The latest James Bond movie, No Time to Die, set the Guinness World Record for the most high explosives detonated in a single film take. Michael Bay disagrees.
The BOOM-loving filmmaker spoke to Empire about his new movie with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jake Gyllenhaal, Ambulance, and his “secret sauce” for explosions. “It’s like a recipe. I see some directors do it, and they look cheesy, or it won’t have a shockwave,” he said. “There are certain ways with explosions where you’re mixing different things, and different types of explosions to make it look more realistic.”
Bay also revealed that his favorite explosion from one of his films comes during the attack scene in Pearl Harbor. (I saw Pearl Harbor the weekend it came out, and I remember the audience being checked out for everything but the December 7 sequence. This is why James Cameron’s Titanic — which draws you in even before the ship starts sinking — earned $2.2 billion and Pearl Harbor “only” made $450 million.)
“Jerry Bruckheimer showed Ridley Scott the movie. And the quote from Scott] was, ‘F*ck me.’ No one knows how hard that is. We had so much big stuff out there. Real boats, 20 real planes. We had 350 events going off. Three months of rigging on seven boats, stopping a freeway that’s three miles away.”
He added, “James Bond tried to take the ‘largest explosion in the world.’ Bullsh*t. Ours is.” I want to love anything as much as Michael Bay loves blowing things up.
(Via Empire)
