At the Washington, D.C. junket for Philip Noyce’s new conspiracy action-thriller Salt starring Angelina Jolie, ComingSoon.net/SuperHeroHype had a chance to talk to producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, and we wanted to ask him a few questions about other projects on his producerial dance card.
One thing we really wanted to get to the bottom of was the sudden departure of Megan Fox from Transformers 3 a few weeks back. They already had a script when Fox and/or the filmmakers decided to part ways (depending on whom you ask), so we wondered how that happened.
“It’s one of those things that built to a pressure point,” the producer told us. “I think she knew and we did, I think we all tried really hard to make it work together, it just wasn’t working.”
“Definitely some script chances for sure,” he responded when asked about how that departure affected the production. “I wouldn’t say a tremendous number, but yeah, absolutely there were some changes, and I think as we’re going along, we’re discovering new ones we have to make as a result of them.”>
Earlier in the day, di Bonaventura told a group of journalists that he thinks Transformers 3 will likely be the last installment at least for him and director Michael Bay, even if that doesn’t mean Paramount won’t reboot the series with new talent down the line. “It may not be the end of the line of Transformers for Hasbro and Paramount, but I would think so. (For) Michael, I’m sure it is. He’s spent a lot of years working on one thing.”
We were also curious about development on a movie based on the Atari video game Asteroids, because it seemed like one of those oddly impossible concepts to make into a movie:
“I’ll tell you what my thought process was,” he said about the project in development. “When I was called about the property – I was called because of what I’d done with ‘Transformers’ and ‘G.I. Joe.’ Atari reached out to me and said, ‘We have Asteroids,’ and I had an immediate reaction ‘Yes.’ The reason was not because playing the game, we thought somehow that game could be translated into a movie, it can’t. The word ‘Asteroids’ connotates a large-scale experience, so the challenge, which was great, was ‘Okay, so how do you get a mythology that will support that?” We really went after a mythology on the level of ‘Star Wars’ and we’ll see if we succeeded or not but it’s not a simple thing of the asteroids are going to hit the earth. We never come to earth. The entire movie takes place in the asteroid field. We do some homages to the game for sure, but I like the sense of scale.”
He also promised that we’ll finally discover who the aliens are that are flying those little UFOs attacking our hero.
(We’ll have more from Lorenzo on whether the reviews and vocal opinions against Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen have affected how he and Michael Bay have gone into Transformers 3 in our full interview sometime in the next few weeks before Salt opens on Friday, July 23.
