How Michael Bay saw his future career in 1996

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On the eve of the release of The Rock, then 32-year old director Michael Bay gave an interesting interview to Premiere magazine. We take a closer look. It’s probably worth making my position clear on director Michael Bay from the off, in case you think you’ve stumbled on another one of those pieces that just ... How Michael Bay saw his future career in 1996

On the eve of the release of The Rock, then 32-year old director Michael Bay gave an interesting interview to Premiere magazine. We take a closer look.

It’s probably worth making my position clear on director Michael Bay from the off, in case you think you’ve stumbled on another one of those pieces that just exists to lob (metaphorical) bricks at the director.

This is not that piece. Two of my go-to films when faced with impending apocalypse are The Rock (1996) and Armageddon (1998) and I love ‘em both. I quite liked the ambition and ideas of 2005’s The Island, although confess that the Transformers movies and the recent Six Undergound left me quite exhausted. But then, I reconciled, they’re not really for me.

Flicking through back issues of some old movie magazines, then, I stumbled on an interview that Bay gave to Premiere in its July 1996 issue. This was on the eve of The Rock's release, and it’s easy to overlook just how far Bay had come in such a short space of time.

At the point the interview was given, he was 32 years old, had built a hugely successful career directing commercials and music videos, and then had followed through with his ambition to become a movie director. His first feature was 1995’s Bad Boys, starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, which (along with Independence Day) was a crucial part of the jigsaw in the former’s rise to fame. It was a surprise hit at the time, grossing over $140m at the worldwide box office. Not bad for a film that cost $19m to make. Four sequels have emerged to date.

Bad Boys is cited by some as their favourite Bay film. What’s surprising about the interview is how cold its director was towards it. He’s warmed to it since, but back in 1996, the article notes that mention of the movie ‘makes him cringe’. Bay is then quoted as saying, “I had a studio that didn’t believe in me and a piece of shit script.”

Sony was the studio, which later hired him for the 2003 sequel, although the screenwriters would change for that (with the likes of Judd Apatow, Ron Shelton and Seth Rogen all contributing to the eventual script).

The Rock, then, upped the ante for Bay, with over three times the budget and a notoriously difficult leading man in Sean Connery. Again, Bay is surprisingly open about this.

“One day I had to get him underwater holding his breath with a fireball coming over him.” the director recalled.

Connery apparently was not happy with Bay, who said that “I think the word f*ckhead came out into the air”.

Bay was clearly tuned to the fact that what he was doing was hardly going to be fodder for movie critics. But what’s also of note is that he appeared to show them some regard. “When I’m more experienced, that’s when I’ll try to do something that’s more regarded critically”, he says. Three of his later projects suggested that he did indeed at least try win reviewers over.

His much-maligned blockbuster Pearl Harbor, released in 2001, was clearly trying to tap into what made James Cameron’s Titanic so popular, but it’d be fair to say that while the film was a financial hit, it was a critical miss.

The blackly comic 2013 crime thriller Pain & Gain, starring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie, was a further attempt to back away from the explosions and general Bayhem of his earlier career. Based on the real-life case of a bodybuilding gang of kidnappers, it didn’t do badly relative to its budget, though its attempts at comedy felt at odds with the nastiness of its violence.

More recently, 2016’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi was also based on a real life story, although arguably the resulting film skewed more towards military action.

The Island, though, remains a curious standout in Bay’s directorial career. The 2005 science fiction movie, headlined by Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, isn’t entirely successful, but the first half of the film in particular hinted at a restraint and injected tension (its plot also seemed suspiciously close to the obscure 1979 sci-fi horror, Parts: The Clonus Horror – so much so that the creators of that film sued DreamWorks, who settled out of court for a reported seven-figure sum).

That The Island's second half feels more familiar Bay territory may also be in part to justify the film’s $120m+ budget. But there’s a sense there was something more within the project. That said, it only just about broke even, and so Bay looked elsewhere for his next film, and so began the Transformers saga in 2007 – a film that recycled footage from The Island in one highway action sequence.

One thing, though: I’d also argue that with the right project, Bay is an adept director of comedy sequences. Just look at the training scenes in Armageddon. They never fail to bring a smile to my face, and I’d be fascinated to see what a full Michael Bay comedy movie would look like.

Yet what also comes across clearly in the 1996 interview is a man finely attuned to movie trends. “I go out there to win”, he rounds off by saying. “People don’t care if you die in this business. The only way I get back is with success”.

And you can’t deny that success is what Bay has found. Several $1bn+ grossing movies, several popular films on Netflix, and more money in is bank account as a result of his work than most of us put together will see in our lifetime.

Bay may be a director some people love to hate, but – aside from his criticising of arguably his most-liked film – it’s hard to see his interview proving too far wide of the mark.

A version of this feature was previously published in 2020.

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