IGN caught up with DeKnight at the Television Critics Association press tour and managed to touch base with him on the experience of working in the Transformers 5 writers room, a structure usually reserved for television projects. Here’s what DeKnight had to say:“It’s that wonderful thing where features are now taking a page from television and getting people together to really try and plan things out. It was a wonderful experience. Akiva Goldsman was fantastic and Jeff Pinkner, who’s co-writing the fifth [Transformers] movie with him was phenomenal. Zak Penn… It was just a room full of brilliant, funny, amazing people. And we spent two and a half weeks in physically the best writers room I’ve ever seen in my life. Paramount pulled out all the stops. It was phenomenal! We laughed and joked and told stories and plotted out… I can’t say what we plotted out, but it was all very exciting and in the next few months we’ll see what moves forward and what doesn’t move forward. But it was a fantastic experience. One of the best experiences of that was when Steven Spielberg popped by one afternoon to just sit and talk and hear what we were working on. Everybody was about to throw up, they were so excited.”
However, DeKnight isn’t quite sure exactly how the franchise will change going forward.
“It remains to be seen. I think the biggest
thing something like that does when you’re dealing with a franchise that is so global and makes so much money is actually taking a moment to really think things out. Because a lot of the times, you go into production, you don’t have a finished script or your script is still being worked on. And it’s very difficult to work that way. I can’t imagine… Especially with the second movie, when the writers strike happened and Michael Bay had to start prepping anyway, I can’t imagine trying to prep a movie of that size and complexity and not having a locked script. And it happens all the time in movies. You just have to start because of people’s availabilities. So my hats off to Paramount for trying something new in this way and really giving this writers room thing a spin. But for me, it was a fantastic experience. I loved it.”
