“I do think the first film was kind of more put together than maybe some of these more recent ones, like the Last Knight, it was great to work on, we had a blast, but there were a lot of picture changes right up ’til the end,” he said.
Probably the biggest challenge for Jablonsky while working on the Last Knight was the constant shortening of film. After critics and audiences alike complained about the runtime of Transformers: Age of Extinction, the latest film was continuously compacted down to avoid the same issue. This even extended to the end credits, which only lasted through the duration of one song as the credits flashed rather than the traditional scrolling.
“Bay, up until the last minute, was really trying to shorten The Last Knight. So every cut we would get, the scenes would all kind of be [shortened],” Jablonsky said.
The shortening of the film ultimately messed with the timing and tempo of the music, which led to some issues as it would start to no longer fit in the scene, leading Jablonsky to throwing out sections of the music and starting over.
“That’s one of the reasons why I released such an obnoxiously long soundtrack for this new Transformers, because we had so much music and I said ‘I just want to release everything the way I wrote it, not the way it’s in the film, because it’s hard for me to watch the film when I just hear every edit,'” he said.
Jablonsky noted that toward the end of production, it would get to the point where editing changes to both the picture and the music would be made without being notified, which he understands since there was so much going on and it would be impossible to relay that information back and forth so often, however he feels that the music was not the best it could be in the final version of the film.
“There are several scenes that used to have a nice melodic flow through the scene, but now it’s like five notes from the theme and it cuts to the next part and then it cuts to the next part,” he said.
“It pains me to listen to this because it was so much better before. I know it was so much better before, but I understand [Bay] needs to shorten his film.”
Jablonsky discusses things such as beginning his work with Michael Bay for the first time, writing the music for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and more.
His words on The Last Knight begin at 31:07.