The Storytelling Challenges of ‘Transformers One’ with Director Josh Cooley

Today, we’re revving up for an exciting conversation with the director of Transformers One.

The work is a breath of fresh air on the silver screen and a nice turn for the franchise. For the first time in a long while, the film sees these heroes animated, and humans are nowhere in sight. We’re at the beginning of their story, back when Optimus Prime was Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth), and he was still friends with D-16, who later became Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry).

As they fight against cruel forces on their homeworld of Cybertron, this friendship is tested and eventually broken.

At the helm is Academy Award-winning director Josh Cooley, who was gracious enough to Zoom with us about the film. From Toy Story 4 to Cybertron, Cooley is no stranger to building unforgettable worlds filled with heart, action, and larger-than-life characters. Here, he’s breathed new life into the Autobots and Decepticons we all grew up with.

Autobots, roll out!

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Telling an origin story

Cooley said the most challenging thing about approaching this story was finding balance and tone.

“It’s obviously Transformers, so there’s going to be action and adventure and all that stuff,” he said, “but at the same time, I knew it was important to make this as character-based as possible. Because without humans, the whole thing is about the Transformers, so they are our humans. In fact, it’s the thing that got me wanting to do the movie was that it’s about this relationship between two characters.

“So selling that, selling that it’s these guys that we know as antagonists need to be friends at the beginning. That was a big challenge. And then how do you present that in a way that’s real? Not just, ‘You’re my friend! You’re my friend!’ But in a real way so that by the time you get to the end of the movie, it feels tragic.”

Setting the story on the homeworld of the Transformers characters also meant they had to set up a great deal of information for both new and seasoned viewers.

“We were working with Hasbro on this, which was great. They were able to give me everything. And at the same time, it was everything. So it was like, ‘Okay, we can’t do all of this, obviously.'”

This could make a film information-heavy right from the start. Cooley and his team chose to mix exposition with tension in the opening.

“That’s why in the very beginning, when [Orion Pax] is watching that hologram that’s giving you the history of Cybertron, there’s also the tension of these guys running to catch him in the middle of that. So it didn’t just feel like you’re sitting there watching somebody tell you, ‘In the beginning, this happened.’

“But that was the condensed version. We worked on getting that down to, ‘What’s the least amount of words we can use to get this all across in a clear way?'”

Nailing the production design

I told Cooley that parts of the movie really did have that sense of childlike wonder you get while playing with toys, and he said that was by design and a feeling they wanted to capture, especially through production design.

“Those toys were colorful; the cartoon is colorful,” he said. “I understand why they went for more silver on the live-action ones because you need to make it feel more realistic against a human. But I didn’t want to do that in this movie.

“I wanted it to be colorful and to also use that as a storytelling mechanism. When things are going great on their planet, it’s really vibrant. But once stuff starts to go south, we totally desaturate things and pull it out. The vibrancy is not just because, ‘Oh, they look like toys.’ It’s because it was a storytelling device.”

The environment also needed to convey the story (and be engaging).

“We’re on their planet, and their planet is basically what’s at stake,” Cooley said. “I always think the audience member has to care about what they’re looking at. If the characters are caring about it, we should care about it. And also, it just needs to look cool. Having a big metal ball in the sky to me isn’t cool. I don’t really want to look at that. So it was like, ‘How can we make it as vibrant as possible?’Jason Scheier, my production designer, we worked together on that.”

Balancing story for young and adult audiences

Cooley told us, “Knowing that we were trying to make a movie that is for everybody, having come from Pixar, that was the goal there as well. I felt pretty confident in that.”

So how did he and his team strike that balance?

“Part of that is letting characters be characters, let them be humorous,” he said. “I want to make sure that they feel well-rounded, not just cracking jokes the whole time, but they feel like they’re living in the world. That’s important to me.”

He went back to the idea of lightness and darkness when thinking about the tone. Cooley loves contrast.

“The lighter it is at the beginning when things are going well, as soon as they start to learn something, then the tone can shift, and they realize things are not what they thought they were, and the relationships are so fractured, then the tone has a drastic shift. And that was all by design. If you started in that tone in the beginning, then the new information wouldn’t mean anything.”

I mentioned there were a few moments that felt like the film pushed the envelope a little bit. One was Bumblebee attempting to go by “Badassatron.”

“I wrote that, and I was thrilled that they left that in there. Because when I think of the movies I grew up with in the ’80s and ’90s, even though they were PG, they’d say a ‘shit,’ or whatever. There was always that little edge where you’re like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be hearing this.'”

Turns out, that little bit of edge played well with audiences and execs, and the nickname has already become a fan favorite.

The best (and most challenging) sequences

I told Cooley that Alpha Trion (Laurence Fishburne) was one of my favorite character designs of the movie. His appearance in a key scene where he explains what happens to the Primes is incredibly dynamic.

But when asked about difficult moments on the film, Cooley said that was one of them. He didn’t want it to be another exposition dump.

“So I was thinking, ‘Oh, AR could be cool,'” he said. “Augmented reality, what is the version of that that’s not just holograms that we can do? And being that Alpha’s a Prime, they’re kind of godlike. So we made up powers for him to be able to form the story around them, out of sand, or metal filings is how I was presenting it.

“And then it became, ‘They’re not just watching this story. They’re actually inside of it.’ And the characters are falling over them. That way it could feel like they are really experiencing it firsthand.

“But that technically was a big challenge. I knew ILM would be able to pull it off. They can do anything, but that was a very difficult, difficult scene.”

While he likes the race sequence, he said his favorite is the finale, and a particularly big moment at the end. We avoided spoilers in our discussion.

“I just love watching the audience watch that scene. This was partially by design, but I didn’t realize this would be the reaction. We were on the sound mix stage and I said, ‘Once that thing happens … I wanted the sound to drop out completely.’ I love the way it echoes, and you just don’t hear anything until that click of the hands grabbing each other.”

Audiences have responded to this moment.

“The first couple audience previews were on the same day, different theaters,” he said. “I was really shocked because it was full of kids, full of adults, everything. The entire theater went completely silent and nobody was moving. And that was very weird.

“But also, that’s what you want as a filmmaker, to really affect them like that. And every single screening I’ve been to, that has happened. Even one at [Annecy International Animation Film Festival] when we screened it there with a thousand people in the theater, you could hear a pin drop.”

Cooley’s advice for aspiring animators

With his background at Pixar and ILM, there’s probably no better person to tell us about what you need to be an animation director.

“For an animator, specifically, it’s a difficult job,” he said. “It takes long, long hours, but it’s also extremely rewarding. It’s really fun, but it is difficult and you have to really love it.”

He said some will stick with it, while other great animators branch out and try new things.

“Don’t be locked into just animation all the time,” he said. “I think there’s something cool about being familiar with everything else around that so that you can help the technical side or help with the creative side as well. Being an animator these days I think is a little more than just moving pixels around the screen. It is a little bit more of a bigger job.”

What about advice for directors?

“You have to trust your teams completely, and you have to listen to them.
Also you have to know when not to listen to them. The biggest job of the director is you have to have the whole movie in your head, and you have to know why you’ve made the choices you’ve made.

“I’ve worked on films where the directors didn’t know what they were making, and the decisions that they choose seem all over the place. And I’ve worked on films when the director knew exactly what they were doing, and those are the movies that are the most fun.”

What do you do when a piece of animation isn’t following your vision?

“Sometimes you just have to be the bad guy or bad girl, and say, ‘Look, I appreciate your idea. I understand your idea, but it’s not the right idea for what I’m trying to do, or not the right idea for the story.’ That’s the trick.”

Does something on screen not serve the emotional core of your story? Cooley said you have to be willing to cut it.

“For this movie, it was about my relationship with my brother. We’re not enemies, but we grew up together. I became a director in fantasy land. My brother became a homicide detective, so two different worldviews now. I was like, ‘That is intriguing to me.’

“I kept going back to that relationship, and my relationship with my best friend as well, for these characters. Every question that was asked of me, I’d always go back to that and go, ‘First of all, does what they’re asking me really affect my emotional anchor into this film?’ If not, and it doesn’t matter, let them answer it. ‘You figure it out.'”

He said he didn’t mean this in a rude or dismissive way.

“I just mean you’re giving them the freedom for all those little things that don’t matter, like the designs of vehicles or whatever it is. But then if there’s a decision that actually affects that emotional core, that’s one you’ve got to stick to.”