Transformers: Another battle begins!

Oh dear, things are getting a bit fractious in the world of The Transformers. Director Michael Bay took to his blog to lambast actor Hugo Weaving as a "whiner" after the latter said his voice work on the blockbuster trilogy was "meaningless" because he had no idea what his lines meant.

In remarks he later deleted – but not before several sites had captured a screenshot – Bay implied that Weaving ought to have taken the money and kept his mouth shut after voicing the lead villain Megatron in the Transformers trilogy without, apparently, bothering to read the script in advance.

 "Do you ever get sick of actors that make $15m a picture, or even $200,000 for voiceover work that took a brisk one hour and 43 minutes to complete, and then complain about their jobs?" asked the director. "With all the problems facing our world today, do these grumbling thespians really think people reading the news actually care about trivial complaints that their job isn't 'artistic enough' or 'fulfilling enough'?

"What happened to people who had integrity, who did a job, got paid for their hard work, and just smiled afterward? Be happy you even have a job – let alone a job that pays you more than 98% of people in America."

Bay was upset by Weaving’s comments to the Collider blog. "It was one of the only things I've ever done where I had no knowledge of it, I didn't care about it, I didn't think about it," said Weaving. "They wanted me to do it. In one way, I regret that bit. I don't regret doing it, but I very rarely do something if it's meaningless. It was meaningless to me, honestly. I don't mean that in any nasty way.

"My link to that and to Michael Bay is so minimal. I have never met him. I was never on set. I've seen his face on Skype. I know nothing about him, really. I just went in and did it. I never read the script. I just have my lines, and I don't know what they mean. That sounds absolutely pathetic! I've never done anything like that in my life. It's hard to say any more about it than that, really."