At the 6 minute mark of Michael Bay’s most recent movie, the audience is treated to a slow-motion shot of a lime green sports car drifting around an Italian piazza. It barely misses a sharply dressed man who’s flipping the driver off, two french bulldogs running for their lives, and a young mother holding a baby who we see get hit in the face by one of two pigeons flying towards her. To the uninitiated, this moment, or rather, the entirety of the 16-minute car chase that 6 Underground opens with, is nonsensical chaos. To the rest of us, it’s Bayhem.

Michael Bay is a director who’s been called a lot of things, ranging from auteur to antichrist. Considering he was once famously quoted as saying, “I don’t change my style for anyone. Pussies do that,” you can be sure he couldn’t care less what you call him, as long as you’re buying a movie ticket. And as the third highest-grossing director of all time, people are certainly buying a lot of tickets. A key factor behind those 6.5 billion box office dollars is Bay’s ability to shoot action scenes in such a recognizably unique way that critics had to make up a word for it. 6 Underground is Bayhem at its finest, and the perfect example to help us breakdown how exactly Bay does action.

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Who says you can’t shoot there?

An essential ingredient to a Michael Bay action scene is location. After all, Bay isn’t known for his tight and steady hand to hand combat fights in dimly lit hallways, he’s known for going bigger than anyone else, and then going even bigger. For his previous Transformers movies, that meant being the first crew to ever film at the Egyptian pyramids, the monastery atop the Petra, and even at the front of the Prime Minister’s office in London. In a Vanity Fair interview, Bay noted that convincing people to grant him access to these incredible locations was a combination of three things: “It’s persistence. It’s charm. It’s a little threat.

He used those traits when it came to 6 Underground as well, especially for the aforementioned car chase scene on the streets and rooftops of Florence. Bay admits having lightly threatened the mayor of the historic city with moving the production over to Rome if he wasn’t allowed to shoot the insanity the sequence called for. Thanks to Bay’s charm and the weight of a 150 million dollar budget, there now exists footage of a professional parkour athlete sprinting down the side of a cathedral that was built over 800 years ago.

Camerawork

Still, you can have the prettiest location on the planet, but if you don’t know how to shoot it properly, it may as well be that dimly lit hallway. Steven Spielberg once said that Michael Bay had “the best eye for visual storytelling,” a quote that’s surely sent more than one film school student into an existential crisis, but upon closer examination, actually checks out. There have been entire essays written about Bay’s now-classic circular dolly hero shot, but even putting aside his “big” moments, Bay’s affinity towards complex composition and camera movement is astounding.

Not only does Bay use a wide range of cameras to capture his action, including, but not limited to drones, go-pros, and a custom-built 8K RED camera lovingly named “The RED Bayhem,” he’s often the one holding them himself. Bay is known for getting right in the middle of the action and camera operating in his movies, sometimes even risking life and limb to get the perfect shot. Behind the scenes footage from parkour group and 6 Underground stunt performers Storror shows Bay laying down beneath the arches as the athletes jump over him. The shot he ended up shooting is featured for less than 2-seconds because if there’s anything that Bay is better at than getting the perfect shot, it’s getting ten of them and intercutting them at a rate that ignores clarity in favor of pure thrill.

Stunts, Stunts, Stunts!

It might seem strange to hear that Michael Bay doesn’t like to use green screen. After all, this is the man who brought the world 5 movies whose main protagonists were giant robots that could turn into vehicles. However, whenever possible, Bay is a director who likes to do things practically: real settings, real explosions, real stunts. Even Transformers set pieces were often shot on location, only using CGI to supplement the practical elements and SFX that were captured in camera. He claims that 6 Underground alone had about 2,000 stunts, and upon watching the movie, that number feels a little low if anything.

These stunts are at their most impressive when they come together with Bay’s stunning locations and varied camerawork. A prime example is a sequence later in the film where Ben Hardy’s character parkours across a skyscraper rooftop in Abu Dhabi, chased by goons and practical explosions as the camera switches rapidly from shaky handheld tracking shots, POV go pro footage, to sweeping drone shots from above. The result is at both confusing, messy, and a constant blast to watch. It is, in a word, Bayhem.

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