Mini Interview With Bay About TF2

E! Online posted a quickie interview with Michael Bay after some awards ceremony in Hollywood, where he briefly commented about Transformers 2.

So...the next Transformers. Does Shia LaBeouf have creative input?
He has zero creative input.

Yeah, but he's like the man now—Mr. Indiana Jones—so he's totally gonna show up and be all, "I know what works!"
No, but I'm friends with Shia. I really love working with him.

So, where do you go with it? How do you up the stakes?
It's not about upping it. It's about still keeping the heart.

Any new characters coming in?
Oh, yeah…a lot of fun stuff. I keep telling the writers, remember the heart and the magic, remember the heart and the magic. It's not about being bigger.

Speaking of bigger, the DVD is doing great. Did you watch the American League Championship series? It's the smartest advertising for Transformers.
No, but we're number one. Go figure!

I am all for remembering the heart (whatever that means) and the magic but I wouldn't mind a little escalation and upping of things. Transformers can be epic in storytelling. Something the cartoons and especially comics have utterly failed to capture. Cartoons don't have the budget to do epic (even though Beast Wars came darn close) but comics don't have that excuse. Instead they have a glacier story pace that could give Lost pointers on how to move things along as slowly as possibly. The movies, with today's technology, can possibly finally give us the wide-screen epic story that Transformers have desperately needed. (source)