Michael Bay Insists 'Pearl Harbor' Had the Biggest Movie Explosion Ever

The latest edition of "Guinness World Records" has declared that the James Bond movie "Spectre" has the biggest explosion in cinema history. "Pearl Harbor" director Michael Bay rather profanely disagrees.

The 007 scene in question is the one where Bond blows up Blofeld's base in the Moroccan desert. The James Bond 007 YouTube channel claims that the filmmakers used 2,223 gallons of fuel, 72 pounds of explosives and captured the explosion in one take. Here's what that scene looks like in the movie.

Just in case you get antsy, it's actually the third explosion in that sequence that's the record-holder. It's an impressive piece of work, but not necessarily the scene anyone remembers from what may be the worst of the five Bond films starring Daniel Craig.

Bay, the "Transformers" series director, is certainly not impressed with the "Spectre" explosion, and he's still standing up for his 2001 epic "Pearl Harbor," starring Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, Josh Hartnett, Jennnifer Garner and Alec Baldwin.

Promoting his new "veterans committing a heist, but for health care" thriller "Ambulance" in an interview with Empire magazine, Bay offered his own hot take on what should count as the biggest explosion in movie history.

"There's a special sauce for explosions," Bay argued. "It's like a recipe. I see some directors do it, and they look cheesy, or it won't have a shockwave. There are certain ways with explosions where you're mixing different things, and different types of explosions to make it look more realistic. … It's like making a Caesar salad."

Bay is a man who knows how to blow stuff up. Is he the director with the most explosions per minute in his film career? Add together the "Transformers," a pair of "Bad Boys" movies and the Ryan Reynolds Netflix movie "6 Underground," and you've got enough boom to win a war.

Indiewire got a copy of the actual printed Empire magazine and dug out an amazing quote from Bay.

Producer “Jerry Bruckheimer showed Ridley Scott the movie, and the quote [from Scott] was, 'F**k me,'" Bay recalled. "No one knows how hard that is. We had so much big stuff out there. Real boats, 20 real planes. We had 350 events going off. Three months of rigging on seven boats, stopping a freeway that's three miles away."

Bay previously described the scene of the Japanese bomb explosion in a different interview with Whalebone magazine.

"There was dynamite everywhere. Stuff was rigged on so many ships," Bay said. "We also had 17 planes in the air, and you're dealing with big puffy Hawaiian clouds. So you have to deal with sun, you got to wait for the right time where you're going to get enough sun because the puffy clouds are moving through. … There's something on the water where if a boat crosses a red line, meaning that you could kill guys in the boats because it's very dangerous because there's KinePak -- which is dynamite in the water -- everywhere. It can blow the boat up, kill the guys.

"It was 12 cameras. We had aerials above. We had helicopters. I think it's probably about 30 seconds of film, but it's full-on gigantic explosions. The plume went hundreds and hundreds of feet in the air. There was a spark that went off to a small little side island and set a forest fire, and we had to go in to put out. But it was a massive undertaking, this explosion."

Even though Bay has fully embraced CGI digital effects in his "Transformers" movies, he's still old-school enough that he refuses to use green-screen technology when he wants to blow something up. There's nothing like the real-time concussion wave from a real explosion.

There aren't any clips of Bay's explosion available to include here. You can buy or rent "Pearl Harbor" from all the usual online movie stores to see the 40-minute attack scene that includes the big boom.

People who grew up before the internet usually took the "Guinness World Records" as the final authority on all the stuff that mattered, so the idea that they might have so thoroughly blown it on this topic is disappointing. Bay's the Hollywood expert on blowing stuff up, so he may well be right and Bond's impressive boom isn't the one that should get the credit.

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