Michael Bay – Ambulance: “The police love my films, I don’t really know why”
The director explains to us how he shot Ambulance with the complicity of Los Angeles law enforcement.
You missed the broadcast ofAmbulance, Sunday evening on France 2? Don’t panic, Michael Bay’s film is available for streaming on the France Télévisions website until February 5.
In the number of First of March 2022, the author of Bad Boys And transformers looked back on the ambition of this action film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and its unorthodox filming methods. Extract :
First: By its subject, its style, its references, Ambulance has a very marked 90s feel, we have the feeling that it’s a film that you could have made when you were starting out…
Michael Bay: It’s true. It’s filmed in a slightly aggressive way, with a lot of hand-held camera work, very few digital effects, guerrilla filming. I wanted to do some sort of pressure style exercise. A guy makes a bad decision, and the trap closes on him. The viewer is in the driver’s seat and the tension builds, builds, builds… You have no idea how terrified I was to see the first cut.
For what ?
It’s a film about two antiheroes. The audience isn’t supposed to like these guys, but they still have to get a little attached to them. And you can only know if it works if you see the film with an audience. We did a test screening in front of 360 people. I don’t care about statistics or quantitative studies, what interests me is observing the body language of spectators. First of all, I would like to point out that a director, in these moments, only wants to vomit! (Laughs) You’re hiding in a corner, incognito, and you’re freaking out. You look to see if people are holding their breath, if they are laughing in unison, if they are getting up to go pee… There are only five of them who have gone to the toilet. Five out of 360 is nothing! They were focused. A word came up in the comments at the end: “immersive”. I liked it. It’s not Avatar, not 3D, but in Dolby Atmos, with the sound banging, the blades of the helicopters above your head, it’s fun. It’s supposed to be a real cinema experience. Something to convince people to come back to theaters.
Ambulance: Michael Bay signs a supersonic and exciting B series
It’s the first of your films to take place in Los Angeles. Your base camp, usually, is Miami…
Miami is my home, but don’t forget I grew up in LA! I started filming there when I was 23. In my ads, my clips, I filmed it from every angle. When it was time to move on, I had looked around, I wanted to look elsewhere. To go filming in a NASA shuttle for example. Or at the foot of the pyramids of Giza. On the Great Wall of China! But it was nice to come back. Even if it’s an ordeal to film here today. Really, it’s boring. The permits are so complicated to obtain, the paperwork so mind-numbing… They did everything to disgust the directors. As I am a smooth talker, and a bit crazy, I went to knock directly on the police door. “ Hey, would you like to be in my movie? » – « Yeah, definitely. » It turns out that police officers all over the world love my films! I don’t really know why… So, rather than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to close a highway ramp, I got into a van, camera in hand, and the highway patrol officers escorted us. All the police officers you see in Ambulance, the SWAT members, are real cops, not actors. The film really has this “ THE feeling “, I believe. Like these classics, Los Angeles Federal Police, Heatwhere the city is a character in its own right.
The entire interview can be found in issue 527 of Firston our online store.
