I could have never imagined, and hopefully through my changed life and SEAL career the effects of your inspiration in my life will affect generations.

So again, thank you so much for helping to bring my life full circle, by casting me in your film, and more importantly, thank you for helping to change the trajectory of a lost teenager’s life through the use of film and story. It’s impossible to pay you back for the blessings you provided my family and I, but my prayer is that this letter of encouragement will suffice as payment.


Respectfully,

Remi Adeleke
Former Navy SEAL & Actor

“The recipients of awards are soon forgotten, but the effects of changed lives last forever”

© 2018 Michael Bay All Rights Reserved.
 
THE SUMMER ISSUE
MICHAEL BAY: THE WHALEBONE INTERVIEW

Master of Disaster
If there is an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, giant robots fist fighting on a freeway overpass or something very big being very much blown to smithereens, chances are Michael Bay had something to do with it.


There was dynamite everywhere.
The director brings in box office billions but still has the swagger and sensibility of a renegade. His fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants style goes back to his film school days, when, shooting in a famed downtown LA building, he was asked if he had a fire permit and responded, “It’s at my house.” He, of course, did not have one. “But, my film wasn’t going to be able to shoot there and it took us a month to get in,” he tells Whalebone. It’s grown far beyond bluffing security guards to talking his way onto battleships during a military conflict with Libya and convincing two nuclear sub admirals that they should let him set a Guinness Book World Record for making things go boom at their base in order the get the verity he wanted by actually filming Pearl Harbor in Pearl Harbor.

Thing is, he’s having a blast doing it.
What was your favorite movie theater when you were a kid?


Fox Theatre in Westwood Village

Michael Bay: Well, there’s a place called Westwood in Los Angeles. And when I was growing up, Westwood was considered the movie capital of the world. This was before mini-malls or malls. So there was something like twenty-something movie theaters all within a square mile. And the theater that I would go to—to me the greatest cinema experience is at the Fox Theatre in Westwood Village, the one with the big white tall column and a gigantic, huge ceiling. It’s a 1,200 person house. I remember seeing Rocky there and Alien there and The Shining there. That was the place where—I built my dreams in that room. That was the room that really helped change me and made me yearn to be a director.

There was also the Avco, not as nice, but it still had a great energy. And something about the long lines, people hate them, but it’s kind of like the anticipation of the lines, that’s kind of the thing that I miss. Growing up as a kid, there were people who would get in lines days before sometimes.

I saw Star Wars at the Avco. I remember that day. There are seminal times in your life you remember and you remember big movies and Star Wars was like one of those movies that I remember waiting in line with my parents, seeing it and it’s a movie that kind of helped change the whole business. In terms of just using technology and just showing you that you can do all this visual kind of effects stuff that’s brand new and put it into one movie and make a whole other world far, far away.

What’s a movie, any movie that you wish you could have directed?

MB: It’s either Lawrence of Arabia, just because it’s a big scope canvas, and I’m always so fond of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Original Alien. And then, one of the movies that that’s when I decided I wanted to direct— that was the day at Grauman’s Chinese Theater when I when I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It’s funny, I filed the storyboards when I was 15 and a half, saving up for a car, Datsun 280z. So I got a summer job working at Lucasfilm. I’m filing Raiders of the Lost Ark storyboards.

So Raiders paid for your Datsun?

MB: No. Apparently my parents, they took it to a mechanic who said it’s a piece of shit. Can’t buy it.

Ultimate summer movie ingredient list?

MB: First of all they’ve got to give you that big cinema experience with the epic shots, big fun action, great characters. That’s what summertime is all about. It’s like, they keep stretching it out now, so now it gets a little more confusing. But when I was a kid, you knew definitively, okay, these are the summer movies, these are the ones that are the big ticket, these are the ones you want to wait in line for. You look forward to those. Now I think, nowadays it’s getting more blurred with all the streaming and so much stuff out there. There’s so much stuff.

Biggest explosion you’ve ever filmed?

MB: The Pearl Harbor explosion. I was flying into Pearl Harbor looking out the plane window. I’m like, “What is that?” There were all these boats, old looking ships, not World War II type, but old enough, digitally if we change some. But big hulls all parked together. It was the inactive fleet. Stuff they’re either going to sink for a reef or stuff they’re going to sell to different third world countries. And I asked, “Can we do explosions here?”

It took three and a half months to rig, which is a massive amount of time. It was close to 700 events. It went off in eight seconds. We’re talking dynamite in the water. There was dynamite everywhere. Stuff was rigged on so many ships. We also had 17 planes in the air and you’re dealing with big puffy Hawaiian clouds. So you have to deal with sun, you got to wait for the right time where you’re going to get enough sun because the puffy clouds are moving through. We had to shut down a freeway that was three miles away. This was a big deal. It was my fourth movie. There’s something on the water where if a boat crosses a red line, meaning that you could kill guys in the boats because it’s very dangerous because there’s KinePak—which is dynamite in the water— everywhere. It can blow the boat up, kill the guys.

The amount of stuff for this one explosion was— it’s staggering how it got pulled off.



Like I learned from film school, don’t take no for an answer.
How many shots was that?

MB: It was 12 cameras. We had aerials above. We had helicopters. I think it’s probably about 30 seconds of film, but it’s full-on gigantic explosions. The plume went hundreds and hundreds of feet in the air. There was a spark that went off to a small little side island and set a forest fire, and we had to go in to put out. But it was a massive undertaking, this explosion.

Any others stand out?

MB: If we’re talking about explosions, there’s one that, the one that I feel the worst about, is Churchill’s house— Winston Churchill’s house, Blenheim Palace in England. We did an explosion there. I feel the worst about that one because it survived the whole Hitler onslaught and the windows, everything survived. But my explosion on [Transformers: The Last Knight] three years ago blew out one of those windows. So that really sucks. And original Coke bottle type glass. They don’t make that anymore.

Something people miss about one of your movies?

MB: When I did Bad Boys, I didn’t have a lot of money and I’ve gotten very maligned for this fast cutting. And I remember my editor saying, “You can’t cut that that fast.” Yes, you can. I’m trying to create a new style. Yes, you can. “You can’t.” I said, “Yes, you can.” And we would get in fights about it. And because I didn’t have a lot of money, I was cutting faster to create a kind of cinematic style. So I got a lot of shit for it. But you look today at the cutting of movies and action movies today and they look like Bad Boys 20 years ago. My action movies are some of the foundation of film language that you see in action movies today.

There used to be a few hundred shots in a whole movie. Now you look at something like Avengers: Infinity War and there’ll be 500 shots in a single action sequence, which is exactly what you’re talking about.

MB: Well that’s something else that they missed. I still don’t use a green screen. The young ones coming up, they’re not doing it real or they don’t know how to do it real. It’s a lost art and it’s a dying art—doing real, big stunts and they’re just going with digital effects nowadays. And I think that hurts a lot of things.

What do you think is lost when people stop doing practical, real-life effects?

MB: I think it takes a lot of the soul out of it, that’s what it is. It takes the soul out of it. It kind of becomes a little bit too computerized. Everyone understands light because they see light all the time but they may not understand it. But they understand when it looks screwed up. They can’t articulate it but they know, oh that looks fake. It looks fake because you know what everything looks like when you’re walking around and you see how light hits things and sets kind of just make it, it becomes more plastic and just doesn’t have that soul to it.

Did you have more fun making The Rock or working with Dwayne Johnson?

MB: Alright, The Rock was my second movie. And the very first directing note I gave to Sean Connery, very first note, scared out of my mind. I’m a kid, okay. And I’m like, “Um, Sean, um, can you do that less charming please?” And he goes, “Sure, boy. Sure, boy.” My name was “boy.” He would always call me “boy” on the set. But the guy taught me a lot. Alright, he was tough. He taught me a lot.

Now Dwayne, he’s fun. When I worked with him on Pain and Gain—I still think it’s one of his great performances. A week before, he chickened out. He’s like, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.” I wrote him this long impassioned letter and again, like I learned from film school, don’t take no for an answer. All right, so I have an actor freaking out and I’m like, “You can do it, you are going to be the secret weapon. They are going to empathize with you.” And he did such a great job.



Where do you fall on Spielberg’s view that movies on Netflix shouldn’t be considered for Academy Awards and things like that?

MB: I talked to Steven about it. He got a little misquoted there. Listen, the world has changed in the past three years. It’s all changed. And we just got to get with it and understand it’s changed and we’ve got to accept it. I think a movie is a movie. Yes, we want the theater experience to survive, but we’ve got to go with the times. And people want things now in different ways and they want it when they want it. Like my dogs, [sounds of multiple dogs barking in the background], you can hear them barking, they want their food now.

But listen, I’m all about the theater experience and I always said I would never do a streaming movie. And I just did this movie for Netflix. I had a great time. And it’s a movie that I don’t think a studio would have done.

I’m just learning all about it. Literally, I just learned how to play Netflix in my house about two weeks ago. And I’m loving it, by the way. But literally that’s how stupid I’ve been. I didn’t know how to download it.

It’s a lost art and it’s a dying art—doing real, big stunts and they’re just going with digital effects nowadays. And I think that hurts a lot of things.


What’s the highest form of moviemaking success?

MB: It’s not the awards that, eternally, we give. It all goes back to film school. When I was in college, I did a senior thesis, there was like 250 people in the theater watching my short 10-minute film and all of a sudden 250 people started laughing and I’m like, “Oh my God, this is amazing.” And that was, right there, that’s what it is. I just care about entertaining audiences and giving them an experience—make them feel something, excite them, entertain them, make them laugh. To me, that’s the highest form, because we make it to entertain people or have them feel something.

How do you know that, well, this all works, this is it, this is making people happy?

MB: I love when I’m doing a very vocal kind of movie, like Bad Boys would be a vocal movie or I guess the first Transformers was a vocal movie, Armageddon was a vocal move. Where the audience is very involved and big laughs and applause and stuff like that. I would love to go to theaters and watch people, watch the movie. And to me that was the joy of it. And you do it about four times and then it’s over, then you’ve got to go to your next thing. So it’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears the whole crew puts in.

And do you get to do that, just go to the multiplex in the mall and kind of blend in and watch how people react to your movies?

MB: Yeah, yeah, I do. Like a normal Joe.

MICHAEL BAY TELLS US ABOUT THAT TIME HE FILMED A BEER COMMERCIAL WITH DAVID NUUHIWA
Maybe it was 20, 25 years ago, I did a surfing commercial for Budweiser in Fiji with this longboarder named David Nuuhiwa and some other guys. We’d take this old yacht, we would go out to Cloudbreak which is in Tavarua. And going home one night, one of the surfers, young surfer, he draws this little thing on a napkin. He goes, “Do you like this design?” I said, “No, that design sucks.” He goes, “It’s going to be my surf company.” It was the Volcom logo.

Then we go back to Hawaii and I’m shooting an insert shot on the North Shore, and David Nuuhiwa, the longboarder, we’re a hundred yards out and I have a waterproof camera. A shitty camera, I can barely get my eye on it. He was pretending to catch a wave, like an insert shot, and literally I’m in the water up to my neck, my board’s right at the tip of his board. My neck is sticking out and he looks right past me and yells as loud as possible, “Shark!”

This fucking 17-foot tiger shark went right under me. It was crazy. It was the year they invented the jet ski lifeguards and they scooped me out of the water. So that’s my surfing commercial.






WHALEBONE MEDIA © 2015-19
 
Última edición:
el de esa lista dice de LA ROCA (y el subrayado es suyo):

Un trepidante thriller de acción con ganadores de Oscar, estampas para el recuerdo, risas y unos personajes con los que nos iríamos a comprar discos o a brindar con pintas con los ojos cerrados. Justo reconocer que es uno de los guiones más inteligentes y honestos que el género ha dado desde entonces.
 
13 HORAS (13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, 2016 -Michael Bay)


Film dirigido por el casi siempre temible Michael Bay y basado en hechos reales, en este caso la película sigue de alguna manera el patrón marcado por "Black Hawk Down" de Ridley Scott , es decir, narrar una situación bélica muy tensa con una puesta en escena efectista y trepidante...Pero en este caso creo que el film de Bay (más controlado o por lo menos sabiendo más lo que quiere) es uno de los mejores de su filmografía, ya que los excesos habituales en la puesta en escena de este director están más relajados y en cualquier caso, cuando aparecen, están justificados por la tensión de lo explicado. También a su favor esta un metraje -que aunque excesivo- está bastante compensado en su mezcla de tiempos de tensión & acción con otros tiempos de necesario relax & descanso para el espectador
 
Ver La Roca en pantalla grande de nuevo y en VOSE debe ser la leche. Yo la vi así en ICARIA hará eones, pero sé que no es lo mismo.
 
No se cansa de contar la misma anécdota de Connery? Por otro lado, no me extraña que lo idolatre, Connery siempre andará a años luz por delante en cuanto a masculinidad por muchos anuncios de bragas y selfis de machacas de gimnasio que haga Bay :digno.

Un saludete.
 
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