Shia LaBeouf jeopardised sequel

Monday, 29 June 2009

Michael Bay almost cancelled 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen' when Shia LaBeouf was injured.

The director says production managers considered scrapping the action film when the lead actor injured his hand in a car accident mid-way through filming and admits they were "lucky" to complete it.

He said: "I actually read it on CNN online and was like, 'This can't be true.' I called my line producer, Ian Bryce, and he said, 'It's true,' and I was like, 'Oh, my God.' He said, 'Let's shut down,' and I said, 'We can't shut down!'

"When you've got a train going, it's so expensive to shut a picture like this down. I was glad we had an action scene in the library, that day we were shooting. I said, 'Let's just go for it. Let's just not stop. Let's use his stuntman, and we'll try to cover as much stuff as we can.'

"We were very lucky because we had shot a lot of the beginning of the movie and we were right at a turning point."

Shia - who starred alongside Megan Fox in the action-filled robot movie - recently revealed he will never regain full use of his hand following the crash in July last year.

To overcome the 22-year-old actor's injury, Michael says staff sought out top medical experts to design a protective cast with fingers made from Kevlar - a strong synthetic fibre.

He explained: "We didn't know how long he was going to be down. I, immediately, had them find the best people in the world to make a special cast that had never been made, with the Kevlar fingers. It was very thin, so you could photograph it. The problem was, if he were to jam his fingers, he could have lost his fingers forever, so we had some experts of the world come up with this design."