On the topic of the cutting room floor:
We had this scene early on in the script. It was a “Sorcerer's Apprentice”-type moment where Bumblebee transfers his energon on to some of these appliances is in the house. We boarded it out and it was a lot of fun and but we never got it to work as a finished thing. It's one of those things where you share a work-in-progress with the world and you don't really want them to see it because I'm not done. But we did a fair amount of work on that sequence and in the end for a variety of reasons, for both tone and for pacing. While on its own, it was going to be a ton of fun, it just didn't propel the movie forward. It stopped the movie in his tracks for essentially this fun little moment and really wasn’t about our characters or their or their experiences, their growth or their relationship really.
On continuity:
Continuity is very important to me, as is being consistent. And so I did take a good hard look at the films that had been done in the past. And as we were thinking about this movie, I still wanted to move to be self-contained. I didn't presuppose any familiarity with the films or the franchise. I wanted someone who wouldn’t know anything about the Transformers to be able to sit in the theater to watch this movie and have a good time and enjoy the movie, not knowing anything about the transformers. But that said, it was important to me that if we were living within this universe and this mythology that it be consistent. At some point we realized that we were essentially boxing ourselves into a corner -- that we were, we were making choices that weren't really in the best interest of the film if we were trying to kind of sit within the overall mythology of the franchise.
Once I talked through some of these things with the producers and with the folks at Paramount, at some point we made the decision that this was the story that we're telling and we have to talk the best where we can. And if that means that we essentially are restarting the franchise and that means we’re rebooting these characters and they were taking aspects of the franchise and putting a different prism on it, then that's what we had to do. And ultimately it was a liberating choice because then we weren’t cornered into these decisions based on what had come before. We could tell our own story. And that that was the aspect of that.
On turning people into goo:
[laughs] Well, we wanted to showcase how much of a threat that our baddies and that if Charlie or Bumblebee some face-to -ace with these antagonists, they are in very big trouble. We wanted to show right away that these characters are a real threat. However in keeping with like you said, some kind of Joe Dante, family, Amblin-y vibe, you try not to be grotesque. We still wanted this to be a family movie. And so even though what the Decepticons do to people is horrific, there's still a comedic element to it. It’s still kind of fun, even though it's gross and awful. You can watch it and give you a little bit of a smile on the corner of your mouth. But that was the idea -- it wasn't horrific and grotesque, that that it was communicated what we want to but, in a family-friendly way. I will say that when we shot that stuff practically, people would get it all over their shoes. It was disgusting.
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