Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura: “Studios are deathly afraid of controversy”

History of the Transformers saga, di Bonaventura, 67, is as cash as a Hollywood producer can afford to be in 2024. He tells us how to keep a popular franchise alive and reads into the future of the industry .

In form and substance, Transformers: The Beginning bears no resemblance to the previous films in the saga. Was it time to shake up a franchise that was humming along nicely?
Lorenzo di Bonaventura : In any case, I wanted to go back to the origins. Around the exit of Bumblebeein 2018, we began to explore the possibilities available to us. Mythology Transformers gave us the opportunity to tell a great story but the problem is that to translate it into live action, we would have had to spend between 500 and 600 million dollars. Obviously impossible. And some financiers didn't really believe that people would relate to a film set on another planet. So for a long time, we left it there. And every three or four years, we came back to the charge. Hasbro was very interested in this project, Paramount was not at all. In fact, we ended up having them wear out (Laughter.) And they started paying attention to the quality of the story. We felt that the public wanted something different, and so did we.

Because it's also a way of maintaining fans' interest, 17 years after the first film?
Yes, but said like that, it gives the impression that it's a business decision. When what really interested us were the characters. Many action films claim to be based on their characters, but in fact this is almost never the case. And what I'm going to tell you will probably seem obvious to you, but it wasn't to us: when we shoot live action, the audience becomes invested in the humans. There, there is none. So all of humanity must be found in the characters of the robots.

I think this is the first time we've explored the full potential of a sentient robot. When you animate a CG character in a live-action film, it costs you about a million dollars a minute. Which forces you to make drastic choices. Where do we spend the money? In action? In the characterization of the characters? You can't do both. With animation, anything was possible. It will be very interesting to observe the impact that Transformers: The Beginning will have on the next live action film. I don't think we can go back on the depths of robots. We no longer have a choice. The studio may not be of the same opinion, but we will push towards it.

Except that fans of Transformers seem to especially demand monumental action scenes, right?
If (Laughter.) The fanbase has complained a lot about Bumblebee : “ Where's the action in that? And where is Optimus? » Which didn't stop some people from liking it, eh, but we received a lot of criticism. It was a lesson. We learn from each film. Besides, if you take Transformers: Rise of the Beastswe focused a lot on the story of this family, but without dropping the action. And the fans didn't complain. You have to do both.

Flattened, the mythology Transformers is a hell of a mess…
Yes, lots of things contradict each other.

How did you unravel all of this to make the story of Transformers: The Beginning so clear?
The Transformers origin story is much clearer than the overall mythology. There has been a lot of discussion about the dynamic between Optimus and Megatron. And in many ways, it seemed to us that it reflected the ideological differences between the right and the left, both in France and in the United States. We therefore did not do Transformers: The Beginning thinking it was a political film, but…

…it is still very much so, particularly in the way you show the exploitation of workers by the leaders. A speech which is also very surprising from a film Transformers.
Because it was relevant to the story. And if I had a six- or eight-year-old kid, I think I'd be happy to take them to see a movie like that so I could start talking to them about the issues surrounding authoritarianism.

How is it different from making a film Transformers today, compared to the time when you filmed the first two with Michael Bay?
It's something else. Over time, we have set the bar very high in terms of spectacle, so the hardest part is to continue to surpass ourselves. But how to avoid repeating yourself? The idea now is to break the mold and, as I told you, to focus first on the characterization of the characters. I don't know yet what impact this will have on the story, but I'm convinced that it will generate very interesting things. However, I keep in mind that it is complicated, even on an unconscious level, not to constantly do the same thing. This may have happened to us in the past… We see a lot of franchises falling into this trap.

And there's one thing I've been paying a lot of attention to in recent years: audiences who haven't gone to see the first films in a franchise are less and less likely to jump on the bandwagon. Because he feels like he has to do his homework before going to the movies. The original print of Transformers: The Beginning East Transformers: Oneand it is a perfectly assumed choice. A spectator must be able to come to the theater without feeling like they have to have seen five films before to understand the story.

Exactly the problem facing Marvel.
Yes, and I'm one of the people who stopped watching anything Marvel. The original films were really good, but the rest sucked. Even the last AvengersI only saw part of it, because I had missed the two previous films… It's still crazy, right? It's supposed to be pure entertainment and I feel left out. This is something you need to keep in mind when running a franchise.

Excluded – Transformers/GI Joe crossover will have “six main characters”

How do you see the Hollywood industry evolving in the next ten years?
Huge question. I believe the movie industry made a huge mistake in the early 2000s by stopping producing R-Rated movies [interdits aux moins de 17 ans, sans accompagnant adulte]. They started from the principle that banning children under 13 was safer. Stupidity, in my opinion. Because what happened is we created fake violence on a massive scale. In these films, a whole bunch of people get killed but no one has a problem with it because there's no blood. It's like it's no big deal. Think about it for two minutes: what is the logic in this? What are we telling our young people?

And the other problem is that in doing that, we also abandoned the best audience we ever had: young men. I don't think it's a coincidence that The Beekeeper worked so well because it's exactly the kind of film that was made until the end of the 90s. And young men came to the cinema in droves to see it.

Furthermore, Hollywood has abandoned any idea of ​​controversy. These big companies are now scared to death. I've been in a lot of controversial films in my career, and guess what? They always made money. And I'd be willing to bet that their success would have been less if they hadn't been so polarizing. The studios have understood that the controversy means that part of the public will not come to theaters. Certainly, but you don't put 200 million dollars into The Kings of the Desert Or Training Day ! If you stay on a budget of 45 or 50 million, then your film has every chance of being profitable, because it's a reasonable bet.

People high up in the industry have decided to play what they believe to be safe, and only make vanilla moviesfilms without rough edges. Currently, it is older, very conservative people who have the power in Hollywood. We need young people to come and turn the tables, like what happened in the 70s when the studios bet on Peter Bogdanovich or Dennis Hopper. We need a counterculture.

Transformers: The Beginning, currently in theaters.