By the time all is said and done, a few hundred million dollars will be spent making and marketing the highly anticipated sequel to last year's hit film "Transformers." Now, one of the film's producers is acknowledging the latest high-profile injury to Shia LaBeouf, suffered this past week, and shooting down theories that a few of those dollars should go toward purchasing a helmet and crash pads for the film's accident-prone leading man.
"Everything is fine," insisted Lorenzo di Bonaventura, speaking for the first time about the "Eagle Eye" star's eyelid injury, which required several stitches. "He got a little nick, and because he has been hurt recently, immediately everything gets magnified."
For those of you who've been living under a rock the size of Optimus Prime, the 22-year-old star severely mangled his left hand in an accident that flipped over his truck in the wee hours of July 27. LaBeouf was booked on misdemeanor drunk-driving charges. Although eventually cleared of those charges, the actor has called the crash "one of the biggest things that's happened in my life," and the "Transformers" writers have been forced to work his injury into the sequel's script.
As for LaBeouf's most recent injury, di Bonaventura insists that the show will once again go on. "He is fine — he was back shooting a couple hours later," the producer said. "He loves doing his own stunts, and that wasn't a stunt, actually. It was just one of those things where a prop nicked him."
He did concede, however, that the accident could have been much worse. "Thank God he is fine, and we are getting close to the end now," di Bonaventura said. "[It was] one of our props, and it's a big prop. It could have been a big cut, but it wasn't."
As for the film itself, which is called "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," the producer insisted that the tale of Autobots, Decepticons and humans battling for the future of the planet will be even more epic than the original.
"It's going great — it's going to be big, it's going to be better, and it's going to be more emotional," he promised. "Michael [Bay] is killing it, and it is going to be amazing. It's one of those sequels where people are really going to say we went after it and topped ourselves.
"There are a lot of new characters," he continued. "My favorite aspect of the movie is that in the first movie, we were able to go on a very simple emotional construct: Boy gets a car, gets a girl. And in this movie, on an emotional level, we are taking the audience to much deeper things. We are asking about the responsibility in becoming an adult and things that have expanded the characters. Hopefully the experience of the movie will be more fulfilling than that of the first one."
Asked if he, Bay and fellow producer Steven Spielberg are laying the groundwork for more "Transformers" sequels, di Bonaventura could only smile. "One at a time," he laughed. "One at a time."
Shia LaBeouf Defends ‘Nuking The Fridge’ And Other Fantastical ‘Indy 4′ Moments
Six nominations give Cafe Tacuba ‘great joy’
(AP)
