Burn wrote:But that doesn't say to me Knight "cares", he grew up with them, that doesn't scream "fanboy".
Just seems to me it's two directors who have two different styles working with a bunch of different writers.
And it's time people accepted that the writers need to be held to task/lauded as well instead of blaming/praising just the director. As far as I'm concerned, the Bay movies got progressively worse as the writers changed.
So this whole "Travis Knight cares about the franchise" is baseless. He has a different style to directing and he had a decent writer to work with.
Not completely. I know I mentioned before that I've watched a lot of Knight's LAIKA work, where he's been pretty much everything before directing Kubo and the two strings. In the bonus features for Kubo, Knight pretty much lays out how when he had a basic script for the movie and decided that it was to have a feudal/warring states period feel he dove into research. He spend months researching for how the characters should look, act, on how the sets should look, and what would be considered appropriate for that time period. He reached out to a couple of Japanese historical societies and museums to get the approval for his design choices, and then went above and beyond by making the more fantastical environments reflect the ukiyo-e woodblock prints. It was after he had the look completed that he then worked on the script and reworked it to better reflect what he had researched and changed with his sets and characters.
Knight is by far more meticulous and detail oriented than Bay on how his movie should work, which could be very well a by product of his stop motion animation background. Bay has stated in his interviews/behind the scenes that he's left the research to others and that he focuses more on how the visuals for the special effects look rather than how the scenes flow. I will however also state that the editing process can be a movie killer as well.
Long speech over with just this final comment. Movies have a lot of fingers in the clay shaping them, and yes directors will get most of the credit or blame because their name is always listed first, and they always have the chance to force a writer change or rework the script while in production. Then if the studio doesn't like it then they'll just fire the director, and get somebody else in there to take the fall.