With the new two-hour Knight Rider movie set to air on February 17, The Deadbolt was part of a conference call with new Knight Rider star Justin Bruening and executive producer David Bartis (The O.C.) to get the goods on everything from KITT's new artificially intelligent abilities and the return of "The Hoff" to the reasons for selecting the new Mustang Shelby Cobra and Justin Bruening's real life driving skills.

Justin Bruening and David Bartis on working with the new KITT:

JUSTIN BRUENING: Working with the new KITT was an amazing experience. Actually, it’s the Shelby Cobra 500GTKR and it’s an absolutely amazing piece of machinery and all of our little bells and whistles we added to it also heightened the experience. It’s great, absolutely a joy, but he gets a little stand-offish and doesn’t talk all of the time. But other than that...

DAVID BARTIS: One of the things that we were able to do on the show is create something we call the "pod car" and it allowed us to put Justin and Deanna [Russo] in an actual car and run the stunts live action. And we can record their performances rather than putting them in a car on a green screen on a stage and hoped that it looked really good when we matted the background together. A lot of the performances you see from Justin and Deanna are actually them in the car on the road with a stunt driver sitting in a cage that’s bolted to the top of the car. So it’s the real car going the real speed, doing the real stunts, while they’re doing their performances and I think you guys will see when you see the final product, it’s an incredible moment. You feel the moment that they’re feeling because they’re really in it, it’s not them faking it on a stage, it’s really happening. For me, as a producer, it brought a level of reality to the performances and the action and it was pretty special.

Bartis on the impact that Transformers had on resurrecting Knight Rider:

"Transformers definitely played a role in it. It sort of heightened everybody’s awareness for the potential of the show. But to be honest, it wasn’t my idea to bring it back. Ben Silverman at NBC was the first person to say, 'Hey, this is a series that we own that was a classic iconic series of the '80s,' and Ben had a lot of passion for the show. I was lucky enough to be on a deal at Universal and they own the show, where they’re partners with NBC, so I got lucky in some ways in being in the right place at the right time. I was also working on another project with Dave Andron, who wrote the sequel, and we were sitting my offices when the folks at Universal and NBC called and said, ‘Is this something that you guys would be interested in?’ [laughs] We jumped on it. For both of us it was something we remembered from the first time it was on TV. So we definitely had a lot of passion for it from our own experience with it and the chance to reinvent it and bring it to a new audience was definitely something that was exciting to us."

Bartis on bringing David Hasselhoff back to Knight Rider:

"We always knew that David had to have a role in this project. We spent a lot of time with him both before production and during production. The thing that surprised me the first time I met him was that Knight Rider is something that’s very important to him and he’s very passionate about. I think more so than anything else he’s done, even Baywatch, which he owned and was on the air with for eleven years. It’s still Knight Rider that he really seems to have the stronger connection with. He had this inherent understanding of what made it work and what the fans responded to. So for us that was a tremendous asset to tap into and get a sense of what elements we would carry over to the new version. He definitely had a role in helping us conceive of what this would be, as well as being in it. I think everybody will be excited to see the way we’ve worked him into the show as Michael Knight."

Inside Knight Rider with Justin Bruening and David Bartis Page 2