Hollywood Reporter talks with director Michael Bay about how ILM became an essential part of making Pearl Harbor happen and how Episode I effects helped:

"When we were making peace with Japan, part of the treaty was that we were able to destroy all their Zeroes, all their planes. We actually made Japan destroy all the documents to rebuild one of these. I found some plane nuts, these guys who collect these planes, at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica. These are very industrious guys that have actually found a couple of Zeroes that were sunk under the water. They raised them and they rebuilt these things in Russia by getting these ancient Japanese plans in an ancient Japanese language. There were only eight people who can transcribe this. These plans were done in this ancient Japanese language for secrecy. So they had to be transcribed into English and then into Russian and then these planes were rebuilt in Russia."

These planes were photographed in detail and, Bay said. "The footage was sent to ILM. And from there, they would digitally hand off a real plane to a fake plane. You'd see the fake plane and go into the water, crash, burn and rip apart. They were taking some of the software they invented for (George) Lucas' fourth installment of 'Star Wars,' where the pod chase breaks up. From there, they kind of perfected that."

While it sounds as though there's nothing that Hollywood's effects wizards can't create now, Bay pointed out, "I really believe you need to do a lot of it real to make it realistic because you can always tell there's something fake about computer graphics. But it has allowed us to do things like recreating the attack on Pearl Harbor to make it feel like you're there. Literally you see this fleet. One of our main things in this movie -- I don't want to give it away -- is the sinking of the Oklahoma, which took five torpedo hits and sunk, they say, in eight minutes. So you've got this battleship with 2,000 guys on it that just rolls over and goes belly up.

"For the movie, we built the world's largest gimbal. It's about 190 feet long. It's the front end of a battleship -- like a front end of a battleship that rolls all the way upside down and goes under. The thing was massive. It was built down in the 'Titanic' stage. From there, we shot that with the stuntmen on (board). ILM will add the planes. They'll add the fleet behind (the Oklahoma). They'll have computer guys mixed in with our real guys. That's how we got some of these epic shots."

It's only been a few years since Bay and Bruckheimer teamed up to make the 1998 blockbuster "Armageddon" for Disney. Has the state of the art in visual effects advanced as enormously as it seems? "I think so," Bay said. "Every year it's taking major jumps. Some of the toughest things (to create digitally) have been water, fire and smoke. ILM's making great breakthroughs on 3D smoke. There was a lot of smoke at Pearl Harbor. We needed very thick black smoke. Those are the little things that get computer graphics people excited."

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