Michael Bay told why “Ambulance” is a special play: “I don't want to make films for work”

“I'm making the films I want to make because, otherwise, why do I make them?” , Michael Bay opened himself from his home in Miami, in a video call with Infobae. Director of Hollywood's greatest hits, which marked a very specific era in the American film industry such as the nineties and early 2000s, this week he released his new film, Ambulance, in a style very similar to that of that stage. “Making a film is difficult, so you don't want to do it as a job,” he clarified emphatically.

“Blood, Sweat and Glory (Pain & Gain) was a lot of fun to do. I shot it on a very low budget right here, in Miami, everywhere,” recalled the director of the film starring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie. He used it as a counterpoint after recounting his experience in the making of Ambulance: “I was developing a small film about a crime in which everything goes wrong, but it got bigger than what was in the script. It happened that way because Los Angeles was so locked up, with no escape, as we filmed at the highest point of COVID-19 in the world at that time. We had to double our efforts.”

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Prisoners, Zodiac), Yahya Abdul-Matten II (Watchmen, Matrix 4) and Eiza González (Baby Driver, I Care A Lot), the new film by the director of the Transformers series brought together three actors in their best professional moments for an action film with high aspirations to entertain and bring an experience of a lot of adrenaline to the cinemas. Each and every one of them grew up with the director's titles. Gyllenhaal and Yahya remembered their favorites in conversation with Infobae: The Rock and Bad Boys respectively, and that speaks of the validity of importance that this filmmaker had in the entertainment industry of the nineties.

“I've always wanted to work with him and I have a very good relationship. It was a lot of fun, a very fair game,” Bay recalled the experience of working with Gyllenhaal, which was marked by intensity. From the adrenaline in the story, the constant persecution and the exhaustion of energy that it meant, especially for Gyllenhaal, the producer left some ideas of how the process was with the actor: “There are ideas that he keeps and tells me. I like actors to experiment, so I give them a lot of freedom. But it's also because I can film fast and I don't let them sit down.”

The premise of Ambulance is quite simple: two brothers meet to rob a good amount of money from a bank. One of them out of necessity, the other almost out of sport. But everything gets complicated when a policeman interrupts the robbery and the brothers must flee. The way they find to escape is in an ambulance, in which the character of Eiza González works.

“I wanted people to feel that I was in crime and that 'what would you do? ' was the constant question for the viewer. And from different perspectives: the bad boys on the one hand, the person who made the wrong decision and a woman who is trying to save someone's life and was left in the middle. All different visions in the middle of the event,” Bay said about how he wanted to impact the public with his new work.

It is possible to criticize its lack of depth in some productions, its style so much like a video clip and even the way in which it gave Transformers a very nineties impression, which generated the displeasure of thousands of fans around the world, who cried out that fights between robots be understood. However, with his words about the production and production, Bay emerged as a director who knows his weapons and knows how to use them: “I like to suggest many things to actors. Can you shoot fast? Better, I like to throw a lot of things at them to change the pace. That creates a particular energy.”

“Doing this was quite ambitious, literally. When filming began, Los Angeles was at the height of COVID-19, so I wanted something that was somewhat controllable. But it couldn't. And we got a lot of material,” he summarized the filming of the film currently in theaters. He again made it clear that Ambulance had been thought of as a smaller film but, due to the availability of the city, it grew. It was filmed in 38 days with an entire empty city and entirely for filming. The Los Angeles Police Department gave him 55 troops to participate in the filming, something that comforted Bay: “It's a lot of film to be shot in so few days. It was fun.”

Its near future seems to be related — something that is already a constant among great filmmakers, screenwriters and actors in the film industry — to gaming: “I spent several years developing a project that is currently turning into a video game. It's a great idea called Black Five,” he revealed. It is a film that would be released accompanied by its video game version, as evidenced by the multi-million dollar agreement it made with Sony to release titles in different formats. The last thing that is known about this project, in addition to Bay's sayings to Infobae, is that Ehren Kruger (Top Gun: Maverick) would be the screenwriter.

Some ideas about World War II and the interest in approaching a “slightly more serious” character were other future projects mentioned by the director who, closing the interview, chose to say without ambiguity: “But I also like those films of big events”. Regarding his 2022 version, he doesn't hesitate to recognize himself as a filmmaker who always wanted to stand out: “If you take a kind of look at my career, I started directing very, very young, and I always liked going from something big to something small, but I always tried to change the game”.

Ambulance is found in most cinemas in Latin America.

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