MICHAEL BAY HAS BEEN CAUSING C ARN AGE FOR ALMOST THREE DECADES, AND HIS NEW FILM AMBULANCE DOES NOT BUCK THAT TREND. HERE, HE TAKES US TO ACTION SCHOOL

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

Guns and poses — Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny Sharp in this year’s bout of Bayhem, Ambulance.

MICHAEL BAY IS talking about action. This is not a surprise. This is the director who, across a career spanning 27 years and 15 films including Bad Boys, The Rock and five Transformers, has presided over so much on-screen mayhem that it’s gained a new sobriquet: Bayhem. If it can be shot, stabbed, exploded, squashed, tossed, overtaken, overturned or atomised, you can rest easy in the knowledge that Bay has done it on screen. All of it. But he’s never not mulling over new ways to reinvent, and then blow the living shit out of, the wheel. “I think about action all the time,” he says. And then he pauses and laughs. “No, I don’t! That’s the dumbest statement I’ve ever heard! What does that even mean?”

It means that ideas for action sequences will intrude upon his thoughts when he least expects them. That tracking shot of a bomb exiting a plane and dropping through the sky in Pearl Harbor?“I was going to bed and woke up right before I fell asleep. I came up with that shot and I wrote it down.” That sequence in Transformers: Dark Of The Moon where a skyscraper suddenly lurches over, with our heroes trapped inside it? “I was doing stomach crunches on a slanted board at the gym, and went, ‘Wait a minute, what if we squeezed the building?’” How about The Island, where a freeway pursuit is enlivened somewhat when the heroes start lobbing giant obstacles at the bad guys from the back of an articulated transport? “I was driving around the freeway when I saw this truck with train wheels, and thought, ‘That would be great if those fell off!’ I write all my own action, and I’m always adding three or four elements.”

So, while, “I think about action all the time,” may sound dumb to the 56-year-old director, it’s the truth. And it’s that drive that led him to his new film, Ambulance, which takes adopted bank-robbing brothers Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, crams them into a stolen ambulance, and chronicles their getaway attempt after a heist hits a hitch. Smaller in scope than many of his movies, it’s nevertheless a showcase for every technique he’s turned his hand to over the years. Here, then, is the director’s guide to Bayhem.