Michael Bay Would Be Kubrick

There’s a feeling a lot of us share right now, even if we rarely say it out loud.

You open your phone and someone built an app in an afternoon. Someone else made a short film without touching a camera. A founder you follow published thirty pieces of content this week, every one of them polished, every one of them made with tools that didn’t exist a year ago. AI can write it. AI can edit it. AI can design it, voice it, translate it, schedule it.

Some of that is true. Some of it is very true. Some of it is a person selling a course about a tool they discovered last Tuesday. But true or not, it lands the same way. A low hum of anxiety. The feeling of being behind on something that didn’t exist six months ago. The suspicion that if you’re not producing more, faster, someone else already is.

It’s easy to read all of this as a race. Make more, make it faster, or disappear.

And somewhere in the middle of that race, a sentence keeps coming back to me:

If format were the idea, Michael Bay would be Kubrick.

To understand why that sentence matters right now, it helps to meet the two men in it.

Michael Bay was born in Los Angeles in 1965. He started where a lot of great image-makers start: commercials and music videos. He was good at it early. In 1993 he directed a spot for the “Got Milk?” campaign, a man who can’t say the name “Aaron Burr” because his mouth is full of peanut butter and the milk carton is empty. It won the Grand Prix at the Clio Awards as commercial of the year.

Then came the movies. Bad Boys. The Rock. Armageddon. Pearl Harbor. And in 2007, Transformers, the first of five he would direct. Giant robots, cars folding into machines, cities collapsing in slow motion. In 2014, Transformers: Age of Extinction cost 210 million dollars to make and earned more than a billion. Altogether, his films have grossed over 6.6 billion dollars worldwide.

Critics have rarely been kind to him. Audiences have kept buying tickets. Both things are true at once, and both are worth respecting. Bay understands something many directors never learn: exactly what a shot needs to feel big, fast and loud. The low angle. The spinning camera. The sunset behind the explosion. He can build spectacle out of almost anything.

Bay is, in the purest sense, a master of format.

Stanley Kubrick was born in Manhattan in 1928. Before he made films, he made photographs. As a teenager he was already working for Look magazine, learning how a single frame could hold a whole story.

Over almost half a century he directed thirteen feature films. That’s it. Thirteen. Among them, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket. Films that people still argue about, still study, still quote, decades after they came out. He was famous for asking for dozens of takes of the same shot: twenty or thirty on some films, seventy or eighty on others, until something true happened in front of the camera.

What surprises people is that Kubrick was not a purist working with less. He was as obsessed with technology as anyone in Hollywood.

In the early 1970s he wanted to film a story set in the eighteenth century the way that century actually looked at night: lit only by candles. No electric light hidden off-camera. The usual cinema lenses couldn’t see in that little light. So his team found one that could, a Zeiss lens built for NASA. Only ten were ever made. He had it adapted to a film camera and shot the candlelit rooms of Barry Lyndon with nothing but flame.

And the only Oscar Kubrick ever won in his life was for visual effects, for 2001.

So the difference between these two men was never that one loved tools and the other didn’t. They both did. The difference was what the tools were for.

Bay’s tools serve the moment. The explosion is the point.

Kubrick’s tools served something underneath. He didn’t want a beautiful candle. He wanted you to feel what it was like to live in a world lit only by fire. The lens was the format. The candlelight was the idea. And beneath both of them, there was a reason the film existed at all.

That reason is the part people still remember fifty years later.

There are three words we use as if they meant the same thing. They don’t, and learning the difference changes how you see everything you make.

A format is the container. The shape a piece of work takes. A reel, a carousel, a newsletter, a podcast, a before-and-after, a talking head, a symmetrical hallway, an explosion. A format is empty until something fills it. Anyone can copy it.

An idea is what you put inside the format. The specific thing this piece is saying, today, to someone.

A concept is the reason all your ideas exist. It’s what stays the same while everything around it changes: the formats, the platforms, the campaigns, the years.

Picture a small bakery. A reel, a carousel and a story are formats. “Why we still let our dough rest for forty-eight hours” is an idea. “Bread that takes the time it takes” is the concept. The bakery can change every format and every idea next month, and if the concept holds, people will still know exactly who they are.

Kubrick worked from the bottom up. Concept first, then the idea, then the format that could carry it, even if that format had to be borrowed from NASA.

Most of us build in the opposite direction. We start with the format, because it’s the most visible part, and hope an idea shows up inside it. Sometimes it does. Usually we end up with a lot of containers and very little in them.

You’ve seen what that looks like, even if you’ve never named it.

Open any feed and look for a minute. The same cinematic color grade. The same slow push-in on a coffee cup. The same car at golden hour, the same gym at five in the morning, the same promise of an irresistible offer, delivered by a hundred different faces. Some of it is very well made. Swap the names, though, and you’d struggle to say who made what.

Brands do it too. The perfect launch: the packaging, the countdown, the creators all posting on the same day, the restock that sells out. Everyone talks about it for a season. Ask what it stands for, and the answer is the launch itself.

And now companies do it every day, because a tool makes it possible. Clean carousels, consistent colors, tips that are all correct. Put a competitor’s logo on any of them and nothing would change.

None of this is wrong. Some of it sells, and sells a lot. Formats are very good at getting attention. They’re just not built to keep it. When the attention moves on, and it always does, there has to be something underneath for people to come back to. If there isn’t, the next launch has to be louder than the last one. That’s an expensive way to live.

Then, once in a while, something stops you. Often it’s rougher. A phone propped on a desk, one person saying one thing they clearly believe. You remember who it was. You remember what they meant.

Same tools, same platforms, same week. One is a container. The other has something inside it.

There’s a simple way to tell them apart. Cover the logo. Could this piece belong to anyone else? If the answer is yes, it’s a format. If the answer is no, if only you could have said it, in that way, to those people, there’s a concept somewhere inside it.

This has always been true. What changed is the price.

Until very recently, formats were expensive. A good video took a crew. A good design took a designer. A campaign took weeks. The cost of making things kept the volume low, and the low volume gave ideas room to breathe.

Today a format costs almost nothing. You can ask a machine for fifty carousels before lunch. You can type “in the style of Kubrick” and get a symmetrical hallway in seconds, one-point perspective and all.

There’s a small irony in that. In 1968, in 2001, Kubrick imagined a machine that could run an entire spaceship. HAL 9000 could talk, reason, play chess, read lips. Fifty-some years later we hear the same thing every morning: the machine can do this, the machine can do that. And the line everyone remembers from HAL is the one about what it would not do. I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

When everyone can make the container, the container stops meaning anything. Production used to signal effort. Now it signals almost nothing.

That’s why Kubrick is more alive than ever. His style can be copied in a prompt. What made his work matter can’t. A tool can give you the look of a candlelit room. It can’t tell you why anyone should sit in it.

And maybe that’s where some of the anxiety comes from. Most of the noise is about formats: faster, cheaper, more. It’s loud because formats are the part that changed. The part that didn’t change is quieter, and it’s still yours.

So before the next piece, it might be worth asking a different first question.

Not “what should I post this week?” That question starts with the container.

It’s tempting to replace it with another outside question. What does my audience want? What is everyone else posting? What’s working this month? Those questions feel responsible. They’re also how most work ends up sounding like everything around it. When you start from what others might approve of, you’re already making a format. You’re shaping the container around someone else’s taste and hoping it fits.

Kubrick didn’t make 2001 by asking what audiences wanted from a science fiction film in 1968. He made it because there was something he needed to understand, and the film was how he went looking for it.

So the first question points the other way: what is true for me?

Something you’ve lived, noticed, gotten wrong, or can’t stop thinking about. Something you would say even if nobody clapped. That’s where a concept comes from. Not from a trend report or from studying what others are doing. From inside your own story.

Only after that, a second question, as a check rather than a starting point: who does this serve, and how do I make it with value and with recognition?

Value is what someone walks away with. Something they didn’t have before they read, watched or listened.

Recognition is quieter. It’s the moment someone sees your work and thinks, that’s me. They feel seen before they feel sold to. And here is the part that seems backwards until you’ve felt it: people rarely recognize themselves in work made to please them. They recognize themselves in work that is honest. The more personal the truth, the more people find their own life inside it.

No tool can answer those questions for you. You’re the only one who can.

I spend a lot of time with people who build things. Almost all of them arrive with formats: a deck, a calendar, a list of reels. Every now and then someone arrives with a concept, and the whole conversation changes. You can feel it in the room.

They’re rarely the ones with the biggest budget. They’re the ones who know why they’re there.

If format were the idea, Michael Bay would be Kubrick.

He isn’t. And in a moment when anyone can make an explosion in seconds, that might be the calmest news anyone building something could hear.

The tools will keep getting louder. Let them. The reason is still yours to find.

Narrative Sparring is a weekly letter on how the people who build things can learn to tell their story. Subscribe at thecruda.com.