Michael Bay, best known for bringing Transformers (2007) to life, detailed his career and the chances he had to take to get this far in Hollywood in an exclusive interview with EW in April last year.

Bay, prior to his filmmaking career, had a year and a half worth of experience in the industry working on commercials and videos. Inspired by James Cameron, he started his journey with the most risky project.

Michael Bay
Bad Boys (1995), starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, was his debut film that pushed his career to great heights. It also saved Will Smith’s career, as he put it.

The film was co-distributed by Columbia and Sony Pictures, and the latter put a lot of roadblocks in the making of the film. If not for Bad Boys, Smith’s career may not have been the same; it earned $141 million in global sales.

Michael Bay’s Iconic Shot Saved Will Smith’s Ailing Career

Fans of Bay’s work know how he loves to get creative with the camera work in his films. His most recent – 6 Underground (2019), starring Ryan Reynolds, was a great example of that.

Given his experience and Sony Pictures’ reluctance to distribute the film, Michael Bay said to EW that he came across an idea for a scene that became his trademark eventually and saved Smith’s career.
Will Smith

“I’m like, ‘This is going to be the trailer shot.’ For some reason, I just came up with this shot as we were driving. And I said, ‘Where’s the circle trolley? Get the circle trolley.’ And we made this round move and… it became a very famous shot. People try to imitate it, but it was a seminal moment.”
Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, the men behind the success of Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop (1984) aided Bay with this one.

Sony Pictures Gave Michael Bay A Hard Time

According to Bay’s interview, Sony Pictures wasn’t sold on the project from the get-go. The director didn’t have big format filmmaking experience prior to this and Will Smith had been a rapper turned actor who had moderate titles to his name, like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990) and Six Degrees of Separation (1993).
A still from Bad Boys (1995)
“Sony didn’t believe in the movie, because two Black actors don’t sell overseas. They had no faith in it. I was watching James Cameron’s ‘True Lies’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, this guy has so much money. I have only $9 million.’ And they shut me down, literally. They shut the power off. That’s how rude they were in this movie.”
Nonetheless, Bad Boys kickstarted Will Smith’s career as a high-octane action star and set Michael Bay as one of the most visually inventive directors in Hollywood.

Bad Boys for Life, the threequel, starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence can be streamed on Netflix; it was released in 2020.