Like just about everyone else, Michael Bay found his entire working life upset by Covid-19. The Hollywood film director behind such behemoths as the Transformers franchise, The Rock, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, was planning his latest epic Black Five when the pandemic broke. Immediately, the project was derailed, with the industry in flux and Bay caught in limbo.
“It was so hard to be creative,” Bay recalls. “And everyone was so scared.”
It’s hard to imagine Bay terrified of anything. A former director of music videos and commercials at Propaganda Films, the Los Angeles native has been making movies since 1995’s seminal cop drama Bad Boys, with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Now aged 57, Bay's films have grossed close to $6.5 billion across the world.
“I could retire,” he says. “But it’s fun! I mean, I like shooting. I really do enjoy it.”
Yet the pandemic stopped Bay dead in his tracks. Unable to shoot Black Five, he went back to his team. “I said to my agent, ‘Goddamnit, I just want to get out and shoot something fast. I’m tired of being locked up at home.’”
Thankfully, he was reminded of a script, based on a Danish film released in 2005, called Ambulance. A visceral heist movie, that could be filmed swiftly and economically.
“It kind of suited my needs,” he says.
The story sees decorated war veteran Will Sharp (Abdul-Mateen II), in need of money for his wife’s surgery, approach his adoptive brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal).
"They had a dad who was a bank robber [and] was pretty vicious,” explains Bay. “And one started to go on the straight and narrow and one kept going the darker way.”
Soon enough, Danny is leading Will into a lucrative bank robbery in downtown Los Angeles.
Unsurprisingly, the heist goes wrong, and the brothers find themselves in a stolen ambulance, carrying a cop who has been shot in the ensuing chaos. Bay calls it “a study in tension”, especially when Will and Danny run into an emergency medical technician or EMT (emergency medical technicians) played by Mexican star Eiza Gonzalez (Baby Driver) in the stolen ambulance.
“She’s really tough in this movie, which is good. Women really, really like her a lot," says Bay.
The director has already screened the movie to select audiences and says women have loved it.
Whether that will translate to box office gold is another matter, but with a bonafide A-lister such as Gyllenhaal and rising star Abdul-Mateen II, there’s every chance it will. In the case of Abdul-Mateen II, he’s enjoyed a remarkable past year, after taking the lead role in horror remake Candyman and co-starring in The Matrix Resurrections.
When Bay first saw him in 2018’s superhero tale Aquaman, he knew of his potential.
“I’m like, ‘That guy’s gonna be a star. I want to work with him'," he says. “I’ve worked with so many famous people in my lifetime and it’s just like I told him, ‘Dude, you are so humble. And you just have a spark about you. Don’t lose that.’ He really is just a humble guy. Just salt of the earth.”
He felt the same about Gyllenhaal, an actor whose diverse credits range from Donnie Darko and Zodiac to Spider-Man: Far From Home.
“We really hit it off,” says Bay. “Just great energy. He brings his A-game. I’ll embrace his different ideas, and he’ll give me different things.”
The chemistry with the two leads is there for all to see, he says. “Jake is fun to watch. Even though he’s out of his mind and Yahya ... the audience just loves him, and they just latch on. Even though their characters are doing something bad. It’s weird.”
Around his actors, Bay sprinkled real-life law enforcers to add to the verisimilitude. Yet, what really gives Ambulance its energy is the fact that he shot it on the hoof, in only 38 days.
“These smaller movies are hard because they challenge you, because you’ve got less of everything but it’s good,” he says. “It puts a lot of structure in the things. This is all you’re gonna get and you’ve got to make it work.”
The only time he’s done anything similar was 2013’s Pain & Gain, a riotous comedy-thriller with Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
“I mean, that was just running around my place in Miami with actors. And that was a pretty shoestring budget," he says.
Bay is also thriftier than you might think.
“I’m a type of director … I do not go over budget. I come on budget. And I don’t like spending more than I absolutely must. On big movies, there’s so much waste, it’s ridiculous,” he says. “You’re creating such a big world for so many people on payroll.”
It’s why he loved scaling back on Ambulance, with a smaller crew. Often, he’d jump in a car with just a soundman and a camera operator to shoot some footage.
Even his company, Platinum Dunes, that Bay co-founded in 2001, is devoted to producing low-budget horror movies, including John Krasinski’s hit film A Quiet Place and its 2021 sequel. Does Bay hanker after a grimy horror himself?
“I would love to do a scary movie,” Bay says. “But I’m wondering what I’m going to do next. I think it’ll probably be a big movie … but I don’t know.”
Ambulance is out in UAE cinemas on March 17
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Uefa Champions League Group F
Manchester City v Hoffenheim, midnight (Wednesday, UAE)
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What is graphene?
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged like honeycomb.
It was discovered in 2004, when Russian-born Manchester scientists Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov were "playing about" with sticky tape and graphite - the material used as "lead" in pencils.
Placing the tape on the graphite and peeling it, they managed to rip off thin flakes of carbon. In the beginning they got flakes consisting of many layers of graphene. But as they repeated the process many times, the flakes got thinner.
By separating the graphite fragments repeatedly, they managed to create flakes that were just one atom thick. Their experiment had led to graphene being isolated for the very first time.
At the time, many believed it was impossible for such thin crystalline materials to be stable. But examined under a microscope, the material remained stable, and when tested was found to have incredible properties.
It is many times times stronger than steel, yet incredibly lightweight and flexible. It is electrically and thermally conductive but also transparent. The world's first 2D material, it is one million times thinner than the diameter of a single human hair.
But the 'sticky tape' method would not work on an industrial scale. Since then, scientists have been working on manufacturing graphene, to make use of its incredible properties.
In 2010, Geim and Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Their discovery meant physicists could study a new class of two-dimensional materials with unique properties.
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Living in...
This article is part of a guide on where to live in the UAE. Our reporters will profile some of the country’s most desirable districts, provide an estimate of rental prices and introduce you to some of the residents who call each area home.
