WARNING: The following interview contains mild spoilers for Bumblebee, in theaters December 21.

Bumblebee is the first big-budget franchise film Christina Hodson has written, but you couldn’t tell from watching the movie. The story's quiet confidence and strong heart makes this the first installment in the live-action Transformers franchise to be driven by the characters and writing rather than the spectacle and explosions.

Ahead of its theatrical release, CBR got the chance to sit down with Hodson to talk about the core of the film, the real world connections between the characters and her own life, and how Bumblebee takes the meaning of “more than meets the eye” beyond a simple catchphrase to sell shape-shifting robots to kids.

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CBR: What surprised you the most about working onBumblebee?

Christina Hodson: How much I loved it, honestly. It was just such a joy to write, I totally fell in love with it. I mean, I’d always kind of loved Bumblebee. He was always my favorite Transformer. It was wonderful writing it and coming into a big existing franchise, but also being given the freedom to kind of just tell this smaller, totally different story that didn’t have to tie into the timeline, that was a prequel. It was just fun, it was great.

For a giant transforming robot from space, Bumblebee himself has a lot of personality. Was there anything you found surprising about writing the character?

It was tough writing a character who’s non-verbal for most of the movie. Constantly throughout the process, I was trying to find ways of getting him to communicate, whether it’s through little buzzes or things like cocking his head and making little movements or gestures. Also, using all the music in different ways over the course of the movie.

It starts with just mood and emotion when she introduces music to him. It’s about conveying your emotions rather than using the lyrics – and then the kind of fun [moment] at the end of the movie where he’s actually using the words. That was just a fun thing to do. When I went into it, I was like, “this is going to be so hard,” and in the end, that challenge turned into one of my favorite things about writing it.

NEXT PAGE: John Cena Is More Than Just Bumblebee's Main Villain

Charlie was the perfect melding of that teenage audience POV character you want in this kind of movie with the gearhead/mechanic’s way of how she looks at stuff. How did she evolve over the course of writing the script?

Charlie’s one of the things that has always stayed really true to who she was when she first came up. She was inspired, actually, by my two nieces. My British niece Jeanie, who at the time was only 3 or 4, but you could already tell that she wasn’t one thing or the other. She wasn’t a girly-girl, and she wasn’t a tomboy. She was kind of nerdy and arty. She was already all these different things, and I think so often in these movies - I don’t mean Transformers movies but movies generally and especially movies about teenagers - the female characters end up in a box.

They’re one, simple note. And what I wanted was for Jeanie to grow up in a world where she was watching movies where the heroines were like her. Where they were complicated and nuanced and interesting. [Charlie’s] an athlete but she’s also a gearhead, like you said… she’s got all these different pieces to her.

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And my other niece Sylvia, in New York, has this incredible bond with her dad. She sadly just lost her mother, and now her relationship with her Dad is so about taking on the things that he loves. She loves Sam Cooke because he loves Sam Cooke. She loves cars because he loves cars, and seeing the way a young girl and a grown man can bond like that… Charlie’s father obviously isn’t in the movie, but he still has a very strong presence in the movie. Those were sort of my two north stars while I was writing, and that’s really what informed who Charlie is.

Moving on, let’s talk about Agent Burns. There’s always at least one human in the Transformers movies who’s like “we can’t trust these giant robots from space” --

Why would they think that?

What could go wrong? In [Bumblebee] though, the second major sequence of the film is the audience getting to see, from Burn’s perspective, just how terrifying it would be to even just be near a fight between these things. Why was it important for us to relate to that character, even beyond Burns being played by John Cena?

Well, John Cena makes him awesome, but I think the best villains are the ones who’re the heroes of their own story, who believe they’re doing the right thing. They aren’t motivated by money and power and greed, but because they really believe they’re doing the thing that needs to be done. Agent Burns very much thinks he’s doing the right thing, protecting Earth and its people just as Bumblebee believes he’s protecting his people.

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What I think is also really nice is how he does get to have his own arc. You don’t often get that with the villains in this kind of movie, and it was fun to give him that. And also, just to be a nerd, it ties into the whole thing: "Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye." I didn’t want him to be just a straight two-dimensional bad guy who is always a bad guy. I wanted him to be a bad guy who has more going on than that.

NEXT PAGE: Bumblebee Was Originally Going To Be An Even 'Smaller' Movie

The other Transformers films have grown in scope so much that it’s gotten to the point where giant robot dinosaurs and King Arthur are getting involved. But the scope of [Bumblebee] felt so much more intimate and based on the characters instead. Was that a deliberate choice going in?

Yeah, very much so.

So that didn’t evolve over the course of writing the movie?

If anything, it started even smaller and then grew bigger. But I always wanted it to be about Charlie and Bumblebee. Even at the end yes the stakes are big, yes there could be a Decipticon army coming, but it’s always about Charlie and Bumblebee.

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It’s about Charlie helping Bumblebee because she loves him and can’t leave him. They found family in each other. It’s kinda about protecting them and that bond. So the stakes are big, but the emotional stakes are always intimate and small.

One of the best elements of the film was the contrasts throughout, especially with Charlie’s step-father telling her to smile more because she’s seems so disconnected from the world. But in the next sequence, she’s getting Bumblebee and genuinely smiling with him. How fun was it to find those kind of connections for the characters?

It was really fun, and I think so much about what I wanted to do with the family is to see that it’s not ‘they’re bad, she’s good’, it’s just that [Charlie’s] just disconnected from them. She’s hurting so much because she’s misses her father, and she hasn’t really been able to bond with them. Even that scene where she comes through and sees them all watching TV together and she’s completely separate from them, it’s not that she’s lost all joy. It’s just that she’s lost the ability to have a connection with the rest of the world.

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Bumblebee really is about her rediscovering who she is and rediscovering those relationships so that by the end of the movie we can feel like we’re really leaving her in a good place. Where she is kind of healed and she is kind of back with her family in a good way.

In these kind of movies, the stepfather is, if not outright villainous, tends to lean into an, “Ugh, you’re not my real dad!" relationship with the younger characters. But in this film, the stepdad, Ron, ends up becoming so likable!

He’s a good guy! In the end, it was the “more than meets the eye" thing that we wanted to do. We wanted to keep that in mind with all the secondary characters even. To turn things a little bit on their head. Take the trope and push it a little bit further.

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If you were to hypothetically do another Transformers film, what would you want to explore? Is there any element you’d want to jump into?

I may have some ideas, but they are definitely secret!

Directed by Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) from a script by Christina Hodson (Birds of Prey), Bumblebee stars Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Pamela Adlon, Jason Drucker, Abby Quinn, Rachel Crow, Ricardo Hoyos, and Gracie Dzienny. The film arrives on Dec. 21.