Screenwriter and producer Roberto Orci made a name for himself with his work on hit TV shows Xena: Warrior Princess and Alias. He went on to co-write The Legend of Zorro, The Island and Mission: Impossible III with regular writing partner Alex Kurtzman. Recently, Orci (again, with Kurtzman) has been entrusted with the difficult task of turning the Transformers franchise into a workable blockbuster for executive producer Steven Spielberg and director Michael Bay. Words: Abbie Bernstein

What went through your mind when this project was brought to you?

We thought everyone was going to think as we did – it’s going to be a giant toy commercial. Spielberg asked us to do it and we went to meet him and we were prepared to say no.

We brought up on Close Encounters and we said, “That’s a movie where, even though it’s about aliens, it’s really about a family falling apart through a man’s obsession. So from our point of view, this has to have a human element, and it has to be the way into the story.” Spielberg totally agreed and said, “A boy and his car.” And off of that, we knew that that would be our axis point and that would be our way into the story. But our first reaction was absolutely terror – how do you do it? How do you make two hours of CGI realistic giant robots?

How difficult was it to incorporate the mythology of the Transformers cartoon series?

It was difficult. But it was made easier as we knew that it was going to be from [the character Sam’s] point of view, and that that was going to give us an access point for the person coming in – to have him meet the Transformers and somehow get the mythology out through them talking to each other. But yeah, it was a pain.

Did you play with Transformer toys when you were writing the action sequences?

A little bit. We had them laying around and it helped visualise it a little bit.

Did Hasbro ever say to you, ‘We’d like to create this toy, please introduce it as a character’?

Not really. I think maybe Michael [Bay], once he came on, might have had a conversation with Hasbro, but when we wrote it, it was all the characters we know.

Was the All-Spark cube part of the original series?

In the comics and in the series, they were always after some kind of an artifact from their planet. There were a million. There was the Matrix Leader Ship, there was the All-Spark, there were Energon Cubes, there were just a variety of things. In a way, that is an amalgamation of several of the doodahs.

Did the studio leave you and Alex Kurtzman alone to write?

Yeah. We worked with a couple of the studio executives, just to keep in touch with them. Mark Haynes was particularly helpful in helping to break the early drafts of the story. But yeah, we’d write it, print it, get notes, rewrite it, print it and get notes.

How long did it take?

Well, the draft that got it green-lit took us about six months. It was the second draft. But like I’ve been saying, we were writing that robot dialogue up until about three weeks ago! So technically, it took two years.

Were there two basic drafts?

That second draft is pretty much the template of the movie, and then from there, we just kept rewriting and making it better and adding little moments. The first draft focused almost exclusively on the boy – on Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, on [their characters] Sam and Michaela. It was pretty much their story throughout the entire thing, very much focused on them. And all of us reading that draft had felt – and this was obviously going off of Spielberg’s ‘a boy and his car’ – basically, that’s all it was about. That’s still the heart of the movie.

With Sam, how much of his personality was in place before Shia got cast? Was the character always the shy outsider?

We always knew we were going for that. In a way, the model we used for him was an updated Marty McFly [from Back to the Future] - the idea of an earnest teenager reacting to an incredible situation, but also a lot of humour that comes out of his character.

Did you utilise any imagery from previous versions of Transformers?

There’s an iconic fight in one of the cartoons on Hoover Dam. It’s one of the settings where Optimus and Megatron fought early on, so that was just floating around.

Were you at all worried about trashing Los Angeles in one of the movie's big action sequences?

Well, first of all, I don’t think they land on anybody, do they? I don’t think people care if Los Angeles is trashed, particularly! We made a conscious decision: ‘We’re not going to victimise New York again, for God’s sake.’ And no one’s going to have any trouble with anyone in L.A. getting squashed, so we knew we were covered!

How much dialogue in the final film is actually improvised?

There are a few moments that are improvised. They improvise a little bit in every scene, just to push it as far as you can. But it’s all in the tempo of what’s there, and everything that was written was shot. And so fifty percent of the improvs make it, fifty percent don’t. You try it, see if it works.

Were you writing with the voice cast in mind?

Yes. That was one of the benefits of being able to write it up until three-and-a-half weeks ago. Since they’re CGI animated, as you get the voices in, you start to go, ‘Oh …’ Obviously, Optimus Prime, we always knew what he would sound like, because it’s the same actor [Peter Cullen, who also did the TV series]. Some of the others, we’d find out, ‘Oh, they’re going to have sort of an English accent? Okay, we’d better adjust the dialogue a little bit.’

How do you and Alex Kurtzman work together?

We sit across from each other and our conversations are the script. Every word.

Do you ever argue with each other?

Yeah, sometimes. But we never go to bed mad!

Are there any iconic things from the Transformers cartoon that you had to use, like Megatron and Prime yelling ‘Megatron!’, ‘Prime!’ at each other?

Yes. Some of those lines are right out of the cartoon. It’s like, why reinvent the wheel? Fans will just complain if we do some other version of it, and we get to pay respect to the original. Nothing was forced on us, but some of the images really did come out of the cartoon, like the image of Megatron frozen - that’s from one of the comics.

Were you instructed to write this so sequels could be made?

No, actually. Our responsibility was to make a good movie that stands alone. Obviously, there are threads there and we didn’t try and close it off so that no one could do anything after that again.

Are they going to make a sequel?

They’re thinking about it!

Are you signed on for two or three?

No.

Did you look at the animated Transformers feature as research?

We looked at that, and I’d seen it back in the day. It didn’t seem like it was going to be the template for a live action movie.

Were there any movies that you and Alex Kurtzman were influenced by in terms of structure?

Close Encounters, ET, Back to the Future…In our conversation with Spielberg, we referenced how we wanted to bring back that feeling of the Amblin movies that was the heyday for me. So those were the real paradigms for us, along with obviously sort of more modern war movies, et cetera. If you look at the structure of those things, you’ll see some of the architecture of Transformers.

Transformers is on general release in the UK and the US. Click here for details of the official Transformers comic.