'Transformers One' | Anatomy of a scene

Hi, my name is Josh Cooley. I’m the director of “Transformers One.” “We need to hurry.” “I still think we have a better chance of fighting them than we do of running away from them.” “Wait, we have gears! We can transform now.” “That’s right.” This scene is halfway through the movie when we see our four characters who couldn’t transform before get these transformation gears. So this is our first chance to be able to transform in their entire lives. I’m thinking about the actual Transformer toy. I had all the toys when I was a kid. Most of the time, they were just lying on the floor half-transformed because they were actually pretty hard to make. So I thought it would be fun to see our characters fight the same way I fought with the toy, which is not quite knowing how to do it. It’s actually a moment to have some relief, some comic relief here. But there’s still danger. They’re still being chased. They’re still being attacked. One of the important things was to not forget that. You can hear the sound and the gunshots of the guns being fired at them. Everything tells us that this is a very serious scene, but what they're going through is really funny. And I think part of the comedy that works well is because we're not making fun of it or trying to wink at the audience. They're in real danger.