Director Michael Bay and actors Shia LaBeouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Ramon Rodriguez and Kevin Dunn reveal all the blood, sweat and fun that went into making the sequel to the sci-fi action/adventure blockbuster. 

Discover which 44th president of what country called Michael Bay a “big-ass director,” whether girls like to watch robots smash things, and which TF2 star may have volunteered to give Optimus Prime a steamy car wash, all after the jump.

Even before they had tallied up the millions of dollars in box office receipts for Transformers’ opening weekend in Summer 2007, the director, producers and the movie’s cast were already talking about doing a sequel. “I think moviegoers, both guys and gals, really like the action and excitement of the Transformers,” star Shia LaBeouf said at the time. “I think they’ll want more.”

A big screen, live-action adaptation of the Hasbro action figures and the animated Saturday morning series, Transformers, would rake in close to a billion dollars in ticket sales during its international theatrical run. Gauging the intense public interest in the battles between the gargantuan robots, director Michael Bay and executive producer Steven Spielberg were more than anxious to give fans an even more exhilarating follow up. “Whatever we do next,” Bay said in 2007, “it’s going to have to blow fans away.”

But, coming up with a new, even more exciting take on the fight between good and evil — the peace-loving Autobots on one side and the evil Decepticons on the other — was no easy feat for Bay. For TR2 AKA Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, the filmmaker re-enlisted the hot, young cast of actors that made the first film such a massive hit and he began constructing even more eye-popping transformations for the iconic Optimus Prime, Megatron, Jazz and Bumblebee — and equally jaw-dropping battle and chase sequences, developed, in part, by the innovative digital wizards at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). Having just put the finishing touches on the film just last week, Bay has indeed accomplished what he set out to do. With Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, he has created another CGI extravaganza — a film that easily tops the original.

What has changed for you from the first Transformers to this one?

Shia LaBeouf: “You know, I’m still playing an ordinary kid in extraordinary situations, so…but I smoked cigarettes at the time, so I had to start, like, chewing tobacco instead.”

(Director) Michael Bay hated your smoking?

SL: “Mike can’t stand it. Or sunflower seeds or…there are quite a bit of things. It’s like a list of things he can’t stand.” [Laughs]

Michael, what did you want to accomplish with the Transformers sequel?

Michael Bay: “We try to push the limits with each film. I mean, I think we really pushed the limits from the first one to this one in terms of just the advances, that people wouldn’t notice that it was all about lighting, reflection and just…complicated algorhythms, like the pyramids coming apart, which was maybe a 100,000 rocks, individually moved, to one guy, six months later, writing code. It kind of stretches the limits of (computer) memory for shots like that. When we first started to do the IMAX, it was full 4K rendered characters, which has never been do before. And there are three scenes in this movie that are full IMAX, shot it IMAX, so that’s pretty much something new.”

There’s a lot of great music in the film. Michael, did you ever play it on the set to get people in the right state of mind?

MB: “Sometimes we do play music on the set, for some scenes. Some actors like it a lot. You mean in their trailers? I don’t know what they do in their trailers.”

Josh Duhamel: “Mostly ABBA.”

Ramon Rodriguez: “Journey.”

Kevin Dunn: “The Carpenters.”

Tyrese Gibson: “Marvin Gaye.”

Shia, did your arm/hand injury affect the shooting of the movie? How did you manage to get through the more action-packed scenes?

SL: “I mean, okay, first, when you hurt your hands, you wet your pants. [Laughs] But you’ve got to do it, so you just kind of buck up and do it, because there is only so much that you can fake. When you have three cameras going on at once and it takes a long time to reshoot the stunts, you just gotta do it. I also have a fantastic stuntman, Vladimir.”

MB: “Shia is a great athlete, he does a lot of his own stunts.”

Michael, you did a great job of incorporating Shia’s hand injury into the film. How did that affect everyone on the project when that happened?

MB: “Well, I actually read it on CNN online and I’m like, ‘This can’t be true.’ I called my line producer, Ian Bryce, and he goes, ‘It’s true.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.’ He goes, ‘Let’s shut down.’ I’m like, ‘We can’t shut down.’ Because when you’ve got a train going, it’s so expensive to shut a picture like this down, and I’m like we had an action scene in the library that day we were shooting, Monday. I said, ‘Let’s just go for it. Let’s just not stop. Let’s use Vlad, his stuntman and we’ll try to cover as much stuff as we can.’ Then on Tuesday we shut down and we had to mix and match everything, pulling from different scenes we could shoot without him. We didn’t know how long he was going to be down and immediately I had them find the best people in the world to make a special cast that had never been made with the Kevlar fingers, very thin so you could photograph it, because the problem was if he were to jam his fingers he could lose his fingers forever. So we had some experts of the world kind of come up with this design. We were very lucky because we had shot a lot of the beginning of the movie and so we were right at a turning point were we could kind of work it in. We were very lucky.”

I heard he was always trying to take the cast off.

MB: “Yeah, we’d have arguments. He would take his cast off and I said, ‘Put your cast on.’ He said, ‘No. I’m fine.’ I said, ‘Put your cast back on.’ We were just trying to protect the hand.”

Did any of you suffer any injuries while shooting all the action sequences or even from all the running?

KD: “Michael wanted to get this long shot of coming around and seeing Sam and running and then getting this big beefo guy special agent tackling me and throwing me to the ground. So he talked me into it and the whole secret was that I had to get my feet to land. We did it quite a few times.”

MB: “We did it three times.”

KD: “The last time I just didn’t get my feet down.”

MB: “That’s the take we used.”

KD: “You’ll see that, and it was his shoulder and my sciatic nerve in the sand met at the same time. I missed Tyrese’s party.”

TG: “We were sad about that. I sprained my left pinky toe.”

MB: “Did you?”

TG: “Yeah.”

RR: “I popped this shoulder which was a lot of fun on the Devestator scene. Oh yeah, bro.”

MB: “You didn’t tell me that.”

RR: “Well, I didn’t want to get you worried.”

MB: “You wanna sue me?”

RR: “No. So yeah, we were shooting the Devestator scene, where he’s sucking all the sand, I had to hold onto this pole. Michael Bay thought it would be a really great idea to bring out two fans that blow 100 miles per hour each and put them right in front of my face so I had sand, soot, dirt blowing in my face and I had two guys behind me with wires attached to my ankles pulling me. Not enough yet, we need cars flipping over my head so we brought two cars and he literally had them attached to a hydraulic crane flipped inches above my head. So the guys are yanking on the cables on my ankles and yeah, on one of the takes my shoulder popped out. We continued rolling because you can use the shot.”

MB: “That was the shot we used.”

RR: “That was probably the shot you used and thank you, Mike.”

Shia, what was it really like working with Michael Bay?

SL: “Mike and I have like a big brother, little brother type thing…he’s like a football coach and he just doesn’t coddle you. And that’s something to get used to, because actors are used to being coddled. You get ready when he says, ‘roll!’ There’s a masculine energy on these movies. But I enjoy the hell out of it. It’s like skydiving for five months.”

Okay guys, what were your favorite memories of making the movie?

TG: “I would say compared to even the first one, I think our roles were so much more serious this time than the first round because there are so many moments comedic-wise throughout the film. I guess the outcome was Michael wanted us to kind of play it a little more serious to kind of raise the stakes and the pressure of what’s really going on, which was fine. I enjoy doing the funny stuff to try and create a balance but I just overall had fun with the experience and we all vibed and were laughing and having big parties, good energy on the set. It’s so much pressure on the set because Michael runs a real tight ship, keeps everybody on the edge. Everybody’s full throttle. I’m like, ‘Look, man, if I don’t do a party, I’m going to go crazy right now.’ I try to keep everybody, the whole crew, the cast, everybody having fun while we were working.”

JD: “Yeah, he took the night shift. I guess the most fun I had was the scene getting to — in the last answer I said we tried to be as accurate as we could and then my favorite scene in the movie was throwing the National Security Advisor off the plane. But that’s the most fun I had. It was just a fun scene to do and there was a nice little stunt involved. That was probably my most memorable, that or the gigantic bomb that went off.”

TG: “It was 1,000 gallons. We made history. The biggest practical explosion in the history of filmmaking that included actors.”

MB: “That’s the world record.”

TG: “You’ve got local, you’ve got world.” [Laughs]

Shia, what was your worst memory of filming the new Transformers?

SL: “The pace, that was the worse thing. It was just nonstop, nonstop, nonstop shooting. It was a five month shoot.”

Michael, can you talk about your decision to use President Obama’s name in the film instead of some fictional presidential name, especially in light of his National Security Advisor being kind of stupid?

MB: “Yeah. I wasn’t really putting that… remember, it is summer fun, by the way. Secondly, the Obama thing came about because I was walking in a Vegas airport and he was walking by himself, carrying his bag and his hanging bag over his shoulder. This was after I’d just seen him in the beginning of his campaign and we were walking side by side. I said, ‘Hey, I saw you the other night and I liked what you had to say the other night. I really like hearing your stuff.’ I introduced myself and he said, ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m a director.’ He said, ‘What movies?’ I said, ‘Oh, these movies’ he said, ‘Oh, You’re a big-ass director. I’ve seen a bunch of your movies.’ So that’s why I decided to put him in.”

JD: “Did he really say big ass director?”

MB: “Yeah, he really did.”

TG: “Josh is very involved in politics by the way. All the time we were filming, he did not miss one speech, the polls, anything. We had so many conversations in the car on the way to the set about the whole campaign. I learned a lot, Josh. You’re the greatest.”

JD: “That’s what I’m there for. I was just worried after throwing him off the plane, I might get audited.”

Josh, since you are considered one of the He-Men of the film, can you talk about staying in shape for the role?

JD: “Honestly, you’re out there literally sweatin’ all day long, so you don’t have a lot of energy to work out.”

MB: “Running in the sand, too.”

JD: “Yeah, running in the sand. Tyrese and I worked out a little bit.”

Together?

JD: “It was more of a personal competition. Yeah, he would spot me and I would spot him. What’s the big deal?” [Laughs]

TG: “That don’t sound too good.”

JD: “Honestly, before we started the first one, I remember Michael told me, ‘Come ready. Be in shape, I demand a lot of my male actors especially in these movies.’ So I did, I just tried to be as strong and ready to go as I could.”

TG: “We worked out twice a day, though. We worked out before we went to the set and after the set we would come and get our five miles in. Have you ever done five miles? Did you do maybe three?”

JD: “I didn’t run five miles.”

TG: “You used to run with us. Three? Two.”

JD: “I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.”

Michael, there’s going to be a lot of guys who want to take their girlfriends and wives with them to see the Transformers sequel. What do you think is in it, especially for the ladies, that would make them want to come and see this movie?

MB: “Well, I think what was interesting about the first one, it’s got relationships with the parents and the kids. Kevin (Dunn) is actually playing my father. That’s very much how my parents were when I was growing up. What was making the movie accessible to everybody was the humor in it. I think that’s how you make it accessible to everyone. It’s not just a fanboy movie.”

What do you think most women hone in on then?

MB: “Most women hone in on the humor. There are a lot of young women that say, ‘I just want to see robots kicking ass.’ I’ve heard that before. I think the relationship between Shia and Megan.”

JD: “Tyrese offered to introduce himself in the second movie by doing a shirtless carwash scene on Optimus but Michael didn’t go for it.”

MB: “I didn’t, yeah.”

TG: “Thanks, Josh.”

Michael, do you have the next Transformers film already in mind? Is it something you want to do next that would be even more exciting than this one?

MB: “People have been asking me that since I have doing these interviews, and literally, since I just finished it, I don’t even want to think about it, it makes me nauseous to even think of the third one. It’s just too close. I definitely want to do another movie before I come back to this. But if I were to consider something, for Transformers 3, it’s gotta be not higher, it’s gotta be sideways in a different kind of way.”

Is it true you want to do a smaller Pulp Fiction-esque movie.

MB: “Well, I keep trying to do it, but Transformers came about and then another Transformers, so now it’s time to do something different. I’m excited to have this one done. Literally finished it last week. Last week, that’s when I finished this. So I came back from Japan and Korea, came back to the States, they all went on and I finished the last bit of the movie.”

Shia, what kind of toys did you play with growing up?

SL: “…I was a Transformers fan. They were a dude’s Barbie.”

If you could transform into anything, Shia, what would it be?

SL: “I have been asked this question for two years now. Listen, I’d want to be transformed into someone who could answer that question.”