The only director Steven Spielberg couldn’t predict: “Rules are made to be broken”
When somebody has been in the business for as long as Steven Spielberg has, they can gauge what any number of directors are going to do and how they will approach their work long before the finished feature hits cinemas.
In addition to being cinema’s highest-grossing director ever, a three-time Academy Award winner, and a trailblazer who made a habit of altering the complexion of the entire industry, Spielberg is also a lifelong cinephile and a prolific producer that’s encountered many of the biggest filmmakers of multiple eras.
If somebody handed him the raw footage from an Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, or Billy Wilder film, then the chances are high Spielberg would be able to head into the editing suite and emerge on the other side with a version of the project not too dissimilar from its original form.
Having produced, executive produced, or helmed flicks hailing from George Lucas, Ron Howard, Clint Eastwood, Robert Zemeckis, Barry Levinson, Peter Jackson, the Coen brothers, and James Mangold among many others, he’s confident he’d be able to tell right away what shape the footage is going to take when it’s being hammered into completion behind closed doors.
There always tends to be an exception that proves the rule, though, and in Spielberg’s case, it was a maverick auteur who got his start working in the storyboard department on Raiders of the Lost Ark, passed up the opportunity to take the reins on Saving Private Ryan, and became a regular collaborator through the Transformers franchise.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, then, the predictably unpredictable Michael Bay was the culprit, with the action maestro telling The Film Pie that he wore it as a badge of honour when Spielberg cemented it in academia that he was the sole director he could never figure out.
“When Steven Spielberg was lecturing to University of Southern California film students, he said, ‘Of all the directors I’ve produced, I can always tell through their dailies how it’s going to be cut,” the Bad Boys creator explained. “‘The only director I can’t… is Michael Bay’. I have a weird style that breaks rules and I live by the theory that rules are made to be broken.”
One person’s “weird style” is another person’s Bayhem, with Bay developing a bombastic style that’s his and his alone. His fondness for rapid-fire editing and short takes has lovingly been described by the man himself as “fucking the frame,” so it’s entirely forgivable Spielberg would catch sight of the dailies and have absolutely no clue what was coming down the pipeline.
The only thing predictable about Bay is that his next movie will be a feast for the eyes but a chore for the brain and/or spirit, with everything else entirely open to debate, depending on how he’s feeling on the day.
