Armageddon director Michael Bay has reflected on how difficult it is to get original films made in Hollywood as he promotes his documentary about parkour, We Are Storror.
If even a major Hollywood director like Michael Bay struggles to find support for an original film idea, then the rest of the industry must be seriously struggling. Yet according to the action filmmaker himself, “No one can greenlight anything anymore,” with the modern mainstream filmmaking landscape being “very different” from the 1990s, when he broke through with such films as Bad Boys, The Rock and Armageddon.
Bay made the observation in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, in which he talked about his new documentary, We Are Storror (more about that shortly). When asked about his filmmaking outside major franchises like Transformers, Bay suggested that he’d struggle to get his 1998 disaster action thriller Armageddon through the Hollywood studio today.
“I just had a conference call with Jim Cameron and we were both commiserating about Hollywood,” Bay said. “No one can greenlight anything anymore. It’s just so slow. It’s a very different business. During Armageddon, those were the days.”
Bay then recalled sitting with screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh and hashing out the script for what would become Armageddon over the course of three weeks; they then got a meeting with Joe Roth, then head of Walt Disney Studios, and pitched them their idea about a crew of drilling experts sent into space to destroy an Earth-threatening asteroid. Roth, impressed by the idea, greenlit it on the spot, setting it as the studio’s big summer movie for 1998 and only stipulating that its title be the portentous-sounding Armageddon.
“That doesn’t happen now,” Bay said. “But that’s how it used to happen.”
Bay’s last film was also a non-sequel – the characteristically hyper, crash-happy thriller, Ambulance. That was his second film he made for Netflix, the first being the 2019 action thriller 6 Underground, on which he first met the “best parkour team in the world,” Storror. The seven-strong team of free-running, rooftop-leaping specialists impressed him so much that he decided to make a documentary about them – the aforementioned We Are Storror, which recently made its debut at the South by Southwest Film Festival.
The documentary took around five years to make, Bay says, largely because of the legal challenges involved with making a film about people whose chosen profession is so unfeasibly dangerous. “If they make one mistake they could die,” Bay says. “Imagine you are an NFL wide receiver and can only drop one ball in your entire career. Imagine you’re a baseball player and have to hit every single ball.”
It sounds like a fascinating film, not just because of its high-wire stunts, but because it also deals with its subjects’ advancing age, and the growing realisation that they can’t keep dicing with death forever. Reviews from the festival have been glowing so far.
The Hollywood Reporter’s interview is well worth reading in full, with lots of other anecdotes we won’t rehash here. It was announced last year that Bay is due to re-team with Bad Boys star Will Smith on another Netflix original action thriller, Fast And Loose, about an amnesiac CIA agent. Given what Bay’s said about getting things greenlit, though, it sounds as though it might not be going into production anytime soon.
“I don’t know,” Bay said of the project. “But until it’s going, it’s not going.”
We’ll bring you more on Michael Bay’s activities as we hear it.
