BUMBLEBEE

AFTER FIVE MICHAEL BAY TRANSFORMERS MOVIES, A NEW DIRECTOR HAS BEEN HANDED THE TOY BOX. TRAVIS KNIGHT EXPLAINS HOW HE’S SHAKING UP A BILLION-DOLLAR FRANCHISE

The latest behemoth from the MCU swaps Ant-man and the Was- oh hang on, it’s the new Transformers movie.

1. SETTING THE MOOD

LIKE THE RUBIK’S Cube or Teddy Ruxpin, Travis Knight is a product of the 1980s. As a kid he thrilled to the likes of E.T. The Extra-terrestrial and The Goonies, but something else that rocked his cerebral cortex was the 98-episode animated Transformers TV series, which aired from 1984 to 1987. “While I loved the comics and toys, [the cartoon] was the thing,” he says. “Optimus Prime was amazing. I loved the ‘waves’: Soundwave and Shockwave. But the one I most connected to was Bumblebee. He was the one who was most like me when I was a kid.”

So when, after directing acclaimed 2016 stop-motion fantasy Kubo And The Two Strings, Knight was offered the chance to direct an ’80s-set movie with Bumblebee as the main character, his brain lit up like a pinball machine. Working with screenwriter Christina Hodson, he devised a tale that would take the robots back to their roots, as metallic giants with real personalities and retro aesthetics.

“There’s something so magical about the simplicity of those designs,” Knight says of the animated series. “I wanted our Decepticons, although they are entirely new characters, to feel like they were woven from the same fabric as the original Generation 1 characters.” The look of villainous triple-changer Shatter was directly inspired by Nightbird, a robot ninja from the cartoon, though sadly she won’t wield her fearsome nunchucks. Dropkick, the other primary robo-baddie, has a visage based on the original Megatron, which Knight describes as “one of the greatest designs of Transformers history”.

2. ASSEMBLING THE CAST

MICHAEL BAY’S TRANSFORMERS films were lurid, apocalyptic war films, involving robots ripping out each other’s spines and people sliding down imploding buildings. Bumblebee drives fast in the opposite direction: it’s a simple, girl-meets-robot yarn, the shy, yellow hulk befriending teenage Charlie. “He tries to figure out the world by copying what he sees,” says Knight. “And if you have a 13-foot-tall giant metallic machine trying to act like a teenage girl, sometimes it might not go well.”

Previously, the female stars of the franchise, depicted by Megan Fox and Rosie Huntington-whiteley, played second fiddle. Knight wanted his female lead to have more impact, and after being impressed by 2015 coming-of-age film The Edge Of Seventeen, he cast Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie. “She has the most expressive face,” he enthuses. “We often replaced chunks of dialogue with just a look from her, and those were almost always the best takes.”

Bumblebee himself remains voiceless, instead learning to communicate through music (“Charlie tries to introduce him to The Smiths,” says Knight, “and he is just not having it”). But Peter Cullen is back as a cameoing Prime, while Angela Bassett and Justin Theroux voice Shatter and Dropkick. “Angela is absolutely perfect for the main heavy,” explains Knight, the man who for Kubo cast Matthew Mcconaughey as a talking beetle. “Justin’s character is bit more unusual, with a quirky sense of humour.”

3. CHOOSING THE SETTING

PREVIOUS TRANSFORMERS FILMS have stomped all over the Earth, from China to the Pyramids of Egypt. Bumblebee has gone smaller, taking place largely around a sleepy town in Northern California. “We travelled all over [the state] trying to find the best, most beautiful places to evoke certain emotions,” says Knight. For a pivotal sequence in which Charlie and her new friend bond over a can of Coca-cola, the crew headed into a redwood forest near Santa Cruz, where even a Transformer is dwarfed by the trees. “The scene is about intimacy and connection, so we needed a place with a romantic quality,” Knight explains.

In his quest to recapture the original era of the Transformers, the director used certain locations to riff on ’80s cinema. “For the pier that Charlie works on, I kept saying, ‘I want a boardwalk that’s evocative of The Lost Boys.’ We ended up shooting exactly where they did [in Santa Cruz]. We were disappointed we never saw a blond adolescent vampire.” Look out, too, for a restaurant in the movie called Dragon Of The Black Pool, a reference to Wang Chi’s Cantonese eatery in Big Trouble In Little China.

4. SHOOTING THE ACTION

ONE THING TRAVIS Knight had never done before Bumblebee: blow shit up. A man who has spent countless hours painstakingly fiddling with stop-motion models, his bag is creation, not destruction. Even so, one evening deep into the Bumblebee shoot, he leaned across to his first assistant director and whispered, “Look, man, I really want to blow something up. Can I actually, physically blow something up, please?”

Knight laughs at the memory. “Pyro? It’s incredibly exciting. They let me set off the charge for this big explosion, and I must say it was one of the coolest things I have ever done. But all things in moderation. I want to make it clear that I have not become a firebug.”

Don’t expect Bayhem, or whatever Knight’s equivalent is (he politely rejects Empire’s suggestion of “Travstruction”). But while Bumblebee is a gentler affair, there will still be car-based carnage aplenty. “The aim is to give this movie a thinking brain, a strong beating heart and a poetic soul,” says Knight. “But it still needs to have spectacle and rock-’em, sock-’em battles. The robots have space-age weaponry. The G-men have a bunch of things they use to try to capture Bumblebee, including these big harpoon guns. We’ve injected some John Carpenter-esque sci-fi insanity into the action bits.”

5. MARSHALLING THE ROBOTS

MICHAEL BAY HAS many strengths, from shooting sunsets to mounting Will Smith-based invasions of Cuba. But laser-focused storytelling may not be one of them. His robot epics were loose, free-wheeling affairs, pinned around on-set improvisation and stuffing as many mechanoids into the frame as the VFX artists could render. Knight, highly organised from his years of fine-tuning animation, has a rather different skillset. “I approached all the scenes with the robots as if they were animated sequences,” he explains. “We completely storyboarded them, and at any moment you could watch an animatic version of whatever you were shooting. Without that discipline, it would have been very easy to get lost.”

There are a fair few Transformers in Bumblebee

— including Ravage, a metal panther/cassette tape who gets ejected from the chest of Soundwave — with many yet to be revealed (Knight promises glimpses of a full-on battle on Cybertron). The result: the director and others found themselves stricken at times with ‘robot fever’, an ailment specific to those who work on Transformers sets. “It’s all theatre-of-the mind stuff,” he says. “We were trying to make them feel real; at times I’d even act out their movements myself, and I looked and felt like an idiot. But this wonderful breakthrough moment came deep in the process: I was sitting with my DP on set, going over shots, when suddenly he leans over to me and goes, ‘Travis, I can see the robot...’”

6. REMODELLING BUMBLEBEE

BUMBLEBEE IS THE closest a Transformers film has come to being a character study, Knight pouring energy into getting his titular hero right. In the previous live-action films Bumblebee was a slick Camaro; now, as in the old animated series, the humble Autobot scout is a VW Beetle. “If ever there was an automobile you wanted to hug, it’s a Beetle,” says Knight. “It’s got rounded shapes, it’s approachable, non-threatening.”

Then there’s his personality. Bumblebee is not only an underbot, but a mech-out-of-water, something which the new movie is playing up. Much of the comedy comes out of his attempts to fathom the ins and outs of human life. He may not appreciate the wailing of Morrissey, but he does get on with Charlie’s equally cute family dog. “The dog’s named Conan, with the proper pronunciation like the awesome Barbarian, not the awesome talk-show host,” says Knight. “When Bumblebee encounters this creature, he tries to figure out how to communicate with it. Him just trying to exist in a normal human domicile does not go very well.”

In short, the mission has been to make a shapeshifting motor as threedimensional as a human. “In this film our robot’s an actor,” Knight sums up. “The question this movie answers is: how did he become the Bumblebee we know from the other stories? I think it’s a lovely answer.”

BUMBLEBEE IS IN CINEMAS FROM 26 DECEMBER