RT-UK: Your other big project this year is Stardust. I've never met Michael, but I've seen and read things from him and I get the distinct impression that he and Matthew Vaughn are incredibly different directors.

LdB: Yeah, they are. They’re very similar in a couple of respects, as they have a very strong point of view and really good taste. You know, Matthew has a very different personality than Michael, and going back to your earlier question about being a producer, it's fun to work with different personalities. Creatively you get to learn something from each guy and if you're lucky impart something back.

In Matthew’s case, going to such a big movie after Layer Cake - he would have to answer the question not me, but - I know that he leaned on me in certain areas. I've been there before making movies this big so I could say, "Yeah, this is a typical experience," and he can make his own decision about what he wants from that. He's not a man who's shy about taking his own opinion but he had a resource, in a way, which had seen this and had worked in the studio on that kind of level. It's experience; you don't have to be particularly start but if you have experience you can repeat it.

RT-UK: Stardust is fantastic, I've seen it twice--

LdB: Really? Have you seen it with the full score?

RT-UK: No, it still had the temp score.

LdB: It's definitely a lot different, Ilan did a great job on the score...

RT-UK: Awesome. But is there more pressure on Stardust because its fan base isn't as large as Transformers'?

LdB: Sure, if you look at the fan base of Transformers, you’ve got a lot of people who are gonna show up if you do it right. As passionate as the Neil Gaiman fans are - and they're every bit as passionate as Transformers fans - they are much smaller group of people. And Neil's sort-of bent view of the world - which I love - is definitely something that’s not easy to communicate. It can frighten people, it can draw people in because it's fresh and new.

RT-UK: You mentioned producing is more creative than being an executive; to a certain extent is it about empowering guys like Michael and Matthew to let their own creativity run unchallenged?

LdB: I think that's your job as a producer; to let the actors and the director make sure that they have the best version of it and the best version of it includes the script and there are certain things that you can have a creative contribution on. A guy like Michael, you're not going to tell him what angle to shoot at. People have asked me, "When you're on the set do you comment?" I'm like, "Are you Kidding?! He’s better than probably anybody else in Hollywood, what am I gonna say? 'Oh I think you oughta take another lens?'" I mean, come on, it's silly! [laughs] But, you know, I can be helpful in the script stage of it, I can help with the casting stage, the musical stage; with each guy you bring a different skill set to the table. But first and foremost, your job as a producer is to be somewhat anonymous.

I think I’m about to start my 145th film that I’ve worked on in some capacity as an executive or as a producer. So you see patterns when you’ve worked on that many. So you can say to somebody, "Hey, I've seen this pattern, there's a brick wall coming right over there," and they can choose to say, "OK," or run right into it; it’s their choice. Sometimes you have to run into them to understand how to get around them.

RT-UK: Transformers is such a big movie but it was refreshing to see that there were real, human characters in the film. In a lot of ways it reminded me of the blockbusters of the eighties; recently we've left characters behind in Hollywood effects movies...

LdB: We didn’t really look at any specific time period of film, what we really looked at was the fact that, we felt that the mythology of the Transformers was so well established, we needed a human story. So really we spent a disproportionate amount of time on the human story because we felt like, for the non Transformer fan you better have good human character so they can connect to the movie.

And Spielberg came up with this idea of a boy in his car; his first car. It seems like a really simple idea, but it has amazing resonance and it carries all the way through the movie. So Michael responded to that idea when he heard it and all of us did. I don’t like these big films when they take themselves too seriously, unless it's about something really serious. Let's just have some fun. So the human story line, even in Transformers, since you’ve seen the film, there's a lot of humour with that too.

RT-UK: I think it's sold in Shia LaBeouf's performance, too, and from Charlie Cox in Stardust.

LdB: I think in any movie you’ve got to have a rooting interest in somebody or some couple.

RT-UK: I guess the worry is otherwise it starts to look like two computers having a fight.

LdB: Yeah, I know. Listen, the hardcore fans were at first very outraged that there were any human characters in it. And it's sort of like, well look it, you know you actually couldn’t afford that version of the movie by the way. Which is something that we actually said, the movie’s going to cost something like $350-500 million, I mean who knows? It's really expensive to render these really big 32ft men. But at the end of the day, we're human and we're going to relate to a human character. An easier way to sort-of look at these big characters is through a human eye. Unless you're somebody who grew up with it, in which case its very easy to make that transition.