Michael Bay Criticizes His Own VFX Crew, Says Their Work Is Crap

From James Cameron to Ang Lee to Andy Serkis, insulting and disregarding the hard work of visual effects artists is a bloodsport for those involved in live-action.

Michael Bay has now taken it to the next level with one of the most out of pocket comments that a filmmaker has ever made about his vfx crew.

While doing junkets for the action-thriller Ambulance,, Bay criticized the vfx shots in his own film. He told the French outlet Les Cinémas Pathé Gaumont:

All those explosions and cars flipping, that’s all real, that’s all live. Real ratchets, whatever. . . . There’s very few bluescreen shots on the movie. There’s not a lot of cgi; there’s a couple and some of the cgi is shit in this movie. There’s a couple shots that I wasn’t happy with, okay? Alright.

It’s peculiar for any director to criticize their own film before its release, but it’s particularly bizarre for a director to attack below-the-line film workers for shoddy work. Film directors get all the glory, so it’s only fair that they also take responsibility for parts of the film that didn’t live up to their standards. Bay’s attempt to pass the buck is a classless move.

For the record, Dan Levitan was the primary vfx supervisor on Ambulance. L.A.-based Opsis FX was the main vfx company.

UPDATE: People with knowledge of the production have informed us that the visual effects with which Bay was displeased were produced by a third-party vendor and not supervised by Levitan.