The promotional trail for any upcoming action movie typically sees the cast and crew selling the project to potential audiences, telling them why they need to head down to their local multiplex as soon as possible to check out the incredible carnage on the big screen. Or, if you’re Michael Bay on the Ambulance press circuit, you call the CGI “sh*t”.
It was a bold move from an admittedly brash personality to blast the work of his effects team, especially when the fast-paced and Bay-sized remake of a 2005 Danish thriller doesn’t even come to theaters until this coming Friday. However, the filmmaker did at least try to walk balk on his comments during a recent interview with Polygon.
“That’s a bit of a misnomer. That day, you say something, [then] they take it out. We did very little CGI for this movie. There’s some really good and then there’s a couple shots that I’m like, ‘I wish I had more time,’ whatever. There’s some very good work. I’ve always had really good CGI. But yeah, there’s a lot of real explosions, real car crashes, real stuff.”
While damage limitation is part and parcel of the Hollywood game, the obvious flaw in Bay claiming he was misquoted to a certain extent is that he roasted the Ambulance effects in a video interview, and his exact words were “some of the CGI is sh*t in this movie”, so it’s not as if people have seized a solitary soundbite and spun it into something else entirely.