Mother Jones
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Michael Bay is one of the most intensely reviled filmmakers of the past 30 years.
“The crassest hack in the business,” Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers—perhaps Bay’s least generous critic—said of the director after watching 2003’s Bad Boys II. “Is Michael Bay the Devil?” an Entertainment Weekly headline read in 1998. South Park co-creator Trey Parker wrote an entire love song for Team America: World Police about how much he thinks Michael Bay is terrible.
Bay has been nominated for four different “Worst Director” Golden Raspberry Awards—a near-record. “Michael Bay is quite the perennial!” says John Wilson, founder of the Golden Raspberry Awards. “I don’t think he’s an adult filmmaker. He has this tendency to revert to the model of, ‘It’s Been 7 Minutes, Something Has To Blow Up Now.'”
This near-constant stream of criticism and condemnation of which the director is fully aware.
And he insists he couldn’t possibly care less about it.
“I really, really don’t care,” Bay tells me, calling from Los Angeles. “For instance, you look at the box-office returns: Break it down, and you see that 120 million people went to see Transformers 3. So, you know, 500 critics are not going to take the fun out of it for me. I make movies for people. I make movies for audiences to enjoy. A few sour apples are not going to spoil my fun.”
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