It makes perfect sense that the most important workspace in Michael Bay’s production house is called the war room. For ordinary meetings, the director of the Transformers films, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor has an airy conference suite at his Santa Monica headquarters. But for the stuff that really counts, there’s a windowless chamber at the building’s core, where big ideas – typically involving big explosions – can be thrashed out in Strangelovean seclusion.

“Essentially, it’s where you go to get stuff done,” says Matt Holloway, a screenwriter who spent up to 10 hours at a time in there with his colleagues Art Marcum and Ken Nolan, during the four months it took to piece together the script for Transformers: The Last Knight.

Bay would sometimes swing by with ideas of his own, tapping them out on his laptop at the same table, while listening on his headphones to Hans Zimmer’s score for Man of Steel, the recent Superman film, to get in the appropriate mood.