Michael Bay Says He Was Misquoted; Is Totally Not Sorry for Armageddon
It Came From Outer Space
Breaking news hit yesterday that filmmaking’s least ashamed horrible multi-million dollar blockbuster maker Michael Bay was actually repentant about one of his films… and it was one of his films that everybody generally kind of liked. I mean, it’s not like it was Oscar worthy, but it was good clean shlocky fun, and worlds (or at least asteroids) more repeatedly watchable than Deep Impact.
Yes. Yesterday, it was revealed that Michael Bay is sorry for how Armageddon turned out. Except he’s not, and has taken to his personal blog to throw shade on anybody who directly quoted the interview.
Buried in an article on Bay’s upcoming Pain & Gain lies a section where the Rene Rodriguez got the director to talk about his infamous style of fast cuts and short shots. And technically he does say “I will apologize for Armageddon… I would redo the entire third act if I could.” But that’s not the whole context.
“It’s really funny,” he says. “People have always given me a hard time on my editing. But if you could do a graph on my movies, you would see how my editing has slowed down over the years. Bad Boys was my first movie, and we cut that quite fast. Back then it was very new for action. Now you see a lot of that imitated. Call it what you will. Yes, critics have given me s–t about it. But when you watch the Bourne Identity movies, they are cut way faster.
“I will apologize for Armageddon, because we had to do the whole movie in 16 weeks. It was a massive undertaking. That was not fair to the movie. I would redo the entire third act if I could. But the studio literally took the movie away from us. It was terrible. My visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown, so I had to be in charge of that. I called James Cameron and asked ‘What do you do when you’re doing all the effects yourself?’ But the movie did fine.
Can I blame reporters for running with the “Bay Apologizes for Armageddon” headline? No! It’s freaking funny! Just so long as they present the proper context somewhere below that headline. But Bay feels somewhat differently:
One press writer has gone too far in reporting false information. He has printed the bare minimum of my statement which in effect have twisted my words and meaning. I’m not in the slightest going to apologize for the third movie in my movie career, a film called Armageddon. On the red carpet for Pain & Gain some reporters asked me what are you apologizing for, and I said what on earth are you talking about?
What I clearly said to the reporter, is I wish I had more time to edit the film, specifcally the the third act. He asked me in effect what would you change if you could in your movies if you could go back. I said, I wish we had a few more weeks in the edit room on Armageddon. And still today Armageddon, is still one of the most shown movies on cable TV. And yes, I’m proud of the movie. Enough said.
Bay’s language makes it’s unclear whether he’s lambasting the Miami Herald’s reporter or folks who ran with the story that he’d apologized, and if it’s the former then he’s missed his mark somewhat, I think. So there you have it folks: Michael Bay is not sorry for Armageddon, the movie we didn’t want him to apologize for. The movie, that when he tries to say something nice about it it’s not that it made bank for the studio, that it was an artistic achievement, or an important step in his career… it’s that television channels really like to put it on on weekend afternoons when they’ve got nothing else to do. I’ll leave you with this:
(via Death & Taxes.)
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