How Michael Bay Made His Death-Defying Parkour Documentary ‘We Are Storror’: ‘I Could Not Condone Anything They Were Doing’

Michael Bay had a big problem. 

During the height of COVID in 2020, he got a text from Drew Taylor, one of the members of Storror, the seven-person group of U.K. parkour artists whose videos of their breathtakingly risky stunts jumping across rooftops from London to Hong Kong have amassed more than 3 billion views on YouTube since 2010. The group’s global reputation led Bay to hire Storror for his 2019 action film “6 Underground,” and now Taylor was asking Bay about making a documentary with them about their lives.

It was an irresistible idea. “Imagine you’re a basketball player in the NBA, and every single basket you throw up, you have to shoot them all,” Bay tells Variety. “Or a [professional] baseball player, and you’ve got to hit every single ball — because if you strike out, you’re dead. That’s the level that they play.” Bay admired Storror not just as “these crazy elite athletes,” but for the visual sophistication of their stunts and how they’ve captured it on camera. “It’s an art form,” he says.

Related Stories

VIP+

Can Content Licensing Opportunities for AI Training Last?

'White Lotus' Merch Drops Include a $3,000 Bed Frame, Sticky Rice Chocolate and Silk Caftans: What Is Actually Worth Shopping?

But the life-or-death stakes of that art form placed Bay into a bind. He knew instinctively how cinematic it would be to capture these seven best friends — who started just mucking about the London suburbs as adolescent teenagers — regularly placing themselves on the precipice of oblivion.

“Part of the appeal of what we do is the lack of safety, the no permissions,” Taylor says. “We can’t do it any other way. If we had harnesses on, then we’re stuntmen. That’s not Storror. We do it for real.”

As a member of the Directors Guild of America, however, Bay was bound to ensure that any project with his name on it as a director was as risk free as possible.

“I could not condone anything they were doing,” Bay says. “I could not be on the set. I could not have anything to do with them shooting. You don’t want to be that person that tried to push that athlete one micro second, one millimeter [into danger], saying, ‘Do the shot.’ I’ve seen stuntmen push it because they want to impress the camera. I couldn’t have any of that pressure on them. I wouldn’t feel right about doing any of that.”

It took years, Bay says, for his legal team to figure out a way for him to direct the documentary without actually participating in how it was made. “I was not going to get involved until everyone was safe,” he says. “I could not be involved in any way, shape or form.”

“He once said to me, ‘This deal was harder to pull off than “Transformers,”’” Taylor says.

Eventually, Bay and the Storror team worked out a solution, and this afternoon, Bay will screen “We Are Storror” — his debut as a feature documentary director — at the SXSW Film & TV Festival for the first time. When talking with Variety, who screened the film in advance of the festival at Bay’s Bel-Air home, the filmmaker was eager to know how the movie was playing, since the SXSW premiere — which Bay sees as a work-in-progress screening — will be the first time he sees it with an audience.

“This is a full movie here, and I hope it’s emotional,” he says. “But let’s just see how people react to it.”

In many ways, Storror, which consists of two sets of brothers, and three of their friends, including Taylor, are the perfect subjects for a Michael Bay film. (The director’s first nonfiction project, the Max series “Born Evil: The Serial Killer and the Savior,” premiered in 2024.) The nature of Storror’s stunts — climbing atop a construction crane in the dead of night to witness a London fireworks display, leaping off of a vertiginous cliffside into a roiling sea, evading police as they scamper across skyscraper rooftops — are exactly the kind of go-for-broke escapades that populate so many of Bay’s feature films. But Bay was far more keen on getting the group to demonstrate what drives them to take those risks. 

“We need to understand the why, because you’re playing with mortality,” Bay says. “My whole thing as a director is like, what is the emotion behind it?”

But since Bay couldn’t be on set — nor could he be in any communication with the group while they were filming — he gave the team a simple and clear directive: Shoot everything.

“We’re in such tight control of our image online,” Taylor says. “Where we would stop recording is where the documentary picks up. It’s all the stuff that we would never record, which is actually what I’m realizing is most interesting to people.” That includes the hours of prep the team does in every location before they do a stunt, from planning their routes in meticulous detail to brushing off all the excess dust and dirt that could cause their feet to slip.

With Bay’s instructions — and his explicit declaration disavowing his approval or knowledge of what they would be doing — the team set about assembling a series of stunts in visually arresting locations throughout Europe, like an abandoned housing complex in Bulgaria and the rooftops of Malta, the place where they say their bond as a team was first forged. 

In a chilling twist of fate, in the film’s first location — a zigzagging, vertical staircase aside a dam in Portugal — a close friend of the group experiences a horrifying accident, captured on camera, that underscores just how perilous Storror’s stunts really are.

“It’s not too far to say that it totally redefined our relationship to the sport, and definitely our relationship to risk,” Taylor says. “Growing up and getting into parkour, and especially being younger, we have this story that we tell everybody about how it’s totally safe because we train so much and it would be risky for other people. It’s like delusional confidence. You cannot be in control of every variable.” (Bay says that his total sequestration from the project meant he only learned about the accident once Storror finished filming and sent him all of their footage.)

“We Are Storror” winds up depicting how the different members of the group, all of whom are now in their 30s, react to the accident in Portugal. Some double down on their fervor for parkour, while others begin to question whether they want to continue at all. Bay then uses the thousands of hours of footage that the team shot for their YouTube channel to contrast their present day misgivings with the uncomplicated fearlessness of their youth.

“That has been a big part of why this project has been so emotionally tumultuous for all of us,” Taylor says. “I think it is quite obviously a swan song. We’ll keep making videos. But in terms of the era of Storror being athletes who push the physical frontier of the sport, I think that’s what this project marks the end of.”

One thing Taylor is sure will never go away, though, is the brotherhood between the seven members of Storror. For example, he says the “fundamental fear” of heights that is primal to human beings is alleviated whenever he’s with his crew. 

“It’s almost a bit of a magic trick,” he says. “I think that’s this weird force field and confidence that the seven of us gives us. When you’re on a roof prepping these jumps, it’s fun. It’s a good time.”

That feeling, however, did not appear to transfer to Bay, who spent months culling through some of Storror’s most hair-raising footage. “I’m terrified of heights,” Bay says with a laugh. “I still get sick watching it!”