Everybody has a background. Everybody has a past. Not everybody's the same person all the way through.

As a filmmaker you have to keep asking yourself the question are we really going to impress them [audience] either by the wow factor, the intelligence factor, the I didn't see that coming factor?

I always consult five to ten people who are hardcore fans, to see how far I can push a role. When they go, "Wait a second, you can't do that! That's a sin!," you go, "Okay, fine, we're not going to do that. We tried too far."

I mean, I'm not a contrarian.

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.

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.

My experiences with the older audience and, selectively, the people I hang out with or run into, they all want to see Arnold [Schwarzenegger] kick some ass.