LOS ANGELES  - Director Michael Bay has labeled as "crap" his 2009 movie "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," blaming its shortcomings on the Hollywood writers' strike.

In an interview with Britain's Empire magazine, Bay admits that they "made some mistakes" while filming the critically panned sequel.

"The real fault with (Transformers 2) is that it ran into a mystical world," he explains. "When I look back at it, that was crap. The writers' strike was coming hard and fast. It was just terrible to do a movie where you've got to have a story in three weeks."

He adds, "I was prepping a movie for months where I only had 14 pages of some idea of what the movie was. It's a BS way to make a movie, do you know what I'm saying?"

This isn't the first time Bay has blamed the writers' strike for the blockbuster's faults. In July 2010, he told USA Today, "I'll take some of the criticism. It was very hard to put (the sequel) together that quickly after the writers' strike."

Actor Shia LaBeouf had similar complaints earlier that year at the Cannes Film Festival. "When I saw the second movie, I wasn't impressed with what we did," he said. "There were some really wild stunts in it, but the heart was gone."

However, both Bay and LaBeouf promised that the franchise's third installment, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," due in July, would rejuvenate the series.

"Transformers 2" grossed about $836 million worldwide, having cost about $200 million to produce.