Interview with Transformers: The Last Knight Producer Ian Bryce

How would you describe what you do with Michael?

It’s sort of my job to help guide him and show him how we can get there efficiently. But he’s got a really good tummy himself. He knows what his day is and then I help manage the big picture for him and figure out how to get him from one place to the other, getting through it on time. Mike is prodigiously fast. The minute he arrives he starts shooting and he doesn’t stop until he goes home. For the size of movie and the scope and scale of the movie, our schedules are very competitive.

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What was it like working on the Arthurian battle?

It was really fun actually, because neither one of us had done it. If you’re fans of movies like Gladiator, The Longest Day, any period battle sequences... The trick for us was to figure out how to give it the scale that the movie deserved and fitted in a financial box that was necessary. We made the battle quite a bit bigger than originally intended, just because we felt that being part of the opening sequence of the movie we really needed to grab the audience’s attention. It was shot in three days but we jammed a lot of stuff into that sequence with horse stunts and archers and fire and spinning balls, the trebuchet. We got a lot in there.

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What are your thoughts on how this Transformers universe is opening up and spiralling out?

The Bumblebee spin-off is scheduled to shoot this summer and release next year. The conceiving of it was done previously, back in the writers room, so now they’re beginning to execute that. I think each one is somewhat reliant on the last one. If this movie is well received then you make that judgement when the movie comes out and push to the next movie. It’s been that way throughout the franchise, we never really committed to the next one until the last one came out and we saw what happened. We’ve taken a one step at a time approach, trying to be faithful to the audience. If they still love it, we keep doing it.