The action pictures I've been typically involved with, when somebody gets punched, you really feel the punching, and when somebody gets shot, you really feel the shot.

I think that running a studio gave me an appetite for making a lot of different kinds of movies and it's given me the opportunity to do that.

I mean, I'm not a contrarian.

We've never pulled from the toy line. We've always pulled from the mythology. What's great is there's so much mythology, so there's always stuff to pull from that. It never lines up perfectly for a movie; it's just like adapting a book or anything else, you know? But you come up with things to create, you come up with different ideas, but fundamentally the ideas always start from the mythology.

I think what's fun of making a Transformers movie is that it gets to be all of the above. I think, thematically, this movie is ... because of the third movie, you can ask questions in this movie you couldn't ask in the previous films. Like I was referring to the fact that they were abandoned by humans in the previous film; their attitude is different, so we've been able to tackle different themes.

Our world faces incredible economic uncertainty. The notion of what is a super power has evolved, and who actually can carry what muscle has changed.

One of the things that's driving films in a particular direction is that the after market value of them is dropping really fast and in many segments of it, not just DVDs. Pay television is dropping.