Transformers One: Director Josh Cooley drew on his childhood memories of playing with Optimus Prime toy

On the younger end of the Gen X spectrum, filmmaker Josh Cooley was an eighties kid.

So, of course, growing up, he was playing with Transformers toys. His favourites were Shockwave and Soundwave but his next door neighbour had an Optimus Prime.

“I played with that all the time because he was just the coolest,” Cooley told The Nightly.

Cooley is the director of Transformers One, and his memories of those childhood play dates informed a scene that is previewed in the upcoming film’s trailers, the latest of which dropped today.

The characters including Optimus, Megatron, Bumblebee and Elita are given the power of transformation and gear up to test it out. Only it’s not the triumphant moment they were hoping for.

“They’re trying to transform and they can’t quite do it right,” Cooley said. “And that came out of my frustration (as a kid) because some of those transformers were really hard to do and so a lot of them were half-done, sitting around.

“And I was thinking, ‘What if our characters, when they first get that chance to transform, they’re just not perfect at it right out of the gate? And that came purely out of the memory of just seeing a half-done Transformer on the ground.”

Transformers One will be the first animated movie to feature the characters since Cooley was a kid. Make no mistake, those cartoons were beloved. But the filmmaker, who worked at Pixar for two decades before taking on this project, said there’s pressure on any movie.

“I was more excited than anything else,” he explained. “I loved watching the cartoon when I grew up, and playing with the toys. I wanted to try and capture that — my memories and feelings — so I was excited to play in this world.”

Even though it has a different vibe to the action-heavy live-action movies directed by Michael Bay, and the 2018 Bumblebee spin-off starring Hailee Steinfeld, it is still unmistakeably a Transformers franchise film.

What it doesn’t have though are any human characters.

Transformers One is an origin story, of how Optimus Prime and Megatron went from besties to enemies, with all the action taking place on the planet Cybertron. It features the voice talents of Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi, Laurence Fishburne and Jon Hamm.

“Not having any human characters, it couldn’t be a fish-out-of-water story,” Cooley said. “It couldn’t be like a robot that doesn’t understand our world. It had to be purely in their world so the humour and emotion had to come out of the characters and the relationship between Optimus and Megatron.”

And in bringing that to life, Cooley singled out Hemsworth as the actor who surprised him the most.

“I always knew he was a great actor but he hadn’t done a lot of voice acting,” Cooley recalled. “So we talked through the process and my process and what he liked to do, and the one thing I was very, very pleased with was how great his story mind is.

“He would challenge me to answer, ‘Well, what’s the thought here?’. And there was this great back-and-forth, a really great relationship. I would say, ‘Here are some lines, let’s make them a little more fun,’ and he’d just riff on stuff. He was a great improviser. Most of his lines early on in the film are his improvisations. He brings this charm and charisma that he naturally has – and you can feel it on screen.”

For anyone who is expecting either a facsimile of the eighties cartoons or the Bay movies, Transformers One is its own thing, while still playing in the same brand sandbox.

Cooley pointed out that there were Japanese and American cartoons on at the same time in the eighties, and they were very different to each other.

“There are great little versions that are branching off all the time with different continuities,” he explained. “This is an origin story and we can take the best of everything and create our own.”

Transformers One is in cinemas on September 19