Hey folks, Harry here with some quotes from an interview that Tom DeSanto did for DREAMWATCH magazine (Pick It Up Now), and the man is a yapping about TRANSFORMERS which he's helping to adapt as Producer (alongside Don Murphy) into a badass Autobot / Decepticon film. In the piece he talks about going for that 1980's film homage feel... I believe the images he's thinking of are things like the look on Elliot's face as they take-off on the bicycles... or the look on Christian Bale's face as the Cadillacs of the Sky tip their wings in EMPIRE OF THE SUN... These were not "annoying kids," but young people... Kids that were profoundly affected by what they were witnessing and through filmic empathy were passing on the awe of those moments to us out in the audience... involving us through them. I'm VERY confident that Tom DeSanto will be blowing our minds with TRANSFORMERS... Here ya go...

Hey Harry,

Just picked up the new issue of Dreamwatch which has an interview with Tom DeSanto talking about his plans for Transformers and claiming he's going to do for it what he did for X-Men.

Among other stuff he says?

"There's no better mythology to bring to the big screen than Transformers. Transformers has got great characters and created an iconic world, and the mythology still resonates with people 20 years after it was launched. Even though they're robots the characters have a lot of personality and a lot of heart and people still care about them. That's a great thing."

"The plan with the movie is that it will combine live action with CGI. I think it's going to be something the audience has never seen before. In all the years of movie-making, I don't think the image of a truck transforming into a 20-foot tall robot has ever been captured on screen. I also want to make a film that's a homage to 1980s movies and gets back to the sense of wonder that Hollywood has lost over the years. It will have those Spielberg-ian moments where you have the push-in on the wide-eyed kid and you feel like you're 10 years old even if you're 35. That's the energy I want to go for."

"Just like with X-Men I want to get to the core of what makes Transformers great. We're going to get back to the heart of what Transformers is and distill that into a movie."

DeSanto says that the film will be based on Generation One and set on Earth and that he's been rewatching all the cartoons and reading all the comics.

Going by his contribution to X-Men I reckon that DeSanto could be the guy to pull this off as he really seems to understand that cartoon and comic fans want films that are faithful to their source. Still, the talk of making it very 1980s is a bit worrying - I just hope there's NOT an annoying cute kid getting in the way of some hardcore metal-mashing action.

Optimum Grime