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Michael Bay literally disavowed any knowledge of what the subjects of his upco*ing documentary were going to do with the camera he gave them, according to a recent interview. In what looks, at least to our eyes, like a very odd bit of jumping through legal and ethical loopholes, Bay described to Variety today the various protections he had to put in place in order to make We Are Storror, his new documentary about the online-famous British parkour team—most of which involved him having nothing to do with, and no knowledge of, what was happening while the movie was being filmed. In case it wasn’t clear: Making a movie about people who do deliberately dangerous things—and who are incentivized in numerous ways to make those things more flashy and dangerous, especially, when, say, they know they’re filming for one of the world’s most famous action directors, who’s previously hired them to work on one of his big-budget films—is kind of fraught with ethical perils.

“I could not condone anything they were doing,” Bay says of the filming process for the movie, which it apparently took his legal team years to set up, and which he put together after all of the raw footage had been shot by the Storror members. “I could not be on the set. I could not have anything to do with them shooting.” Basically, he couldn’t be involved in the project at all until after all of the footage had been shot without anyone dying—to the point that he didn’t know about the existence of a pretty frightening accident, one that makes for a major emotional throughline for the movie (which debuts at SXSW this weekend), until after the full footage had been delivered to him. All of which can’t feel ever-so-slightly hinky to us, in terms of questions about who’s pushing who to do what: You could argue that Storror, which has been posting stunts online for 15 years at this point, and which has more than 10 million followers on YouTube, would have been doing and filming these stunts regardless. But Bay’s decision to build, and now promote, a movie that essentially sells itself on the appeal of people doing stuntwork, without any of the standardized protections that cinematic stuntwork is supposed to be acco*panied with, can’t help but set off alarm bells in our head.

In any case, Bay gave only one instruction to his…subjects? Stars? Employees? Film everything, including the planning sessions and prep that Storror does to ensure that their stunts are as safe as they can be, and which they usually keep off-camera to preserve their free-wheeling mystique. For fans of the group, it undeniably sounds like this will be a more personal behind-the-scenes look at their work than the world has ever gotten before; what it says about its very deliberately—and legally!—hands-off director may end up being more murky. To be fair to Bay, he did acknowledge at least some of this, noting that at least part of the reason he felt he couldn’t be around for filming was that, “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.”