Responding to Megan Fox's suggestion that he's better working with high-explosives and giant, digitized automatons than with flesh-and-blood actors, ever-modest Transformers director Michael Bay had this to say:
Well, that’s Megan Fox for you. She says some very ridiculous things because she’s 23 years old and she still has a lot of growing to do.... But I 100% disagree with her. Nick Cage wasn’t a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in Armageddon. Shia LaBeouf wasn’t a big movie star before he did Transformers — and then he exploded. Not to mention Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, from Bad Boys. Nobody in the world knew about Megan Fox until I found her and put her in Transformers.
Yeah, who in the world had ever heard of Nicolas Cage before Bay cast him in 1996's The Rock? Well, apart from these folks, I mean.
Now, if Bay wants to take credit for Cage's metamorphosis from Oscar-winner to Worst Movie Star Alive, that's another matter altogether.
(via Vulture)
--Christopher Orr