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.

But fundamentally, I don't think of it as an alien-invasion movie; everybody's here, kind of, right? So, I think it's probably more of an action-adventure picture, if I actually had to qualify it.

What I can't figure out is why we're not making more R-rated movies, actually.

My backpack has seven or eight DVDs in it and four or five of them have been there three months and I'm desperate to get to them.

If the studio wants to spend money on making your movie better, let them.

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.

I think when you're doing something cutting edge like 'The Matrix,' it might mean when everybody's saying 'no' that you're really on the right track.