The Steven Spielberg classic Michael Bay thought “was going to suck”
Throughout his career, Michael Bay has, for want of a better phrase, blown the shit out of stuff. Known for his big-budget action films, Bay has contributed to some of the most commercially successful movies of all time, including Armageddon and Pearl Harbour, so while his artistic credentials are sometimes criticised, no one can doubt his blockbuster ability.
Born in Los Angeles, Bay always had his eye on the movie industry and spent much of his childhood watching the kind of action movies that would later influence his own. Childhood explosions were also a fun facet for Bay and he once captured a toy train firecracker disaster on his mother’s 8mm camera.
Bay’s beginnings in the film industry surrounding an internship with George Lucas at the age of 15. At the time, Lucas had been working with Spielberg on Raiders of the Lost Arkas a co-writer with Laurence Kasdan and when Bay was tasked with filing the storyboards for the film, he was less than impressed.
Speaking with Collider, Bay explained, “I had this little office. One day, I started getting these gigantic storyboards from London: Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.” At the age of 15, Bay must have been excited by the prospect of being anywhere near a Steven Spielberg movie, but he then told his friends, “Yeah, Spielberg’s doing this movie called Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think it’s going to suck.”
Raiders of the Lost Ark was the film that spawned the Indiana Jones movie franchise and saw Harrison Ford play the iconic archaeologist explorer for the first time. The movie focuses on Indie’s battle with Nazi German forces in 1936 as he tries to recover the long-lost Ark of the Covenant.
There had been little interest in Raiders in the build-up to its 1981 release, but when it finally came on screen, audiences were blown away, and it quickly became the highest-grossing movie of the year, with a further critical success arriving too, including an impressive five Academy Awards.
Naturally, young Michael Bay was one of the audience members who loved Spielberg and Lucas’ movie, showing that his previous conception and expectation of it was all wrong. “Cut to a year and a half later,” Bay said. “I would go to the movies with my parents on Sundays. And I went to the Grauman Chinese Theater. When I saw the movie, [I was] like, ‘Oh my God. That’s what I want to do.'”
Not only did Raiders of the Lost Ark show Bay that his future lay in filmmaking—as well as teaching him the important lesson of not judging a movie from its storyboards—but he would later meet Spielberg and tell him how he had gotten the film at all. Having started his directing career, one day, Bay got a call from an agent and said that he had set up a meeting with Spielberg.
Bay noted, “I’m like, ‘Oh my God. Oh fuck.’ I was shy.” At the Amblin offices, Bay didn’t have a clue what to say to Spielberg, so he decided to tell him the truth. He said, “Hey, I filled your storyboards, and I really thought your movie was going to suck.” Thankfully, Spielberg started “cracking up”, at which point Bay told him of the fact that, in the end, it was Raiders that had inspired him to become a director himself.
