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MICHAEL BAY on how Ambulance reconnected him with directing action
[ EDITED BY CHRIS HEWITT]
Let the Bayhem commence! Jake Gyllenhaal stars as bankrobber Danny Sharp in Michael Bay’s first postpandemic movie.
NOT MANY DIRECTORS have had a word coined specifically as a result of their dedication to the noble craft of blowing shit up. Michael Bay has. ‘Bayhem’ doesn’t just work as a word because it’s a damn good pun (and it is a damn good pun), but because Bay, from the minute he roared onto screens with 1995’s Bad Boys, showing off his trademark (if, it’s fair to say, not universally beloved) fast-cutting, camerawhirling style, has blown up anything that can be blown up, and most things that can’t. Yet, for all his success, it had seemed that the two-time Criterion Collection honouree (in the US at least) had perhaps lost his edge, dulled by a succession of Transformers sequels.
Ambulance changes all that. The story of two brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal’s Danny and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Will), who rob an LA bank and wind up making a desperate getaway in a stolen ambulance with a paramedic (Eiza González’ Cam) and a badly wounded cop (who had actually been shot by Will during their getaway), it’s a smaller, more intimate and intense movie than we are used to from Bay, and very much a return to form for the director who — energised and galvanised by the relative restrictions imposed by a meagre (ahem) $40 million budget — injects the movie with energy, brio, and enough swooping drone shots to power a YouTube channel. We sat down with the fast-talking filmmaker for a deep dive into his process on the movie and, yes, all the Bayhem.