'Film Journal' Interviews Robert Orci & Alex Kurtzman

Film Journal.com- The writers of the soon-to-be-released sequel to the 2007 Transformers live action movie, Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci, state their thought processes about how they went about writing both movies in an interview at filmjournal.com

In the case of the first Transformers, Kurtzman and Orci centered their screenplay around one of the most emotionally universal stories known to man: the tale of a boy and his first car. "Everything in the movie emerged from that basic idea," Orci explains. "Who are the people in the lives of a boy and his car? Well, there's the girl he wants to get into his car and the parents who buy him the car." (Not to mention, of course, the giant transforming robots that either seek to protect or destroy the boy and his car.)

That simple narrative may have been enough for Part One, but moviegoers are trained to anticipate bigger and better things from the sequel, which means the boy at the center of the Transformers franchise—that would be Shia LaBeouf—might need a whole fleet of new cars to satisfy expectations.

"Sequels are frightening because you really have to come up with a reason to tell a second story that doesn't have to do with the first movie being successful," Kurtzman admits. "So we looked closely at all the sequels we loved growing up, films like The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Superman II and Aliens. The common denominator in all those movies involved a major test for the hero and a bad guy who was truly frightening and who put the hero through the mill. Most importantly, you didn't have to see the previous movie to come into the sequel and like it. Those criteria served as our guide for constructing Revenge of the Fallen."

Despite, or perhaps because of, the rushed production schedule, Orci and Kurtzman found themselves pulling out all the stops in the writers' room to ensure that Revenge of the Fallen would join the rarefied company of sequels that outdid the original. "We tried to put everything we could think of into this one movie," Orci says. "We weren't saving anything. As soon as you start saving things for future installments, you're only hurting your current film."

Read the whole interview here where the two writers discuss Transformers, a third writer in the loop, their future with the TF movies, and other items that they have been writing for like 'Fringe' and 'Star Trek'!