At this point, asking whether Michael Bay is a raging egomaniac is akin to going on Wikipedia to determine if a bear does, in fact, shit in the woods: It’s like, why even bother? You already know what the answer is going to be! Still, just in case you have some lingering doubts, we’d like to present some additional facts for you. In an interview that runs in today’s Wall Street Journal, Bay is asked what he thinks about some of the recent comments that Megan Fox has made regarding his directorial style and how it doesn’t offer his actors many chances to actually “act.†To which he responds:
I 100% disagree with her. Nick Cage wasn’t a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in Armageddon. Shia LaBeouf wasn’t a big movie star before he did Transformers — and then he exploded. Not to mention Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, from Bad Boys. Nobody in the world knew about Megan Fox until I found her and put her in Transformers.
Far be it from peons to disagree with Michael Bay when it comes to Megan Fox — after all, few in Hollywood have better BabeDar than he does — but Nicolas Cage? Apparently Bay had forgotten that Nic Cage had already worked with esteemed directors like Francis Ford Coppola, David Lynch, Norman Jewison, and the Coen Brothers before Bay discovered him. And, oh yeah, before The Rock made him a “starâ€, there was that little incident when he took home a little gold statue that one night — but who even remembers such trivial things?
Master of Machines [WSJ]