Do you have room to improvise here, or are you sticking to the script?

DJ Caruso: My style is always to give the actors freedom as long as long as the words and the story and scene still have the same meaning. We go through a pretty intensive rehearsal process where we don't necessarily lock lines down, we lock our heads and decide what the scene is about, so if the words change along the way, we're cool. And Shia can turn it into gold. He can give the same intent of dialogue on the page that isn't sounding quite right. That's his greatest gift to a filmmaker.

Alex Kurtzman: And we worked with a lot of cool writers on this movie; everyone brought a different thing to it.

DJ Caruso: The problem with Shia, though, is that the other actors see that and then they think they can do the same thing.

Alex Kurtzman: That's a great point. There are very few actors who are truly good at improvising; that's a real skill. To be a real good improviser, to make something funnier and sexier, that's a very tough thing to do. And Shia makes it look easy because he is that guy.

So do you have a secret deal with Shia to only make movies with him?

DJ Caruso: Honestly, I would! It's a blessing every day, because he comes to work and just gives 110%. He almost tortures himself because he just wants to be good. Even if it's the smallest thing and he's only there for half a day to do a shot where he picks up a Coke can. He's so committed, and it's infectious. He makes you love your job, so of course I'd work with him again.

So Y The Last Man is going to happen?

DJ Caruso: It's probably going to be happening, yeah. With New Line now part of Warner Brothers, Warners is now very high on the project. And Carl Ellsworth and I are probably going to deliver the script to WB/New Line by next week.

Did you direct any of the last season of The Shield?

DJ Caruso: I didn't get to because I was doing this but I know the last episode is unbelievably explosive. It's so much so it's fantastic. It's sort of a dream, like what I think The Sopranos should have been at the end.

Robert and Alex, what are you writing now? Are you just working on Transformers 2?

Alex Kurtzman: We broke the whole [Transformers] story before the strike and they were able to prep an outline we'd written during the strike. The second that ended Bay locked us in a room for two months. It was nuts. We literally lived in a room with Ehren Kruger, the three of us, and they were shooting three weeks later. It was insane.

Robert Orci: We won't come back into that until post, in terms of writing. Once they're animating the robots we can change stuff. And right now we're polishing up The Twentieth Amendment, a project we wrote a few years back and might be able to get going again. And Fringe.

Why not go to comic con with Eagle Eye?

DJ Caruso: This movie comes out on September 26. I really feel like I'm going to finish it on September 12. I mean that! I don't know how that happened, but it did. It's enormous. So we figured we'd bring a few people here to see some of it.

The first two reels have a lot of action. Does the movie ever let up?

Alex Kurtzman: It's funny you say that, because before we started today I said 'I hope the first act isn't too slow!' Because when it gets going, it's a bullet to the end.

DJ Caruso: It's pretty much that, yeah. But there's some great scenes and character in there. It's action with incident, so things are always happening and you're always learning about people as it happens. We don't stop the story.

Do we ever see more of the main characters' lives and backstory?

DJ Caruso: You're going to be propelled forward, and you're going to get a little bit of a look back into Shia's life particularly. Mostly you get a little bit of him towards the end of act two.

Alex Kurtzman: I think too that these movies are always best when a character is forced to confront their flaws by attrition. They're forced into a situation where you've got basically 24 hours to face your worst demons at a time when you never thought you'd have to do that. That's part of what makes these movies good. So a lot of it is about seeing their lives from a new perspective because the insanity that they're thrown into.

Steven Spielberg came up with this idea ten years ago? What part of that idea survived?

Robert Orci: The kernel of what he pitched us was: what if the world turned against you in every way that it can, when everything is so interconnected.

Alex Kurtzman: What if all the tech that makes your life easier could be manipulated by someone else, and that in turn could turn you into someone you don't want to be?

As the movie goes on, can audiences catch on to clues placed within?

DJ Caruso: Definitely. They're there, all seeded throughout. They're not intentionally planted so you can figure it you, but if you catch things you'll understand it.

Of what we saw today, what was the most difficult to film?

DJ Caruso: Obviously the car chase, because it's all the different pieces. And what I loved about this chase was that our characters were meeting each other for the very first time. These two worlds collide and as they're trying to figure things out there's all this mayhem. And also the opening sequence with Chiklis in the Pentagon. It was a tough scene to get all the beats right.