The Big Picture

Director Josh Cooley brings his love for Transformers to life with intricate animation and a fresh take on the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron.
Cooley’s background in storytelling and animation shines through in his approach to creating a believable relationship between the iconic characters.
The film’s stunning visuals, attention to detail, and careful balance of action and story aim to appeal to both die-hard fans and a new generation of Transformers enthusiasts.

Transformers One has been rolling out teases since announcing its A-list cast, launching the first trailer from space, and inviting fans to see early screenings months ahead of its release, so its presence at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con was to be expected. While there, director Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4) joined Collider’s media studio to share some of the extensive work that went into telling this origin story between a young Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry), who would go on to become Optimus Prime and Megatron.

At some point in the story’s progression from script to screen, it was decided the best way to capture the magnitude of Cybertron’s early days was to take the franchise back to where it began: animation. Since Pixar and creatives like the team behind the Spider-Verse have brought the format back into the foreground of film, tapping a filmmaker like Cooley makes perfect sense. Though this marks only his sophomore feature as a director, Cooley’s background in storyboarding, world-building through his writing, and his first-ever movie, Toy Story 4, earning an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature proves this guy knows his stuff.

During his conversation with Steve Weintraub, Cooley discusses his own love for Transformers and why this project meant so much to him and his team from the moment he read the script. He talks about why this epic story could only be told on screen through animation, the inspirations for the unique design, and never sacrificing story for spectacle. Cooley discusses working with the legendary VFX company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) as animators, expensive shots, scenes that couldn’t make the cut, where they’re at with sequels, and tons more. Watch the full interview in the video above or read the transcript below.

Transformers One The untold origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron, better known as sworn enemies, but once were friends bonded like brothers who changed the fate of Cybertron forever.Release Date September 20, 2024 Director Josh Cooley Writers Andrew Barrer , Steve Desmond , Gabriel Ferrari , Michael Sherman

COLLIDER: I’ve seen your movie, and it is excellent. I said this on social media, but it’s definitely one of the best Transformers movies. After I see it in 3D and IMAX, I will make my final judgment because I saw some of the footage in 3D at CinemaCon, and it looked incredible, and I’m not a 3D guy.

JOSH COOLEY: You know what? I’m not, either. It makes the movie somehow better, which totally blew my mind. It really immerses you in it. It makes things easier to see sometimes which I was not prepared for. So, my mind was blown by the 3D. It’s made for it.

Totally. And just to let the audience know, when I think of the best Transformers movies, it’s the original Michael Bay, the first one, because I just think it’s great, the ‘86 animated movie, [The Transformers: The Movie], and your film. How do you, as the filmmaker behind Transformers One, compare your movie to the ‘86 animated movie?

COOLEY: I can’t. I remember seeing the ‘86 movie at a friend’s birthday party, and I was a part of that generation that was affected by it. I’m too close to Transformers One. In a weird way, I’m just too close to try and judge it to put up there. But I love the first Transformers, 2007, ‘86, Bumblebee. I’m a fan of Bumblebee, as well.

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I really enjoyed Bumblebee. A lot of people love it, and I liked it a lot.

COOLEY: What I think about it is that the original cartoon Bumblebee was a fan-favorite because he was kind of hanging out with a young kid, and that’s exactly what the movie is doing. So, for me, it reignited what I remember.

By the way, I’m not dissing on Bumblebee. It just isn’t in my top three.

COOLEY: Totally.

What a lot of people aren’t gonna realize is that in the movies, when you have the Autobots and the Decepticons, they cost so much money to animate that you have to minimize their screen time. You can’t do a 20-minute scene of Optimus and Megatron. It will bankrupt you.

COOLEY: Yeah, it’s all about the detail. With live-action, you have the real world to compete with when you’re designing a Transformer, so you need to see every single nut, bolt, and mechanism. An animated film allows you to exaggerate and to simplify things, as well. So, we didn’t need to see every single joint movement in the face.

Image via Paramount Pictures

The reason I think fans are gonna love it, and the reason I think the movie is so good, is because you actually have relationships between the characters. You see Megatron and Optimus Prime as friends, essentially like brothers, and the progression of their relationship to what fans can expect.

COOLEY: That’s what got me involved from day one; I read that in the script. I was like, “This is totally new. An origin story where they’re friends at first?” That’s the challenge for this movie: How can we sell these characters that everybody knows as enemies as best friends? I knew that if we could do that and do it right, there’s always that underlying tension of, we know it’s gonna fall apart, which is great. You want that as a storyteller. You’re always playing with it. It’s heartbreaking in a way because people like seeing them together, love hearing Chris’ voice and Brian’s together.

It’s a believable relationship, and it’s believable why things go a certain way. I mean, you all know what happens.

COOLEY: But how it happens. It’s two different world views of the same problem. You kind of understand both solutions. It’s an awesome thing to do—not just show a bad guy be bad, but why are they acting the way they’re acting?

Animating Cybertron – The Inspiration, the Ambition, & ILM

Many people don’t realize that certain shots in animation cost a lot more than others. What were some of the shots that people might think, “Oh, that’s not expensive,” but were?

COOLEY: There’s a scene that’s basically a flashback that’s told in real-time, so it’s almost like AR—augmented reality—where it’s happening around our characters, and it’s all made out of metal filings, and every single little thing is flying around them. When I pitched it to ILM, I said, “So in this scene, they’re standing in the middle of this, and the story is being told around them. It’s all made up of sand and metal…” And they’re kind of going, “Okay…” And I could sense they were going, “How the hell are we gonna do this?” [Laughs] I knew it was gonna be expensive, as well. But what’s so great about ILM is they’re ILM. They said, “We’ll figure it out.” And they came back and showed an early test of it, and I was like, “That’s it. That’s totally it.”

The animation looks so good. Talk a little bit about designing what it was actually gonna look and feel like and working with ILM on that.

COOLEY: Knowing it was going to be animated gives you some leeway to exaggerate things and make things a little bigger and broader, but I didn’t want to go full cartoony with it. I never thought of this as a cartoon. It was always, “I want this to be believable.” — that’s always the word I was using. It’s something that you see, and you go, “I can reach out and touch that. There’s weight to it, there’s correct physics, the lighting feels right, but it’s something I’ve never seen before.” So, it was a tall order to try and create something that’s never been seen, but we had such great material like G1 and the original artists. We wanted to use Art Deco as an inspiration. J.C. Leyendecker, the painter, his paintings look like living sculptures of people, and I was like, “That’s the kind of feel that I want for our characters since they are still robots. We can’t ignore the fact that they’re robots, but I still want some of those humanistic characteristics in there.”

‘Transformers One’s Director “Can’t Help but Think About What’s Next”
Image via Paramount

Lorenzo [di Bonaventura] told me he envisioned this as a trilogy. I’m not going to do any spoilers, but obviously, the film ends in a way that you can continue. The fact that Paramount has started screening it two months before release tells you how good it is and it tells you that the studio believes in it. My question is, now that they’re clearly very confident about the film, how much have they started calling, like, “Let’s start working on the other one?”

COOLEY: I couldn’t hear you over the fiesta.

[Laughs] Right. Exactly.

COOLEY: We’ll see what happens, right?

Listen, I already know what’s going on, and I’m going to say it on camera and to you. They’ve clearly called you and said, “Let’s start developing,” because it takes time.

COOLEY: It takes time.

This is a really good movie, and animation is doing so well now at the box office. People are going to see it in theaters, which is another reason why, no matter what this costs, it’s cheaper than a live-action Transformers.

COOLEY: I wanted to make this for the big screen. I know Paramount+ exists; I want this to be on IMAX. I want it to be in 3D. We looked at a lot of epic movies that have a personal relationship at the core, like Spartacus, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments—big, epic films like that—knowing that this is going to be something that’s huge that you have to go see on the big screen.

Image via Paramount Pictures

100%. Are you working on the script now for the sequel?

COOLEY: I’ll tell you this: I can’t help but think about what’s next because we’re finishing up this one. I’ve been watching all the different versions that are coming—IMAX, 3D, all that—so I’ve been watching the movie quite a lot, and my story brain can’t turn off. So, I have my ideas.

Sure. Again, when we get closer to release, I’m gonna ask you more specific stuff, especially about the ending and other things. This is not the time of the place. But you will want more when the movie ends.

COOLEY: I hope so.

I’m very confident.

From Pixar to Paramount, Josh Cooley Knows How to Draw an Audience

One of the things that I think the film does so effectively, and it’s important for a franchise like Transformers, is it’s going to appeal to the die-hard fans, but you’re also able to introduce a new generation of kids. Talk a little bit about the trickiness of appealing to kids and also to long-term fans.

COOLEY: It’s very tricky to try and make the majority of people happy with something. It’s very difficult. I credit my background at Pixar for helping with that.

You were at Pixar? What?

COOLEY: I was for about 18 years. So, I’ve worked on films where it is about getting as big of an audience and as many people enjoying it as possible. With Transformers, it’s different because you have people who are such hardcore fans. The great thing is that my entire crew is hardcore fans, and I am, as well. So, a lot of love was brought into it. But being an origin story really helps because you can go, “We all know this part where they go to Earth, but before that, let’s start talking about the beginning of Transformers in the very beginning and what happened,” and there’s a little bit of that in there. So, it helps to kind of ground everything that comes up afterwards.

I’m always curious about the editing process. Animated movies can change a lot in production. Did this film go through radical changes where you redid tons of things?

COOLEY: Yeah, that’s just part of the animation process—the process that I’m familiar with, which is get it up on storyboards as fast as possible because that’s where it’s gonna live. It’s not gonna live in a script, it’s gonna live up on the screen. So you want to look at it and go, “What’s working?” You know it’s not going to work. It’s not gonna work. You wanna be wrong as fast as possible, so you’re looking to see what does work, what feels right, what feels true, and then tear it down and start over. You rewrite scenes and put them back up. So, we did that on this film, I wanna say, about six or seven times. It evolves. It evolves over time. One of the blessings about animation is we can be on the mix stage, and I’ll be like, “Hey, can we change that shot to be a little bit longer?” And we can go back in and do things at the last second. It’s a blessing and a curse.

An Extended Airachnid Scene Didn’t Make the Cut
But she can be spotted in the trailer…

What is the biggest change, or the thing that came this close to being in it but ended up getting cut?

COOLEY: There was a scene where there was a hunt happening with Airachnid, who’s our spider character. It was just her tracking, and it was awesome. That was one moment when I was like, “Ah! I wish we didn’t have to cut that.” It was just pure visual and just an awesome Transformer moment.

That’s called a sequel.

COOLEY: Hey!

Just throwing that out there.

COOLEY: That could definitely happen.

As far as deleted scenes, did you animate anything that made it that far, and then you actually cut it out?

COOLEY: No.

So everything got in there?

COOLEY: Everything got in there. We didn’t cut any scenes that were even in layout. The structure of the script was there from the very beginning. A lot of our changes were in the tone, and how to find the right tone. This Transformers film has all the action, all the bravado, everything that you love about Transformers, but how do we make it for everybody? That was a big challenge.

One of the things about this Transformers is you have to make a movie that’s gonna appeal to moviegoers, you gotta make sure Paramount is happy, and you have to make sure Hasbro is happy.

COOLEY: There’s a lot of people.

Talk a little bit about what Hasbro said as far as notes. Because, let’s be honest, it helps to sell toys. You know what I mean?

COOLEY: Well, Hasbro is a toy company. Transformers was a toy first and then they made a series, so it’s born out of being a toy. Hasbro was great because they would give me whatever I needed. Any questions I had, I’d throw their way and the brand team would answer with either a PDF explaining something or artwork—anything we needed. So, they were extremely helpful for any questions at all. There’s a lot of lore with Transformers, and we only have so much screen time for this story with these characters. So, we were able to pick and choose what we needed for the lore to tell the story. Paramount had what they would like in the movie, but luckily everybody’s happy right now, so I’m very happy with how it’s turned out.

There’s gonna be a lot of toys for this movie. I already know it.

COOLEY: I hope so!

Related Hasbro Rolls Out New ‘Transformers One’ Figures This Summer The figures will be available for fans this fall.

I know there are toys coming. What is the coolest thing you’ve seen in terms of merch that you’re looking forward to owning or just talking about?

COOLEY: Well, I have the Robosen Optimus Prime, the ones that self-transform. That thing’s pretty incredible.

It’s unbelievable.

COOLEY: I joked with my kids, I said, “Meet your next sibling,” and they’re like, “What? It’s breathing!” That thing’s pretty cool. Man, if they make an Orion Pax one or something from our film, that would be cool. I really hope they make a pinball machine.

They have Transformers pinball, but not this Transformers.

COOLEY: Yeah, specifically to this one. I would love to own a pinball machine for this movie.

Transformers One opens in theaters nationwide on September 20.