木乃伊3 The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor(EN)Subtitles

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1 00:00:13 Hi, I'm Rob Cohen, director of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,
2 00:00:17 and the next hour and 45 minutes
3 00:00:20 is going to be a commentary of a free association sort,
4 00:00:26 trying to give you some sort of insight into things that went on and went behind
5 00:00:32 the making of this very large, epic-scale film.
6 00:00:39 Here, you see the Universal logo used as a geography lesson.
7 00:00:45 I wanted to make sure that the audience understood the relationship
8 00:00:49 between North America and China,
9 00:00:52 and to get the feeling of the scale of that country
10 00:00:57 and its position in the world.
11 00:01:01 Here, a messenger arrives at high speed
12 00:01:05 in the second century B.C. by the pyramids of Ningxia.
13 00:01:10 Ningxia pyramids are a real thing. Those are they.
14 00:01:15 And they represent
15 00:01:18 some of the great artifacts and architecture
16 00:01:21 left by the early Chinese civilization,
17 00:01:26 which, of course, is a 5,000-year civilization.
18 00:01:31 Here's the great international martial arts star, Jet Li,
19 00:01:36 who is playing the mummy in all his different forms.
20 00:01:41 We're creating here the atmosphere that was around what was called
21 00:01:47 "the period of the Seven Warring States" in China.
22 00:01:52 Up till about 200 B.C.,
23 00:01:55 seven territories that were within the boundaries
24 00:02:00 of the Han Chinese empire
25 00:02:04 were at constant civil war.
26 00:02:07 And ultimately, each king tried
27 00:02:11 to become the emperor and rule the other six.
28 00:02:15 And here, based on some true history,
29 00:02:19 assassins were sent out to murder
30 00:02:23 the one king that would be able to unite the country
31 00:02:28 and dominate the entire political system,
32 00:02:31 which is the character Jet Li plays.
33 00:02:34 And, by the way, the assassination attempt was the subject of Jet's movie Hero,
34 00:02:39 which was also loosely based on the history of the Qin Dynasty
35 00:02:44 and that emperor.
36 00:02:47 Here, in short strokes,
37 00:02:51 I was trying to show the misery
38 00:02:54 and ruthlessness of this editor...
39 00:02:58 Emperor,
40 00:03:00 not the editor. The editor was ruthless in other ways.
41 00:03:03 Anyway, the fact is that his drive across China
42 00:03:08 led to untold millions of deaths
43 00:03:12 and enslavements, executions, torture
44 00:03:16 and suppression of books
45 00:03:20 and Confucian laws
46 00:03:25 that had been in focus in China
47 00:03:28 for a thousand years before that.
48 00:03:32 And here, ultimately, we show you,
49 00:03:37 through slave labor, how the Great Wall of China was built.
50 00:03:42 However, the Great Wall that we depict
51 00:03:45 is a wall from 1200-1300 AD.
52 00:03:49 And the northern wall, as it's called, came from 200 B.C.,
53 00:03:53 was actually made of tamped earth and mud brick.
54 00:03:57 And like John Ford said,
55 00:04:00 "When given a chance between printing the truth and printing the legend,
56 00:04:02 "always print the legend."
57 00:04:04 And I wanted the audience
58 00:04:06 to see the Great Wall that they knew,
59 00:04:09 not a mud wall that would have been very con fusing,
60 00:04:13 even though we're historically inaccurate.
61 00:04:17 Here, Jet calls his favorite general,
62 00:04:19 and we see in the map of China that their garrisons
63 00:04:23 and his army has spread out throughout the land,
64 00:04:26 and he has total control of what is called Qin-a,
65 00:04:31 our Qin Dynasty China.
66 00:04:35 You know, the fact is that at the height,
67 00:04:39 the first emperor was able to field a million-man army.
68 00:04:44 We have 140-some-thousand in Iraq.
69 00:04:47 He could field a million.
70 00:04:49 And so that gives you some idea
71 00:04:53 of the power of this man.
72 00:04:56 As all emperors of China, they're symbolized by the dragon.
73 00:05:01 You'll see the three-headed dragon is a very important symbol
74 00:05:04 behind Jet and on his armor and everywhere,
75 00:05:08 his flags, banners, everything.
76 00:05:12 Also, the fact that emperors were like man-gods.
77 00:05:17 You were not allowed to look directly in their eyes.
78 00:05:20 You could not ever turn your back on the emperor.
79 00:05:25 As you see, people are treating him with deference
80 00:05:29 that we now associate with kings and popes.
81 00:05:33 But the despotic concentration of power,
82 00:05:40 thank God, has rarely been seen again.
83 00:05:43 Here, we shot out in Turfan at the actual monastery
84 00:05:49 near the Kazakhstan border.
85 00:05:51 Of course, this is a set we built in Shanghai,
86 00:05:54 where the two ill-fated lovers
87 00:05:58 realize that even though they've been warned
88 00:06:01 not to engage,
89 00:06:04 they are fighting a force even greater than the Emperor himself,
90 00:06:10 which is a transcendent love.
91 00:06:15 The book that's coming up
92 00:06:19 is actually a scroll called the oracle bones in the movie,
93 00:06:23 and if you look to the left,
94 00:06:25 those bones with the writing on it are the true oracle bones.
95 00:06:30 I had to give a form of concentrated knowledge,
96 00:06:34 but the real oracle bones were discovered
97 00:06:39 in the early to mid 20th century
98 00:06:44 with predictions about the future
99 00:06:47 etched on cow scapula and other bones.
100 00:06:52 So those were called the oracle bones.
101 00:06:55 So that is the basis of our idea of the book,
102 00:06:58 which, of course, had its antecedents
103 00:07:01 in the other two Mummy movies, with the Book of the Dead, et cetera.
104 00:07:07 This book was in fact rumored to have existed.
105 00:07:14 These libraries, like the Alexandria Library,
106 00:07:19 were repositories of all the knowledge of the ancient world,
107 00:07:24 and very little of it, unfortunately, has survived.
108 00:07:28 And here, Michelle Yeoh is reading the curse on the Emperor.
109 00:07:34 He thinks it's a blessing to become immortal,
110 00:07:38 but she's reading the curse in Sanskrit,
111 00:07:41 which is an ancient Aryan language
112 00:07:44 that very few people speak.
113 00:07:47 And today, there's almost no one.
114 00:07:49 And we got the only oral Sanskrit speaker in North America
115 00:07:54 to teach Michelle how to speak that curse for real.
116 00:08:02 Here, the horses to quarter the victim
117 00:08:08 was a favorite form of execution of this emperor,
118 00:08:11 as well as the cutting people in half at the waist
119 00:08:16 and, of course, sentencing them to living death,
120 00:08:21 building the Great Wall.
121 00:08:24 Whoops! That has to hurt.
122 00:08:26 I told Michelle there, "You do not give the Emperor the satisfaction of carrying on,
123 00:08:32 "when she sees her lover executed in such a brutal way,"
124 00:08:37 starting a show of strength in all the female characters in the film.
125 00:08:44 Now, the Terracotta Army of Xi'an is a real thing.
126 00:08:49 It was a tomb that was started...
127 00:08:53 The construction was started on it when the Emperor was about 14.
128 00:08:58 He died around 44,
129 00:09:01 and for 30 years, 700,000 artisans worked
130 00:09:05 to create the tomb,
131 00:09:08 waiting for the day when he would need it.
132 00:09:13 Of course, he wanted to be immortal, this is based on truth.
133 00:09:17 Now, we're twisting this to say
134 00:09:20 that the Terracotta Army came about
135 00:09:25 not as an homage to a living man-god despot,
136 00:09:31 but as a curse put on by this good witch.
137 00:09:35 And now, we see that his entire army and he
138 00:09:40 have been turned into Terracotta Warriors,
139 00:09:44 which were rediscovered in truth
140 00:09:47 in 1974 when a Chinese farmer was digging a well
141 00:09:51 and kept pulling up clay shards of eyes and hands and helmets
142 00:10:00 and so on, and that's when this wonder of the ancient world was rediscovered.
143 00:10:06 Okay, so, here's Brendan Fraser.
144 00:10:09 I needed an opening scene to show how he was bored out of his mind.
145 00:10:16 I, from time to time, go fly fishing,
146 00:10:19 and I thought, "What better image
147 00:10:22 "than to show the comedic talents of the great Brendan
148 00:10:28 "pursuing something quite different than where he was left in Mummy 2,
149 00:10:35 "no longer an adventurer,
150 00:10:37 "in England, bored out of his mind,
151 00:10:39 "having a Rick O'Connell-type fishing expedition,
152 00:10:44 "in which, of course, the Peacemaker comes into play?"
153 00:10:50 We shot that stream scene outside of Montreal,
154 00:10:53 and now we're at an estate outside of London, in Aylesbury.
155 00:10:59 Now we're back in an interior in Montreal
156 00:11:03 of the St. Stephen Club.
157 00:11:07 So with the magic of movies,
158 00:11:09 we basically made three locations into one.
159 00:11:17 And again, here's Rick,
160 00:11:19 about to get a blast from the past
161 00:11:23 and look at this costume of his from the French Foreign Legion,
162 00:11:28 which is the actual costume he wore in the first Mummy,
163 00:11:33 and to long for the days of adventure,
164 00:11:38 which clearly he's not having.
165 00:11:41 Now it's time to meet the new Evy, Maria Bello.
166 00:11:46 Rachel Weisz chose not to come back into the movie for personal reasons,
167 00:11:53 and I looked for someone with her beauty, strength, intelligence,
168 00:11:57 but someone as unexpected to be in a popcorn, summer tentpole movie
169 00:12:03 as Rachel was herself in the first Mummy, and I hit upon Maria Bello,
170 00:12:10 a very wonderful actress from The Cooler, from A History of Violence,
171 00:12:15 and a very beautiful and gifted woman.
172 00:12:18 And l thought, why not take a hot American woman
173 00:12:21 and give her a British accent,
174 00:12:23 rather than just assume this has to be a British actress?
175 00:12:27 And Maria brings her own unique American fire to this part.
176 00:12:33 And I spent a little time
177 00:12:38 in this first movement of the film
178 00:12:41 to introduce you to this new relationship,
179 00:12:45 which is in fact very different
180 00:12:47 than the Rick O'Connell-Evy Carnahan relationship in the first two films.
181 00:12:53 They are now married 20 years, they have a 20-year-old son
182 00:12:59 from their early relationship in Egypt.
183 00:13:03 And they're living on the wealth of her family
184 00:13:07 and the great Egyptian discoveries that they made.
185 00:13:12 They've been spies during the war for the British, so they've been...
186 00:13:16 They've had their war service, and now they're retired.
187 00:13:20 She has turned into a romantic novelist
188 00:13:24 who's novelized their first two adventures,
189 00:13:29 but now is struggling with writer's block
190 00:13:31 because unless she lived it, she doesn't know what to write.
191 00:13:35 And we begin to see that the new Rick and Evy
192 00:13:40 have lost a lot of the fire and a lot of the romance, heat, sexual attraction
193 00:13:47 that the old Rick and Evy had in the other two movies.
194 00:13:52 And of course, this will be rekindled through adventure.
195 00:13:56 And that really is my idea about life,
196 00:13:58 that you don't really get the juices flowing
197 00:14:02 unless you're out there on the line, out on a cutting edge,
198 00:14:08 where all of your systems are pumping at full speed.
199 00:14:13 And it's part of why I like to direct action movies,
200 00:14:16 because they are cinematic, they live on the motion factor
201 00:14:24 of film and what film does so well, capturing this action
202 00:14:28 and taking you on these different perspectives within action.
203 00:14:33 And it also gets the blood going,
204 00:14:35 and when the blood is going, all the senses come up or peak,
205 00:14:40 and when it comes to romance or sex,
206 00:14:45 definitely it's good to have those fluids pulsing through your body.
207 00:14:51 Here we're introducing the new Alex.
208 00:14:54 When we last saw Alex, he was eight. This is 13 years later.
209 00:14:58 Here he's 20, 21,
210 00:15:01 and he's played by a newcomer, Luke Ford,
211 00:15:05 who I found in Australia.
212 00:15:08 He's 6'3" and seemed to me to have a lot of Brendan in him
213 00:15:13 and a lot of Maria in him.
214 00:15:16 And he worked really well in a screen test,
215 00:15:20 which we may include in this DVD, with Brendan.
216 00:15:25 And you can see how the character came along.
217 00:15:31 He's acting against one of the great English theater actors,
218 00:15:38 David Calder, who was King Lear this last summer,
219 00:15:43 and to rave reviews.
220 00:15:46 A very capable guy, capable of many faces
221 00:15:52 and many, many moods, as you shall see.
222 00:15:57 I wanted to have a scene where, like Rick's fly fishing expedition misadventure,
223 00:16:03 that we showed Evy's, sort of, private life
224 00:16:09 and her longing for the adventure that she and Rick had in the past.
225 00:16:16 I thought, no better than to give her
226 00:16:19 a little Errol Flynn-Basil Rathbone kind of moment with the candles
227 00:16:23 and the running and jumping and fighting the enemy,
228 00:16:27 and of course, the butler, always good fora joke.
229 00:16:35 Here, the flip side of his wanting to seduce her,
230 00:16:41 she tries to seduce him.
231 00:16:43 And this is where, I think, Maria is so great,
232 00:16:49 because she is so unafraid to do whatever the scene demands
233 00:16:57 and to put her all in something
234 00:17:00 as silly as this little seduction scene that goes totally wrong,
235 00:17:06 but I loved her guts and gusto.
236 00:17:11 And, of course, you can always count on Brendan to take things to the max, too.
237 00:17:16 Coming up is my favorite cut in the movie,
238 00:17:18 the pinched nose to the blowing up of the head,
239 00:17:22 from London to China in a cut.
240 00:17:26 And now, we're at last going down below, into the tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
241 00:17:32 This is a very large set I had built in Montreal.
242 00:17:37 My wonderful production designer, Nigel Phelps,
243 00:17:40 shining in this set and in all the sets,
244 00:17:44 in their scale, their beauty, their period correctness
245 00:17:48 and the way they gave me a setting
246 00:17:53 to do the various action and information that the film needs.
247 00:18:01 Here, we're in the first section,
248 00:18:05 where the royal reality
249 00:18:10 of these Fu dog sculptures
250 00:18:14 and the gold ceiling that was collapsed
251 00:18:20 that you saw very briefly.
252 00:18:22 And, of course, what's a Mummy movie without a few mummies?
253 00:18:27 Here's number one.
254 00:18:29 Anyway, all of these ideas in this tomb
255 00:18:34 are based on the real tomb in Xi'an
256 00:18:38 in terms of its layout and the hypothesis
257 00:18:43 of where the army was and where the Emperor was actually buried.
258 00:18:50 The army has 800 of the warriors.
259 00:18:54 They think 8,000 warriors have been reassembled,
260 00:18:58 and these are the exact replicas of that actual army,
261 00:19:03 the chariots, the weapons,
262 00:19:06 which are no longer in the hands of the Terracotta Warriors.
263 00:19:09 They were taken away by the son of the first emperor,
264 00:19:14 who was a usurper and was afraid of rebellion,
265 00:19:18 so he had all the weapons removed.
266 00:19:20 But here, for the first time,
267 00:19:22 we see the exact replica of the army and the true weapons
268 00:19:28 and the way they were designed to hold them.
269 00:19:31 The pikes, the halberds,
270 00:19:33 the cavalry officers with their little hats there,
271 00:19:37 and the horses and their swords, being the cavalry,
272 00:19:42 and the layout of the army
273 00:19:47 and the chariots, I think, are all fairly accurate.
274 00:19:53 This mercury gas is another thing that's based, believe it or not, on truth,
275 00:19:59 that they had these rivers of mercury
276 00:20:03 that would vaporize over time
277 00:20:06 so that any grave robber who found the tomb
278 00:20:10 would instantly be poisoned.
279 00:20:13 And as strange as it may seem to you,
280 00:20:16 these crossbow guns are also a true Chinese design,
281 00:20:21 not just a movie design.
282 00:20:23 But when I saw them, how could I live without them?
283 00:20:28 Of course, throwing stars are a long-time Chinese weapon.
284 00:20:34 And so we bring all sorts of reality
285 00:20:38 or truth, historical truth, in a fictional context.
286 00:20:43 And none of the ideas... I did not limit myself to the ideas of,
287 00:20:49 "This is 200 B.C., everything has to be specific to that period."
288 00:20:56 There's so much great Chinese history
289 00:20:58 that I just wanted to get in the astrolabe and things that came later,
290 00:21:04 but! know my stuff, and I know when I'm diverting
291 00:21:08 from the historical points or truth to what works well
292 00:21:15 in the fantasy fiction form here in The Mummy.
293 00:21:21 Here, the feng shui compass is in fact normally set the opposite
294 00:21:27 to our polar orientation.
295 00:21:32 And again, using something that was Chinese
296 00:21:36 to have fun with an idea, as you'll see,
297 00:21:41 but these horses and chariots you see in the back of each frame,
298 00:21:46 these are these magnificent things that you can see in Xi'an
299 00:21:51 at the tomb site at the museum there.
300 00:21:54 If you are so lucky as to be able to go to China and see this,
301 00:21:59 it's something you will never, never forget.
302 00:22:05 These are concubines.
303 00:22:06 The Emperor was buried with his concubines
304 00:22:10 and with his pets and his horses, his favorite horses.
305 00:22:14 Anything that the Emperor had in life,
306 00:22:17 he was buried with and was supposed to pass or come back,
307 00:22:24 pass to another world or come back to this one
308 00:22:26 and have everything that he knew.
309 00:22:29 As life sometimes imitates art,
310 00:22:33 I had hypothesized that the Emperor would be buried underneath the army,
311 00:22:39 that his real "tomb" tomb, the crypt, would be underneath the army.
312 00:22:43 And sure enough, while we were shooting,
313 00:22:47 Chinese archeologists, through using radio cryptography or tomography,
314 00:22:54 found a tomb, an inverted pyramid, underneath the pit site of the army.
315 00:23:01 So they say they are not gonna dig it up for 50 years, which I don't understand,
316 00:23:07 but that's the last we heard about it.
317 00:23:13 I'm sure it's a complicated idea
318 00:23:16 to find the remains
319 00:23:18 of this first emperor that has become immortal,
320 00:23:22 not through taking potions, like what happened in his real life,
321 00:23:26 but became immortal through the tomb that was erected in his honor.
322 00:23:33 Here, we're introducing
323 00:23:36 a wonderful, bright, up-and-coming female star, Isabella Leong,
324 00:23:42 a wonderful actress who was born in Macau,
325 00:23:46 now lives in Hong Kong, but is a great beauty
326 00:23:51 and a wonderful presence to have in this film,
327 00:23:56 very fresh and remarkable in her loveliness.
328 00:24:01 Not here, because here she's trying to kill our young hero
329 00:24:06 because she doesn't know who he is or understand what he's doing in the tomb,
330 00:24:10 and she's doing everything she can
331 00:24:14 to make sure that this emperor is never raised.
332 00:24:17 Because what's a Mummy movie if we don't try to stop a mummy from being raised,
333 00:24:22 and then, of course, they're raised, and then we've got to stop them
334 00:24:26 before they rule the world?
335 00:24:31 I'm really proud of this scene, the scale of the set which you see here.
336 00:24:38 And it's a hope that you all get to Xi'an
337 00:24:43 or at least look it up, Google it,
338 00:24:45 so you can see how much verisimilitude is actually in the film.
339 00:24:51 Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist,
340 00:24:56 a guy I actually personally knew in college
341 00:24:59 when my girlfriend was going to Sarah Lawrence, where he taught,
342 00:25:03 he had many phrases that broke down a myth,
343 00:25:09 but one of them was the call to adventure,
344 00:25:13 and that each hero gets this call
345 00:25:17 and either listens to it or doesn't.
346 00:25:20 And here, Rick and Evy are getting their call to adventure
347 00:25:25 in the offer of the Foreign Office
348 00:25:28 of Britain, but our equivalent of the State Department,
349 00:25:34 saying, "We need you to courier this priceless artifact back to China."
350 00:25:40 And of course, Rick and Evy made a compact with each other
351 00:25:43 that they're going to retire and they're not going to risk their lives
352 00:25:46 and gallivant all over the world anymore.
353 00:25:50 And here, Maria and Brendan are so desperate
354 00:25:55 to get out of the house and have some adventure,
355 00:25:58 and each one doesn't want to be the first one
356 00:26:02 to break the compact between them.
357 00:26:07 So it's a fun scene where they're slowly
358 00:26:13 working their way towards mutually breaking the compact
359 00:26:18 and making a new compact to get back to the life
360 00:26:22 they were meant to have, meant to live.
361 00:26:26 Does this mean we can count on you one last time?
362 00:26:31 And again, we're off to Shanghai.
363 00:26:35 Now it's a few months later. It's Chinese New Year,
364 00:26:38 which takes place in February usually.
365 00:26:43 It's a two-week celebration.
366 00:26:45 Here's a set we built and refurbished on the Shanghai studio lot.
367 00:26:51 The set, most of it, existed before, but we gave it quite the facelift.
368 00:26:57 And here is a set, also right there in Shanghai,
369 00:27:01 at the Shanghai studios, of Jonathan's nightclub,
370 00:27:05 which... How could it be more perfect than to be an Egyptian-themed nightclub?
371 00:27:11 That's my dear friend Marcia Nasatir, my first agent,
372 00:27:15 literally my first friend in California,
373 00:27:18 who's acting with our inimitable John Hannah.
374 00:27:22 She plays a Russian princess, just, you know, after the war.
375 00:27:27 After World War II, Shanghai was one of the last places
376 00:27:32 that Russians and westerners could go easily,
377 00:27:37 so a lot of Russian Jews fled to Shanghai.
378 00:27:42 In fact, one of my producers on Stealth, Mike Medavoy,
379 00:27:46 his parents fled to Shanghai, and he was born in Shanghai.
380 00:27:51 Of course, this is all before Mao and the Long March
381 00:27:55 and the shift in China from these decadent days
382 00:28:02 in Shanghai, when westerners ruled the city,
383 00:28:06 and the Germans, the English, the Americans, the French,
384 00:28:10 all had their own quarters,
385 00:28:12 and sex, drugs and rock and roll, well, swing, was the order of the day.
386 00:28:21 Yeah, working with John was a fantastic delight,
387 00:28:26 because he's inventive, he's bold,
388 00:28:29 and he knows this character really, really well.
389 00:28:33 And I wanted to give him more to do in this film
390 00:28:36 than either of the other two films,
391 00:28:39 which you'll see as his character develops.
392 00:28:44 Coming on stage now is a wonderful Irish actor,
393 00:28:48 Liam Cunningham.
394 00:28:50 I definitely..
395 00:28:53 I saw him in The Wind That Shakes the Barley
396 00:28:56 and had to have him.
397 00:28:58 And of course, the kid over his right shoulder
398 00:29:00 actually is my son, Kyle, who was going to university in Shanghai,
399 00:29:05 at Fudan University, so I said, "Here, I'm gonna put you to work,
400 00:29:09 "make you a flyboy who's a bully-boy intent on beating up Luke Ford."
401 00:29:16 Now, that would be an interesting fight to wager on,
402 00:29:20 since they're both... Kyle's 6'l", Luke's 6'3",
403 00:29:26 but Kyle's a Krav Maga guy, which is how I got to Krav Maga
404 00:29:30 for Brendan in this film.
405 00:29:32 Krav Maga's an Israeli martial arts system of great brutality and directness,
406 00:29:38 which is what we trained Brendan in
407 00:29:41 to fight Jet Li in the third act, in the mano a mano sequence.
408 00:29:47 Now, here's a relatable situation that I really loved, which is,
409 00:29:51 the father cannot see that the son has grown up.
410 00:29:55 He's lied to them. He's been in the deserts of China
411 00:29:58 and not at Harvard, where they thought he was.
412 00:30:02 But the big problem in the film for the parents is that
413 00:30:08 they don't know who their son really is.
414 00:30:11 They were busy during the war, helping with the war effort.
415 00:30:15 They parked him in Australia, in boarding school,
416 00:30:18 and they thought they were being good parents.
417 00:30:23 But they have grown out of touch
418 00:30:25 with the fact that their son is now a young man.
419 00:30:29 And Rick, especially, the old bull, cannot acknowledge
420 00:30:33 that the young bull has the strength that he does.
421 00:30:36 And part of what I liked doing in this film was building it around the family,
422 00:30:43 and some true, relatable family issues,
423 00:30:46 father and son trying to understand each other,
424 00:30:52 husband and wife trying to deal
425 00:30:54 with the weight and complexity of a 20-year marriage
426 00:30:59 that has lost a lot of its fire,
427 00:31:02 and to make The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
428 00:31:07 have an emotional core that was relatable,
429 00:31:11 so that the action was about characters you care about,
430 00:31:16 and who, hopefully, you're interested in,
431 00:31:18 as opposed to just a bunch of action strung together.
432 00:31:23 Here is an extraordinary actor, Anthony Wong,
433 00:31:28 one of the great Hong Kong actors, star of a zillion Hong Kong films,
434 00:31:33 the most famous of which is probably Infernal Affairs,
435 00:31:41 where he played the part that eventually became
436 00:31:43 the Jack Nicholson part in The Departed.
437 00:31:46 A wonderful face, a very lovely guy,
438 00:31:50 but plays a very tough, dark villain in a lot of his films.
439 00:31:55 I guess his physiognomy is destiny.
440 00:32:00 Next to him is a young woman doing her first part,
441 00:32:05 Jessey Meng, a wonderful, tall,
442 00:32:10 six-foot-tall woman from Hong Kong
443 00:32:13 who is a TV presenter and game show host and that sort of thing.
444 00:32:17 And I wanted a physically imposing woman,
445 00:32:22 and when I met her, I had to have her,
446 00:32:26 and she was so beautiful that I gave her a scar.
447 00:32:29 And that way, it would be easier to tell her from other women in the film,
448 00:32:34 and also to try to mess up that beautiful face,
449 00:32:40 and of course, it only made her sexier.
450 00:32:42 So what can you do? Some people have it, some people don't.
451 00:32:46 Here's another set we built, the Shanghai Museum set,
452 00:32:50 on the Shanghai studio lot.
453 00:32:53 Jonathan and his Rolls, which will not have a great fate by the end of this night.
454 00:33:00 And here is a museum archeological laboratory,
455 00:33:05 where, in fact, they are working on restoring an artifact.
456 00:33:11 Anne Kuijian, our great set decorator,
457 00:33:14 did a great deal of research, and all of the tools, the whole layout,
458 00:33:21 is completely correct to the skills
459 00:33:26 and inquiry of archeologists
460 00:33:31 and how they would go about restoring such a priceless discovery,
461 00:33:37 this chariot and this bronze statue of the Emperor
462 00:33:42 with the sarcophagus in the back on this wagon,
463 00:33:47 and all the things that this would lead to if it were a true discovery.
464 00:33:53 So having Brendan lean against the horse's ass
465 00:33:57 while he's being a horse's ass was something I enjoyed.
466 00:34:02 Just the subtle imagery of it, I don't know if anybody would get it
467 00:34:05 if! didn't say anything, but every time I see it, I like it.
468 00:34:11 Just an interesting filmmaking thing, this hallway
469 00:34:14 was one hallway that we dressed three different times
470 00:34:21 to make it seem like the museum had all these hallways.
471 00:34:26 And just, again, a little bit of movie switching reality
472 00:34:32 and making it look like something else.
473 00:34:36 Here, the couple is beginning,
474 00:34:40 in their new sense of adventure and the unexpected,
475 00:34:43 being in a foreign place,
476 00:34:45 to get rekindled,
477 00:34:47 to have the romantic element of their relationship rekindled,
478 00:34:53 interrupted by Professor Wilson, David Calder.
479 00:34:56 And we're now beginning
480 00:35:00 to bring all the threads of the plot together,
481 00:35:04 to begin the next big story movement of the awakening of the mummy
482 00:35:10 and the pursuit of the mummy in the film.
483 00:35:18 Here, Brendan did an improv. This was totally Brendan,
484 00:35:22 this idea that he would be so clumsy on purpose,
485 00:35:28 and with the Eye of Shangri-La,
486 00:35:31 the precious artifact that they were supposed to return to Wilson.
487 00:35:35 And of course, right here, the plot is about to thicken, as they say.
488 00:35:43 Yang, a warlord from western China, this was really true,
489 00:35:48 after the Japanese were defeated,
490 00:35:51 many of the powers that helped defeat the Japanese
491 00:35:54 had their areas of complete control, very much like Afghanistan today.
492 00:35:59 And they were called warlords and they had great power,
493 00:36:04 sometimes controlled illicit trades like the opium trade or illegal arms,
494 00:36:10 but they had resource and standing,
495 00:36:14 and many of them were vying for the control of China.
496 00:36:19 And here in our story, Yang has the crazy plan
497 00:36:25 to awaken the Emperor
498 00:36:27 and to restore him as an immortal on the throne of all of China
499 00:36:34 and probably all of the world.
500 00:36:37 Because you know, mummies never just want a small thing,
501 00:36:42 especially when they're played by the great Jet Li.
502 00:36:47 One of the things I really wanted to do is have a...
503 00:36:50 Always wanted to have a kung fu fight in an evening gown,
504 00:36:54 which is coming up, but as you'll see,
505 00:36:59 Maria is not just the damsel in distress,
506 00:37:03 she carries a switchblade in her garters.
507 00:37:05 She's ready to fight,
508 00:37:10 and I don't wanna give anything away, but you'll see that soon.
509 00:37:16 Here, the challenge of this scene as a director was that,
510 00:37:20 literally, seven of the eight leading actors
511 00:37:25 are on set at one time.
512 00:37:28 And this is a wonderful opportunity
513 00:37:32 to stage a complex scene.
514 00:37:36 But it's also one of complexity unto the logistics
515 00:37:41 that all these actors have to be covered at all these different moments,
516 00:37:46 and the screen geography,
517 00:37:50 the dramatic emphasis that comes in the editing phase,
518 00:37:54 all has to be thought of as you're directing it.
519 00:37:59 And it was always interesting to me,
520 00:38:03 because in this film, more than any I've done,
521 00:38:06 there were so many leading characters onscreen at the same time.
522 00:38:12 Now, you have Wilson, Yang and Choi, three villains
523 00:38:17 and two heroes down below,
524 00:38:20 now you have two more heroes going to come into the action, that's seven.
525 00:38:26 And then, you're gonna have the Emperor very soon.
526 00:38:32 And that is eight characters in a smaller space.
527 00:38:37 It's not a large... It's a big set, but not huge.
528 00:38:41 So eight characters interacting,
529 00:38:44 and trying to make sure that each moment is covered.
530 00:38:50 Here's one of our big, first... Not big, but first complex special effects,
531 00:38:57 visual effects, the gold snakes unraveling and slithering off
532 00:39:03 And the Eye of Shangri-La, this giant blue diamond
533 00:39:08 opening up and containing the elixir from the Pool of Eternal Life,
534 00:39:14 which is not water. I wanted it to be something else.
535 00:39:17 So I decided, what would happen if diamonds were liquefied?
536 00:39:23 If we could shrink diamonds to the level of a pixel,
537 00:39:27 and have them faceted and reflective and so on?
538 00:39:32 And so, as you'll see, as the movie goes on,
539 00:39:37 the substance is actually something other than just a normal liquid.
540 00:39:45 Here, the first stunts we did in the movie.
541 00:39:51 The movie was choreographed by Vic Armstrong,
542 00:39:56 my amazing... Well, everybody's amazing stunt coordinator
543 00:40:01 and action unit director.
544 00:40:04 He was my partner in all of this madness,
545 00:40:08 and a greater guy you'll never find.
546 00:40:12 His name is synonymous with all the great action films of our time,
547 00:40:18 including the Bonds,
548 00:40:20 and all the Indiana Jones except the last one,
549 00:40:24 and you just look, IMDb him,
550 00:40:30 and look at that r¨¦sum¨¦,
551 00:40:32 and you'll understand why it was an honor to have him on The Mummy,
552 00:40:37 and why it's an honor now to have him as a friend.
553 00:40:42 And of course,
554 00:40:45 the mummy is about to make its entrance into the film.
555 00:40:52 There was a lot I worried about with this idea I had called liquid solids.
556 00:40:57 How could I make things that were bronze,
557 00:41:01 things that were terracotta, to move?
558 00:41:04 And I came up with this idea of this cracking and re-melding of the material,
559 00:41:11 and you'll see that in both the Emperor
560 00:41:14 and the horses in the film.
561 00:41:20 Here is the Terra cotta Emperor,
562 00:41:24 full CG creation, based on Jet Li, his face,
563 00:41:30 and the burnt under-mummy
564 00:41:33 that was what is left of the horrible death
565 00:41:39 that Michelle Yeoh gave him with the curse.
566 00:41:43 A gain, Jet Li's voice modified to reflect the burnt,
567 00:41:50 wispy, and cicada-type end of his Iarynx,
568 00:41:56 the horrible disfigurement
569 00:41:58 and the curse of eternally being encased in the terracotta.
570 00:42:05 And his abilities, remember from the prologue,
571 00:42:09 he has the control over the five elements, including fire,
572 00:42:13 which you just saw him use
573 00:42:15 by heating up his hand to cauterize Wilson's head off
574 00:42:20 And it was a sad thing to kill off David Calder,
575 00:42:24 but you know, he chose to be a two-faced villain, not me.
576 00:42:29 No, he was great all the way through.
577 00:42:32 You see the horses.
578 00:42:33 You see the molten interior
579 00:42:38 and the fact that the plates, the vectors of stress break and reform,
580 00:42:44 and this was all very complex algorithms that we did at Rhythm&Hues,
581 00:42:49 the visual effects company that did all the horses
582 00:42:54 and this chase through Shanghai.
583 00:42:56 The other company was Digital Domain,
584 00:42:59 who did the conversion to terracotta when the Emperor's cursed
585 00:43:05 and, as you'll see, the entire battle sequence in the third act.
586 00:43:12 What? No!
587 00:43:14 There are over 1,000 3-D effects in the film.
588 00:43:18 It's a huge load that we got done in record time,
589 00:43:22 using two companies primarily, Rhythm&Hues and Digital Domain,
590 00:43:27 as well as my old friend Syd Dutton at Illusion Arts.
591 00:43:32 We used CIS and Pac Title,
592 00:43:35 all of which worked very well together, and Cafe Effects.
593 00:43:40 But a thousand visual effects is no small order.
594 00:43:44 And you'll see many of them in this chase sequence.
595 00:43:47 When I read the script, by our veteran and very witty writers,
596 00:43:52 Al Gough and Miles Millar,
597 00:43:55 they had a form of this chase in there, and I went, "There is..."
598 00:43:59 I'd been to China many times.
599 00:44:01 There is no Shanghai, 1946-1947-era, left.
600 00:44:08 The Bund, what's left of it, is all on the waterfront.
601 00:44:13 It's all high-class shopping, Prada, et cetera.
602 00:44:19 And there's no way to control it,
603 00:44:22 and there's no way that you can have an extended chase.
604 00:44:26 And that's when we found the Shanghai studio had
605 00:44:31 a very nice-sized standing set of period Shanghai.
606 00:44:36 So we went there and began to lay out
607 00:44:41 how something that was on the move
608 00:44:44 at 30-40 miles an hour, whatever horses can do,
609 00:44:50 was onscreen for some six minutes,
610 00:44:55 and how to do all these stunts.
611 00:44:58 And this was one of the best
612 00:45:02 and most fun technical challenges I ever had,
613 00:45:06 because I had this one idea, the actors should do it all.
614 00:45:10 And if you watch the chase,
615 00:45:13 you'll see that there are very few times
616 00:45:18 when there are stunt actors in the chase.
617 00:45:23 And Vic and I had to work really hard
618 00:45:28 to figure out how to make Brendan and Maria and all,
619 00:45:32 John Hannah, all of them safe.
620 00:45:34 And of course, we did set John Hannah on fire.
621 00:45:38 That was not a trick. I mean, it's a fire trick for movies,
622 00:45:42 but John actually had his ass on fire and told me it got quite hot.
623 00:45:49 Anyway, Brendan riding these bronze horses
624 00:45:54 was a complex rig to..
625 00:45:57 This, by the way, was a full CG shot.
626 00:46:00 If you go back and see Brendan catching up to the wagon,
627 00:46:05 it's totally CG Brendan, CG horse.
628 00:46:09 Here, we have CG Emperor and CG horse,
629 00:46:13 but real Brendan on a bucking horse.
630 00:46:18 All along the perimeter of the chase are observations
631 00:46:23 about Chinese New Year in Shanghai in that post-World War II period.
632 00:46:28 There were 500 dressed extras we had every night
633 00:46:33 to give you the feeling of life and people on the streets.
634 00:46:37 But the costumes that Sanja Hays did for the whole movie are, I think,
635 00:46:43 rich and textured and befitting and becoming to the actors,
636 00:46:50 as well as descriptive of who the actors are,
637 00:46:54 and the 500 costumes, the nightclub, the armor,
638 00:47:00 the tunics, the entire look of the film.
639 00:47:05 Sanja, who did The Fast and the Furious for me and xXx for me,
640 00:47:11 you know, brings her great taste and lovely flair for design to the film.
641 00:47:20 Here, we have this twist that,
642 00:47:23 how could she get shot point-blank and just be fine and...
643 00:47:27 I chose not to show the bullets healing up
644 00:47:31 and hope that the mystery would be even greater
645 00:47:36 by not explaining it at this point.
646 00:47:42 Here, we have the Beijing Opera doing The Monkey King.
647 00:47:48 We really staged the opera with the real Chinese opera stars.
648 00:47:54 And it was a fitting climax, operatic climax,
649 00:47:59 for Brendan and Luke and Isabella's adventure.
650 00:48:03 And here, the bail out of the truck in an evening gown,
651 00:48:10 done by our very fine stunt people from Montreal,
652 00:48:18 not only sexy, but speaks French.
653 00:48:22 And a stunt in an evening gown, I love it.
654 00:48:25 Anyway, we had the Chinese experts, the people who...
655 00:48:31 A descendant from the people who invented fireworks
656 00:48:33 do these fireworks, various fireworks displays in the movie.
657 00:48:37 And it was wonderful to see all the things of which they're capable.
658 00:48:45 Here was a challenge, again, as a director, trying to figure out
659 00:48:48 how to do the Johnny-the-explainer scene, or the exposition scene,
660 00:48:54 and put a sugar coating around the pill that must be swallowed.
661 00:49:00 We must know the rules. We must know the goals.
662 00:49:03 We must know the logic that will set the adventure in its next movement.
663 00:49:09 And I chose to keep these people wrecked
664 00:49:14 and in pain, burnt, ripped, destroyed,
665 00:49:19 so that as they are talking about the rules,
666 00:49:25 there's a certain amount of comedy, and the family story is continuing.
667 00:49:33 Here, the romance, the attraction of the young actors is beginning to surface.
668 00:49:38 And I said to Isabella, "The more you talk
669 00:49:41 "about the truth of your life, the crazier you sound."
670 00:49:48 And to give Maria as much to play against as possible.
671 00:49:53 But again, little moments of levity and fun
672 00:49:57 as we're getting all of the loose ends wrapped up
673 00:50:03 from the previous first act of the film,
674 00:50:06 and the second act rules being laid out, the goals.
675 00:50:14 This was a good scene.
676 00:50:16 Now, they commented on my beads, and I'm rattling them so you can hear them.
677 00:50:22 I'm a practicing Buddhist, and these are Buddhist prayer beads.
678 00:50:27 One set comes from Tibet, this set,
679 00:50:32 and this was given to me by a Chinese monk, Buddhist monk,
680 00:50:37 while we were shooting The Mummy.
681 00:50:39 And this beautiful blue amber one was given to me by Jet Li
682 00:50:43 as a gift at the wrap, and from his own collection.
683 00:50:47 And that is not the real gift Jet gave me.
684 00:50:52 He gave me many gifts that were not material.
685 00:50:55 He's a Buddhist, he's a generous man, and his One Foundation
686 00:51:02 is truly an effective charity group,
687 00:51:07 totally involved in, like, the rescue of people in the earthquake
688 00:51:13 that hit China this spring.
689 00:51:17 He has a beautiful vision, he's a beautiful man,
690 00:51:20 and if you wanna support the One Foundation,
691 00:51:24 he'll take a penny or 10 cents.
692 00:51:28 He doesn't want big donations, he just wants a lot of small donations.
693 00:51:33 Kind of like my man, Obama. Obama's got a lot to do with The Mummy,
694 00:51:38 because he's also gonna lift the curse
695 00:51:41 and bring the country back from the dead.
696 00:51:44 I thought I'd just put in my political plug.
697 00:51:47 Hopefully, by the time you're getting this DVD,
698 00:51:50 he's the president-elect of the United States.
699 00:51:54 Here, this crash-landing is totally CG.
700 00:52:00 We, of course, never could go to this kind of location,
701 00:52:05 and to do a crash-landing on a glacier
702 00:52:08 would be very hairy indeed, as you now see.
703 00:52:12 And through the power of the computer,
704 00:52:18 we're able to do these sophisticated 3-D environments
705 00:52:23 and bring a kind of thrill to the filmmaking process
706 00:52:30 that, if you don't overuse it, you use it correctly,
707 00:52:35 can really enhance the movie and bring us into realms of imagination
708 00:52:41 that we weren't able to explore before the advent of CG, you know.
709 00:52:46 I got in on it early with my film Dragon heart.
710 00:52:49 It was the second CG film ever made, after Jurassic Park,
711 00:52:53 and the first one that used CG to create a character.
712 00:52:57 And now, I look at this under-mummy character
713 00:53:01 that's acting out here, and you go,
714 00:53:06 "When I was doing Dragon heart, this was unthinkable
715 00:53:10 "that you could do a human or a human-like character
716 00:53:14 "in full CG and have it be this lifelike and expressive."
717 00:53:20 My friend David Fincher is bringing out this film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,
718 00:53:25 in which Brad Pitt, at different ages, is fully CG.
719 00:53:33 So it's come a long way, baby, from those early days
720 00:53:38 in 1993-94
721 00:53:42 when it was first developed at ILM.
722 00:53:48 So here, we have a combination of aerial photography
723 00:53:52 in mountains on the west coast of Canada
724 00:53:57 combined with full CG characters hiking through the snow.
725 00:54:02 This, of course, was on a stage, with no glass in the canopy, I might add,
726 00:54:07 that's all digital glass, digital plane, real plate.
727 00:54:11 Here, a set in Montreal,
728 00:54:15 it was 90 degrees and just so hot.
729 00:54:21 I was in shorts and a T-shirt, and I just...
730 00:54:25 The actors, we needed to do everything to keep them cool,
731 00:54:29 as cool as possible.
732 00:54:31 So here, again, real mountains, CG people.
733 00:54:37 Real set in Montreal in a parking lot.
734 00:54:43 It was so good when we filled in the parts so we couldn't see all the parked cars.
735 00:54:48 This was an interior on a set in a warehouse in Montreal.
736 00:54:55 So we were able to,
737 00:55:00 hopefully, create the persuasive illusion that they were trekking in the Himalayas,
738 00:55:05 trying to find Shangri-La,
739 00:55:09 and do it in a way that made it possible to do it,
740 00:55:14 either interior or exterior sets, plate photography, complete 3-D modeling
741 00:55:21 and human elements, or all of the above mixed into one scene.
742 00:55:30 Now, we take a little time, now, to further the character development.
743 00:55:35 The mother and son reaching back to each other,
744 00:55:39 and the son putting his foot in his mouth.
745 00:55:43 I love the way Luke did it, where he knew it was a mistake
746 00:55:46 even while his mouth was still moving to form the words.
747 00:55:50 And a great comeback for all young people
748 00:55:54 whenever their parents ask them uncomfortable questions,
749 00:55:58 just shoot back,
750 00:56:01 "Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answers to."
751 00:56:05 So, a little bit of bridge building between mother and son.
752 00:56:10 And now, another abortive attempt at romance.
753 00:56:17 Isabella... I totally love the way she looks in this sequence.
754 00:56:23 You see the beauty of her face
755 00:56:26 and the loveliness and the intelligence of her acting.
756 00:56:32 This is a young woman who did not speak English, really, when I cast her,
757 00:56:37 and through the course of the production, became totally fluent,
758 00:56:41 and now can speak it almost without an accent.
759 00:56:47 She's a very clever and very talented young woman, just turned 20,
760 00:56:54 and I wish her the best of long and fruitful careers, to Luke also.
761 00:57:00 We used to call him Lukey.
762 00:57:02 She used to call him Lukey Long-Long for some reason.
763 00:57:04 I can't figure out what that reason might be.
764 00:57:08 The expression is !!kick my ass.!!
765 00:57:11 And for the record, you didn't.
766 00:57:16 Here you're way up.
767 00:57:18 I always get almost
768 00:57:21 a sort of height phobia,
769 00:57:25 looking down there.
770 00:57:27 I... It has a very visceral effect on me.
771 00:57:30 I wrote this thing about John Hannah and the yak.
772 00:57:34 I kind of needed him to have more to say
773 00:57:37 and more to say to someone,
774 00:57:39 but as each couple is paired off in their private scenes or the family,
775 00:57:44 I thought, "Why not give him a yak
776 00:57:48 "and let a certain kind of sweet relationship
777 00:57:54 "form up between him and the yak?"
778 00:57:56 Now the yak, we called Geraldine,
779 00:57:59 because there was a sort of female idea around her,
780 00:58:04 is actually a yak named King, who's a male
781 00:58:08 and was a gift to the queen...
782 00:58:14 From the Queen of England to some people in Canada,
783 00:58:18 or at least his parents were these royal yaks,
784 00:58:22 and so King is actually Sir King.
785 00:58:27 Anyway, here a scene I asked Gough and Millar to write.
786 00:58:32 I wanted to see the father and the son,
787 00:58:35 both who are weapons fanatics,
788 00:58:39 get into it, and of course,
789 00:58:41 they're talking about everything but weapons.
790 00:58:45 And through this gun comparison,
791 00:58:50 they're actually testing the limits of their relationship,
792 00:58:55 and who's worthy with the current knowledge
793 00:58:59 of how to proceed against the Emperor,
794 00:59:02 with Brendan kind of in the old school and Luke in the new school
795 00:59:07 with the new-school weapons.
796 00:59:09 And of course, all the weapons are, in fact, period-correct.
797 00:59:13 That is, this Russian PPS-38 or whatever it was called,
798 00:59:18 and Brendan has the Thompson machine gun,
799 00:59:22 which he is famous, from the other two movies,
800 00:59:25 for using like a signature weapon.
801 00:59:28 Of course, Brendan will use swords
802 00:59:31 and his son's guns and the Peacemaker
803 00:59:36 and everything else before the movie is over,
804 00:59:39 including his two fists
805 00:59:42 and the mystical dagger.
806 00:59:46 Brendan is unique among actors for me
807 00:59:50 because of his ability to take the pie in the face,
808 00:59:54 his love of humor.
809 00:59:58 And here's a guy 6'2", handsome,
810 01:00:03 the body of an Adonis, as you'll see later on,
811 01:00:07 and really would rather slip on a banana peel
812 01:00:11 and face-plant into a mud puddle.
813 01:00:14 And that is unique.
814 01:00:15 Most male actors don't want
815 01:00:19 to play games with their image
816 01:00:22 and are very reluctant
817 01:00:25 to ever take any sort of humiliation or show fear,
818 01:00:31 and Brendan relishes it.
819 01:00:33 He's also an incredible dramatic actor.
820 01:00:36 If you haven't seen his films Gods and Monsters or The Quiet American,
821 01:00:42 please rent them at your video store or Netflix,
822 01:00:46 because you will be very impressed and moved by his abilities
823 01:00:51 when he's not being funny.
824 01:00:53 The other thing that's great about Big B, as I call him,
825 01:00:57 is his stunt abilities.
826 01:01:00 This is an actor that you can really ask to do his own stunts.
827 01:01:05 He's very physical, he's very strong,
828 01:01:08 and he likes to do his own,
829 01:01:12 because he likes the authenticity.
830 01:01:16 He's very methodical and careful
831 01:01:19 as you lay out the choreography and what you want him to do,
832 01:01:23 but then, as you'll see over and over again in this film,
833 01:01:27 it is really him doing the wire ratchets
834 01:01:32 or the fights.
835 01:01:35 He took a lot of punishment, but he gave a performance
836 01:01:40 that I think you can feel great authenticity within it.
837 01:01:47 This is a set, again, built in a parking lot
838 01:01:50 outside the studio in Montreal.
839 01:01:53 All these mountain sequences were shot in August.
840 01:01:57 It was so hot and humid, and even here,
841 01:02:03 John Hannah got pneumonia from the sweating,
842 01:02:09 and whatever else he does at night
843 01:02:12 that might engender pneumonia.
844 01:02:15 But he really was a trouper and hung in there even with a high fever
845 01:02:21 when everybody was sweating,
846 01:02:23 so he didn't look any different than anybody else.
847 01:02:27 We created the snow out of about 100 tons of Epsom salt.
848 01:02:34 So all this crystalline stuff that looks like thy powder snow
849 01:02:40 is Epsom salt.
850 01:02:41 And the blown snow is a very beautiful device
851 01:02:46 that will spin liquid soap
852 01:02:51 into these flakes that are completely snow-like
853 01:02:57 in terms of the way they stick in the hair, et cetera.
854 01:03:03 So you got the soap and the Epsom salt, you could've taken a bath.
855 01:03:07 Here are my favorite creatures maybe that I've ever done, the yeti.
856 01:03:13 They are a cross between the polar bear and the Tibetan snow leopard.
857 01:03:20 You'll see both animals reflected,
858 01:03:22 the snow leopard and the polar bear, both highly endangered species,
859 01:03:27 the snow leopard even more than the polar bear.
860 01:03:32 Both creatures of incredible beauty,
861 01:03:37 the polar bear, not from the Himalayas, but the snow leopard is.
862 01:03:41 So I created these bipedal things with creature designer Aaron Sims,
863 01:03:46 who did all the creatures in the movie,
864 01:03:49 the yeti, designed the Terracotta Emperor, designed the three-headed dragon,
865 01:03:55 the lion dog that you'll see later on
866 01:03:58 and all of the different foundation warriors,
867 01:04:04 the desiccated warriors that Michelle Yeoh calls into battle in the end.
868 01:04:09 Now here, Brendan is doing Krav Maga.
869 01:04:13 It is sort of everything that can be effective.
870 01:04:19 If you go back and look at the fight,
871 01:04:22 it is very unflowery, very direct,
872 01:04:25 full of leg jams and back elbows and head butts
873 01:04:31 and taking the enemy's weapon and using it against him.
874 01:04:35 So you find all these things in this fighting style,
875 01:04:42 which is used by the Israeli army,
876 01:04:45 and which was an answer
877 01:04:50 of what Brendan could do to fight Jet Li.
878 01:04:54 So you had the wushu, the beautiful balletic wushu
879 01:04:59 that Jet is world champion and master of,
880 01:05:04 and then you have Brendan with his strength
881 01:05:07 and this sort of bar-fighting technique.
882 01:05:10 Now, there's one of my favorite yeti shots, the upside-down yeti.
883 01:05:15 Working this out with wires to know how to handle Anthony Wong
884 01:05:21 so that the yeti could really look like he was handling him.
885 01:05:25 All that took extensive pre-production,
886 01:05:28 storyboarding, planning, and then, of course,
887 01:05:30 we get the re on the day, and all that goes down the drain,
888 01:05:34 and you have to make it up as you go along.
889 01:05:37 There's a lot of that in filmmaking where you have a plan,
890 01:05:42 but as Napoleon said,
891 01:05:44 "The plan rarely outlives the first shot of a battle."
892 01:05:52 Here, John Hannah improvising like mad.
893 01:06:00 I would give him situations. I'd give him the essence,
894 01:06:06 but I wouldn't let him have the script,
895 01:06:07 so he hated me, but got with it,
896 01:06:12 and we've now become good buddies.
897 01:06:15 And I love the spontaneity of his performance.
898 01:06:20 Here, Rhythm&Hues
899 01:06:24 creating these icicles and creating the yeti
900 01:06:29 and the mountain,
901 01:06:30 and the under-mummy is created by Digital Domain.
902 01:06:34 And both visual effects houses had to work together,
903 01:06:38 including sharing proprietary software,
904 01:06:41 passing backgrounds and foregrounds back and forth
905 01:06:46 depending on who was responsible for what.
906 01:06:48 So there you have a Rhythm&Hues background
907 01:06:51 and a Digital Domain under-mummy,
908 01:06:54 and here we're back to a Rhythm&Hues terracotta mummy.
909 01:07:08 This is a good example of Brendan doing his own stunts.
910 01:07:14 The climb up this thing was a long way up.
911 01:07:21 Of course, he had a guide wire on him,
912 01:07:24 but still willing to take the fall.
913 01:07:28 And now coming up to do his own ratchet, which hurts. Bang!
914 01:07:35 Not an easy thing to withstand so much force,
915 01:07:41 but Big B, you can always count on him.
916 01:07:47 Here you have a totally digital shot.
917 01:07:51 The only real thing is the tip of the stupa, the Buddhist temple, the gold tower,
918 01:07:57 or the golden tower as it became known in the post-production.
919 01:08:05 It's part of why I love movies.
920 01:08:08 It's just the ability to create illusion.
921 01:08:11 It just is endless and fascinating,
922 01:08:16 how much new technical progress
923 01:08:21 and new storytelling abilities that happen each year
924 01:08:26 in the digital effects world.
925 01:08:31 The explosion done in Western Canada.
926 01:08:33 Its effects felt in Eastern Canada.
927 01:08:38 And all supposed to be in the mountains of Tibet,
928 01:08:43 shot in August, when it was scorching hot.
929 01:08:47 And here comes an avalanche.
930 01:08:49 Now, I've done an avalanche before, in xXx,
931 01:08:53 but I used particle animation to solve the problems.
932 01:08:57 And here, Derek Spears and I talked about using fluid simulations
933 01:09:03 or fluid dynamics to do this avalanche.
934 01:09:07 So the avalanche is actually, technically, done a different way than the xXx avalanche,
935 01:09:14 which was done with Joel Hynek, who's a co-supervisor here.
936 01:09:18 So Derek and Joel, I took different approaches,
937 01:09:22 because this approach was not technically possible
938 01:09:27 only four or five years ago.
939 01:09:33 Blowing snow turbo-rotors at high speed there
940 01:09:37 to get the human actors wrapped into the experience.
941 01:09:42 And this little subplot about the diamond was something that I came up with
942 01:09:47 halfway through the movie,
943 01:09:49 that John Hannah would have a relationship with the diamond.
944 01:09:54 And if you track here on the DVD,
945 01:09:58 you'll see exactly how and when he got it.
946 01:10:02 And, of course, if we're so lucky as to be a big hit,
947 01:10:07 and they want to do a fourth Mummy movie,
948 01:10:11 I think Jonathan is on his way to Peru with the diamond,
949 01:10:16 and then the diamond has more power than we've revealed in this version,
950 01:10:21 this chapter of The Mummy.
951 01:10:23 Again, the actors being pulled up out of a membrane of Epsom salt
952 01:10:29 and other snow material by the yeti,
953 01:10:33 but of course it was by
954 01:10:37 several big kind of weightlifter, wrestler guys in green suits,
955 01:10:45 and then the yeti put in later.
956 01:10:48 I did very little greenscreen, almost none, almost no green-suit guys.
957 01:10:54 It's now possible, in the digital world, to just skip all that
958 01:11:00 and create it from whole pixels.
959 01:11:08 Here, digital yeti on a set in a parking lot.
960 01:11:14 We made it!
961 01:11:21 Here's another of my favorite sets that Nigel built.
962 01:11:27 This hidden Buddhist shrine in a cave,
963 01:11:34 overlooking the valley of Shangri-La
964 01:11:36 and the housing of the Pool of Eternal Life.
965 01:11:40 And the re-introduction of the magnificent and transcendent beauty,
966 01:11:47 Michelle Yeoh, into the film.
967 01:11:51 And clearly alive,
968 01:11:55 even though she was stabbed by the Emperor 2,200 years before.
969 01:12:01 We are in a fantasy,
970 01:12:03 and we are at the Pool of Eternal Life in Shangri-La.
971 01:12:07 I wish I had some of that stuff
972 01:12:10 Do you ever think, if you had it available to you,
973 01:12:14 would you take it and live forever?
974 01:12:17 I would. I don't even have any doubt about that.
975 01:12:20 I'd like to have a lifetime as a doctor and a lifetime as an astronaut
976 01:12:26 or a lifetime as a pilot.
977 01:12:29 But as a movie director, the good thing is,
978 01:12:33 you get to explore lots of different lives
979 01:12:37 right here in the one life you're given, short though it may be.
980 01:12:42 So with each film, you go into a different life,
981 01:12:46 whether it's the life of a street racer or the life of an extreme sports crazoid,
982 01:12:53 the life of a pilot in Stealth on an aircraft carrier,
983 01:12:58 all of the different lives you get to look into
984 01:13:01 and examine and get out of,
985 01:13:05 ¡®cause not all the lives are equally enjoyable.
986 01:13:10 But here, getting to live the fantasy world of creatures,
987 01:13:16 a world that I was first exposed to through the films of Ray Hariyhausen,
988 01:13:22 a great pioneer and talent that I had the pleasure of meeting several years ago
989 01:13:27 when I was planning a remake of Sinbad,
990 01:13:34 a brilliant guy in his 80s, still sharp as a tack.
991 01:13:39 And here's Syd Dutton's interpretation
992 01:13:43 of the valley of Shangri-La
993 01:13:46 with my conception as this Buddhist valley of peace and abundance
994 01:13:52 and of a poetic calm and beauty.
995 01:14:01 Of course, no place like that exists except in our minds and hearts and wishes.
996 01:14:10 I love this moment where Michelle Yeoh realizes that her daughter has brought home
997 01:14:16 not a worthy subject of her love.
998 01:14:21 And she realizes that her daughter is no longer a little girl,
999 01:14:27 even though she's 2,200 years old or so,
1000 01:14:31 the daughter of Russell Wong, who played General Ming, and her,
1001 01:14:37 but a young woman who's now in love with a westerner and a mortal guy,
1002 01:14:44 when she, in fact, is immortal,
1003 01:14:47 which leads us to some of the more fun lines in the film,
1004 01:14:52 about he had no problem dating an older woman,
1005 01:14:56 which is coming up in the next scene.
1006 01:14:59 But I look at the beauty of Isabella and Michelle,
1007 01:15:04 and the face of Asia
1008 01:15:09 is what I wanted a lot of people to see in this film,
1009 01:15:15 to look and feel my love and respect for Asian culture,
1010 01:15:21 Asian cinema and Asian history.
1011 01:15:27 I have truly been in love with these ideas
1012 01:15:30 since I was eight years old and my mother took up Chinese watercolors,
1013 01:15:35 and I, living in a small town,
1014 01:15:38 started to page through these art books on Chinese art,
1015 01:15:42 and getting a whole other worldview
1016 01:15:46 on a country and a people that seemed so different
1017 01:15:50 and was among the first places I went when I could travel, in college.
1018 01:15:58 Walking the Great Wall was one of those extraordinary experiences
1019 01:16:04 you wish for everyone in their life.
1020 01:16:07 When I first went to China, the Xi'an tomb had not been rediscovered,
1021 01:16:13 so, again, I went back to see the tomb,
1022 01:16:16 and that was a thrill because you really feel...
1023 01:16:21 These 800 warriors that they've reconstructed, each has a different face,
1024 01:16:26 and you feel the long arms of history reaching across the millennia to you
1025 01:16:32 and saying, "We are like you. We were like you.
1026 01:16:36 "You know people like these people."
1027 01:16:39 Some of them are happy, some of them are bitter,
1028 01:16:41 some of them are fat, some of them are muscular
1029 01:16:45 and some seem introspective and others are fierce.
1030 01:16:51 You know these types of people, and there they all are, standing six feet tall,
1031 01:16:56 completely lifelike, in this tomb in the center of China.
1032 01:17:04 Now here, we have the rapprochement scene between father and son,
1033 01:17:10 where the son realizes what it would be like to lose his dad,
1034 01:17:16 ¡®cause he held him dying in his arms,
1035 01:17:19 only saved by the mystical power
1036 01:17:22 of Michelle Yeoh and the Pool of Eternal Life.
1037 01:17:27 And the father finally being able to admit his mistakes,
1038 01:17:34 his blind-sightedness,
1039 01:17:37 and yet his great desire
1040 01:17:40 to respect and love his son now as an equal,
1041 01:17:46 eyeball to eyeball, and it was...
1042 01:17:52 Of course, this is the scene every son would probably like to have with his dad.
1043 01:17:56 I didn't get to have mine. Mine died very young, but...
1044 01:18:01 So here I got to fulfill my wish fulfillment.
1045 01:18:06 And I'm hoping that these parental scenes
1046 01:18:13 with Isabella and Luke that...
1047 01:18:17 Maria and Luke, they give it a kind of heart
1048 01:18:21 that makes these characters worth rooting for,
1049 01:18:25 and that they give it an emotional center.
1050 01:18:31 The actors here are just so charismatic,
1051 01:18:36 and all of them, to the person,
1052 01:18:39 just the loveliest people I've ever worked with,
1053 01:18:42 and I've worked with a lot of people.
1054 01:18:45 And if I did come back to do the fourth one,
1055 01:18:49 it would only be because I can't bear that I won't work with this cast again.
1056 01:18:56 Somehow, we have to make that happen.
1057 01:19:02 Here, the under-mummy fully exposed, not needing his terracotta shell,
1058 01:19:06 or not wanting it, he never wanted it,
1059 01:19:09 but knowing that he's within steps of immortality,
1060 01:19:15 and that, when he's immortal, he will come and get the girl
1061 01:19:22 and have the daughter in a way he never had the mother.
1062 01:19:27 And of course, he does not come back totally the same.
1063 01:19:32 Now, immortal, from the pool,
1064 01:19:37 he has regained his shape-shifting abilities,
1065 01:19:40 can become a series of creatures that suit his deeds
1066 01:19:47 and dominate everything in its path.
1067 01:19:51 Here, a three-headed dragon, a piqiu, as it's called in China,
1068 01:19:57 and the Emperor's symbol come to life
1069 01:20:01 in a very powerful, creepy,
1070 01:20:06 insectoid dragon way, you know.
1071 01:20:09 And I wanted the dragon, this dragon,
1072 01:20:13 unlike Draco, my good dragon, the Sean Connery dragon in Dragon heart...
1073 01:20:18 I wanted this one to have a kind of very unsettling presence
1074 01:20:25 and very weird clicky language, with that.
1075 01:20:28 All that stuff you hear in the soundtrack
1076 01:20:31 was stuff that I did with sound designer and sound effects editor, Bruce Stambler,
1077 01:20:37 who's done xXx, The Fast and the Furious, Stealth, for me,
1078 01:20:43 wonderfully vivid sound environments that are created around those films.
1079 01:20:50 The soundtrack is literally
1080 01:20:55 half of your impact in the viewing.
1081 01:20:59 I hope you're listening to this in 5.1 or better.
1082 01:21:05 I hope you're listening to the Blu-ray version of this,
1083 01:21:07 because it is the quality
1084 01:21:12 that all filmmakers have been seeking
1085 01:21:15 from the beginning of the after-market quest,
1086 01:21:21 starting with videotape and Iaserdiscs and DVDs,
1087 01:21:27 and finally we get to an ultimate format,
1088 01:21:30 and we've gone to great lengths to give our Blu-ray edition
1089 01:21:36 all the bells and whistles, and more than anyone has ever packed in.
1090 01:21:42 So I'm gonna think that you're all watching this in Blu-ray.
1091 01:21:49 Now we move into the third act in the movie,
1092 01:21:53 if you can break it down like a play.
1093 01:21:57 But we are in the final movements, and this is where
1094 01:22:04 Digital Domain becomes the main visual effects company.
1095 01:22:10 The dragon is still Rhythm&Hues, but from this point on,
1096 01:22:14 all of that which you see is pretty much Digital Domain
1097 01:22:20 in the dimensions of this battle that forms up
1098 01:22:24 between the forces of good and evil, Michelle Yeoh's versus Jet Li's.
1099 01:22:31 So..
1100 01:22:34 The cooperation between those two companies was unique
1101 01:22:38 to my experience.
1102 01:22:41 And something that I hope happens more often, because
1103 01:22:47 these smaller effects companies, not these corporate giants like ILM,
1104 01:22:52 but that is where the artists are.
1105 01:22:55 That's where the new digital artists go,
1106 01:22:58 because they can use this as a form of self-expression.
1107 01:23:03 Here we are with the Terracotta Army taking the field once more
1108 01:23:09 after 2,200 years of darkness.
1109 01:23:14 I had Professor Li, a real military expert on the Qin Dynasty,
1110 01:23:20 advising me as to the deployment of the troops,
1111 01:23:24 which weapons came in what order.
1112 01:23:27 And the entire army is an exact replica
1113 01:23:33 of the Xi'an tomb, in terms of armor, weapons,
1114 01:23:37 helmets and belts, shoes, everything.
1115 01:23:44 So we're bringing to life
1116 01:23:47 that which can only be still in the darkness of the pits,
1117 01:23:54 the excavation pits in Xi'an.
1118 01:23:56 But I recommend you Google "Terracotta Army of Xi an,"
1119 01:24:02 X-l apostrophe A-N,
1120 01:24:05 and you will definitely have your consciousness expanded
1121 01:24:12 by what you'll see.
1122 01:24:15 This image came to me in a dream,
1123 01:24:18 that Michelle Yeoh threw the oracle bones and it fanned out in an arch above her.
1124 01:24:24 I don't know where it came from,
1125 01:24:26 but I woke up with that as a dream,
1126 01:24:29 and I just decided, logic or no logic, I was gonna make it real.
1127 01:24:34 And that's also a lot of fun,
1128 01:24:36 being a movie director is thinking these things up,
1129 01:24:40 and then having the ability to render them,
1130 01:24:46 good, bad or indifferent from your brain,
1131 01:24:50 to some form of movie reality.
1132 01:24:55 We built this huge head of Jet in the deserts of Tianmo,
1133 01:25:00 a very inaccessible place way above Beijing.
1134 01:25:08 It's a site where the original Wall actually still..
1135 01:25:12 Ruins of it... You can still see the northern wall.
1136 01:25:16 And that wall that you see in the background, we built.
1137 01:25:20 But in bits and pieces,
1138 01:25:25 earlier in the film, when we were doing the "building the Great Wall" sequence,
1139 01:25:29 you can see the actual ruins of the very wall we're saying was being built next to it,
1140 01:25:36 parallel to it, if you go back to the building, in the prologue, of the Great Wall.
1141 01:25:43 Here, these Chinese artisans built the wall
1142 01:25:48 to look exactly like the ruin would've looked at the northern wall.
1143 01:25:54 And of course, the earthquake
1144 01:25:56 and the zipper, as I called it, of the earth opening up,
1145 01:25:59 is from Digital Domain, as is all these foundation warriors,
1146 01:26:05 designed by Aaron Sims and executed by Digital Domain
1147 01:26:11 and supervised by Joel Hynek and Matthew Butler,
1148 01:26:15 the co-supervisors at DD,
1149 01:26:20 which up till now has been my favorite effects house,
1150 01:26:25 having done xXx and Stealth, as well as this.
1151 01:26:29 But now, with Rhythm&Hues in the mix, it's like an abundance of riches.
1152 01:26:36 And there's Russell Wong, the desiccated Russell Wong,
1153 01:26:39 making his comeback in the film.
1154 01:26:42 And one of the things that I'm proud of is, when you watch this battle sequence,
1155 01:26:48 this is not image duplication.
1156 01:26:51 Each mummy is individually animated
1157 01:26:57 in the sense of,
1158 01:26:59 they are unique creatures doing unique things.
1159 01:27:03 You will not find two doing the same thing.
1160 01:27:07 So, we do this through a program called Massive,
1161 01:27:13 and lots and lots and lots of hand animation,
1162 01:27:17 rendering and compositing.
1163 01:27:22 This originally was gonna be shot in three different pieces,
1164 01:27:26 the volley of arrows, and on the site with Joel Hynek that day,
1165 01:27:31 I just went, "Let's make it all one, and here's how we'll connect the three
1166 01:27:36 "into one continuous shot,
1167 01:27:38 "both the launch of the arrows, the flight of the arrows,
1168 01:27:41 "and the impact of the arrows."
1169 01:27:43 I did that little bit of humor, because, you know,
1170 01:27:47 a Mummy movie, you have to keep your sense of humor,
1171 01:27:50 or it becomes
1172 01:27:54 not as effective.
1173 01:27:58 You have to say, "I know I'm having fun. I'm trying to make sure you're having fun."
1174 01:28:03 We know it's all a big fantasy,
1175 01:28:05 but we have rules, and we ground it at the same time.
1176 01:28:10 We get the right to enjoy the craziness of raising the undead.
1177 01:28:17 This sequence is one of my favorite,
1178 01:28:19 because if you look at the choreography of Yang's charge,
1179 01:28:24 there's so much going on,
1180 01:28:26 and each Terracotta Warrior is given its own choreography.
1181 01:28:34 And I love the scale of these shots.
1182 01:28:38 I always like making movies on a big canvas.
1183 01:28:41 It's something I really enjoy, even though it's so logistically complex.
1184 01:28:48 But to me, it's a rewarding scale to work in.
1185 01:28:54 And just this sequence
1186 01:28:57 is really as big as I've ever been able to do,
1187 01:29:02 and it may be the biggest I ever get to do,
1188 01:29:05 but at least I got to do it.
1189 01:29:15 This dismount of Jet's took three different stuntmen.
1190 01:29:20 Two different stuntmen and Jet to execute.
1191 01:29:24 And now we get into
1192 01:29:28 what was billed in the Asian newspapers as the fight all Asia's waiting for.
1193 01:29:33 That put a lot of pressure on us.
1194 01:29:36 But you know, when two icons of the Chinese cinema
1195 01:29:41 are fighting for the first time,
1196 01:29:46 the scene took on another meaning.
1197 01:29:50 Jet and Michelle are great friends and wonderful to work with together,
1198 01:29:55 because they have so much fun with each other,
1199 01:29:58 even though here, it's a fight to the death.
1200 01:30:03 Here's this corkscrew shot I loved.
1201 01:30:06 Sanja and I purposely designed the dress
1202 01:30:09 just so it could fan like that in that shot.
1203 01:30:13 And that's a good example
1204 01:30:16 of costume designer working together with director and DD,
1205 01:30:21 Jet's fight choreographer, working, all of us, together,
1206 01:30:27 to make something balletic and pretty or, you know, beautiful to watch,
1207 01:30:33 at the same time, hopefully, gripping.
1208 01:30:38 Michelle Yeoh sacrificing herself to get the dagger,
1209 01:30:42 the only weapon that can kill the Emperor.
1210 01:30:45 It's interesting that Michelle, with so little screen time,
1211 01:30:49 rates up there at the very top of the list with the audience.
1212 01:30:55 It's a testament to who she is as an actress
1213 01:31:01 and to the character she brought to life
1214 01:31:04 that with so little screen time,
1215 01:31:08 people feel so deeply about her, you know, in the research screenings.
1216 01:31:13 Here's another thing that was really fun to work out.
1217 01:31:16 The idea that the contact between Rick and Evy
1218 01:31:20 would be so intense.
1219 01:31:24 Usually, CG characters and human characters
1220 01:31:28 have a hard time interacting.
1221 01:31:31 But in the ways we constructed the warriors
1222 01:31:35 and the choreography of this,
1223 01:31:38 there is a real sense
1224 01:31:40 of corporealness and weight and gravity that we were getting.
1225 01:31:46 And the interaction between Rick and Evy with the warriors,
1226 01:31:51 I think I'm very proud of
1227 01:31:54 because it's just a fantasy fight.
1228 01:31:58 And of course, much of this I owe to Ray Hariyhausen
1229 01:32:03 from Jason and the Argonauts, the battle with the skeletons,
1230 01:32:09 which got me so excited when I was a kid.
1231 01:32:14 Here, the Ni Yuan, the real Chinese symbol,
1232 01:32:17 the temple guardian dog, the lion-dog,
1233 01:32:22 now a thousand-pound creature capable of great feats of strength,
1234 01:32:27 comes on scene,
1235 01:32:29 as the Emperor keeps changing
1236 01:32:33 his form and his powers.
1237 01:32:38 And the son comes to save the day.
1238 01:32:44 And of course, the parents had it all under control.
1239 01:32:48 These transitions of Jet from beast to human or human to beast
1240 01:32:54 are among the trickiest visual effects in the movie.
1241 01:32:59 The idea to not just do a morph,
1242 01:33:02 to somehow feel the organicness of the transition,
1243 01:33:08 was a big part of the analysis of the problem
1244 01:33:14 that we endeavored to solve.
1245 01:33:19 And it's interesting how the ins and outs
1246 01:33:23 of any of the visual effects are so important.
1247 01:33:28 So much of the credibility depends on transition
1248 01:33:35 in visual effects work.
1249 01:33:38 Another parental scene here, the death of Michelle Yeoh, of Zi Yuan,
1250 01:33:44 and the daughter's absolute grief.
1251 01:33:50 Isabella was drawing upon
1252 01:33:52 some fairly traumatic experience in her own life,
1253 01:33:56 and the feeling was incredibly deep.
1254 01:34:00 Also, Isabella and Michelle did very much develop
1255 01:34:05 a mother-daughter relationship during this film.
1256 01:34:13 The underworld, the cog room as we call it.
1257 01:34:17 The Chinese water wheels are a very big part of the culture
1258 01:34:21 and have been for a long time,
1259 01:34:23 as rice irrigation depends on the flow of water.
1260 01:34:29 So, I kind of thought,
1261 01:34:32 "Let's connect it up to the astrolabe in the foundation chamber."
1262 01:34:36 The Chinese invented the astrolabe.
1263 01:34:40 If you wanna see the original one, just Google "astrolabe." L-A-B-E.
1264 01:34:47 And you can see that this is an exact replica
1265 01:34:53 of the original Chinese astrolabe, and
1266 01:34:59 one of the great breakthroughs in navigation,
1267 01:35:04 that the Chinese had long before it was ever known in the West.
1268 01:35:12 The Emperor controlling the five elements
1269 01:35:16 and drawing his victims back under the wall,
1270 01:35:21 to their living death and their grave underneath the wall.
1271 01:35:27 This idea came to me from...
1272 01:35:32 In Polynesian culture, in HawaIIan culture, very often,
1273 01:35:37 they would bury slaves alive under each post of a royal house,
1274 01:35:44 because it was thought that the slave would hold the house up forever.
1275 01:35:51 And I sort of thought the Emperor might have a similar idea,
1276 01:35:55 that these dead workers would, in fact, make the Wall live forever.
1277 01:36:02 And this came partly from the poem Ozymandias
1278 01:36:07 by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
1279 01:36:09 The idea of a colossus in the desert, now ruined,
1280 01:36:14 that of a king that once was so high and mighty,
1281 01:36:20 and now is obscure to the point of unknown.
1282 01:36:26 And such is human endeavor and human ego.
1283 01:36:33 You know, there are aspects of this
1284 01:36:36 that I totally put into the creation of that head
1285 01:36:39 and the way Luke finds it in the opening act of the film,
1286 01:36:44 very much like Ozymandias is described, I think, you know,
1287 01:36:49 "I met a traveler from an antique land"
1288 01:36:52 It's an amazing poem.
1289 01:36:55 Very short, so check it out. Ozymandias.
1290 01:37:00 I think it's O-Z-Y-M-A-N-D-I-A-S.
1291 01:37:05 And the death of Yang, a very powerful illusion
1292 01:37:09 of not a good way to go, ground between these wheels.
1293 01:37:15 Jessey was not supposed to go in
1294 01:37:19 and got so caught up in the moment
1295 01:37:23 that she got swept in through the wheels as well.
1296 01:37:28 Now, of course, it's an illusion how...
1297 01:37:31 But there was not much space there, and she really could've been hurt.
1298 01:37:38 Jet and Brendan finally having their mano a mano,
1299 01:37:42 and Jet working within his wushu
1300 01:37:49 style of grace and power,
1301 01:37:52 inside spin kicks and, you know, all of the arsenal that he has,
1302 01:37:59 and him getting caught up, torturing Rick,
1303 01:38:05 and the divide-and-conquer theme here,
1304 01:38:09 where Jet is too big a character,
1305 01:38:12 too formidable a villain
1306 01:38:16 for even one hero to defeat,
1307 01:38:20 and even a hero as strong as Brendan.
1308 01:38:24 And it needing father and son to work together
1309 01:38:29 to bring this guy down.
1310 01:38:32 And the one Achilles' heel which is his heart with this blade.
1311 01:38:38 And here, even with the blade going backwards,
1312 01:38:44 the two pieces fusing together
1313 01:38:46 point to hilt, it passed through his heart.
1314 01:38:51 And in the rules of this game that have been clearly set up,
1315 01:38:55 this is the only way he can get it or could be dealt the death blow.
1316 01:39:01 And I made it as gruesome a death as I could get away with in PG-13,
1317 01:39:07 with him being cooked from the inside
1318 01:39:10 and being gone for good.
1319 01:39:15 And the causality with the army, that the army is gone
1320 01:39:21 and blown back underground to its origin,
1321 01:39:27 where it will return to an undiscovered state,
1322 01:39:32 to be rediscovered by the Chinese farmer digging a well in 1974,
1323 01:39:38 some 30 years after this story ends.
1324 01:39:42 It's an interesting journey we took on this film
1325 01:39:48 through the country of China,
1326 01:39:52 the geography of China, the spirit of China
1327 01:39:56 and the history of China.
1328 01:39:59 It's the reason I did the film.
1329 01:40:02 I did not ever...
1330 01:40:05 I haven't done a sequel to my own films.
1331 01:40:08 The Skulls had a series of direct-to-video sequels.
1332 01:40:12 xXx has had two sequels now, a third one coming...
1333 01:40:18 I mean, The Fast and the Furious has had two sequels and a third one coming,
1334 01:40:23 and xXx had one sequel with a cast change.
1335 01:40:29 And you know, I didn't do those for reasons.
1336 01:40:35 There are too many new ideas and too many new things to explore.
1337 01:40:41 That was Marc Pitre dancing by there, my co-producer, right-hand man,
1338 01:40:46 thought I'd give him a plug for all the hard work.
1339 01:40:48 That's Derek Spears, the little guy looking down the girl's dress,
1340 01:40:53 there, to the right of Brendan and Maria,
1341 01:40:55 Maria in a beautiful silver lam¨¦ dress that Sanja designed.
1342 01:41:00 Vic Armstrong is dancing with his wife in the background.
1343 01:41:04 And if you go back, and you see this bald little guy
1344 01:41:07 dancing with the tall, beautiful, pregnant goddess,
1345 01:41:10 that's me and my wife, Barbara.
1346 01:41:15 Here, the payoff of this joke, again, that we found, kind of discovered, like,
1347 01:41:21 what the possibilities would be for future stories
1348 01:41:25 with Jonathan winding up with the diamond
1349 01:41:31 and heading to a place that definitely there are mummies.
1350 01:41:35 And so the saga might continue.
1351 01:41:38 Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this journey with me.
1352 01:41:43 And there's so much more I would love to tell you.
1353 01:41:47 There are many, many anecdotes and rich insights to the process
1354 01:41:54 of what we went through and how it was done
1355 01:41:56 in the ancillary materials here on the DVD.
1356 01:42:00 There's also the book The Art of The Mummy,
1357 01:42:05 which is a beautiful art book that New market published which has a lot of...
1358 01:42:12 An essay by me, plus interviews with Nigel Phelps, the production designer,
1359 01:42:18 Anne Kuijian, the set decorator,
1360 01:42:20 Sanja Hays, Aaron Sims, everything, storyboards
1361 01:42:25 and the total way the picture was conceptualized.
1362 01:42:30 Here, in these beautiful end credits
1363 01:42:33 by Imaginary Forces, the title company,
1364 01:42:39 we thought of it as an epic painting,
1365 01:42:43 that if there was a series of paintings that was about the movie,
1366 01:42:49 but in a way as if they were Chinese, different forms of Chinese painting,
1367 01:42:56 and, you know, trying to be consistent to the very end.
1368 01:43:02 But the word "China" has a magic for me that I've had all my life
1369 01:43:08 as I've explained to you, so when I heard that...
1370 01:43:11 Even though it was Mummy 3, as it was called then,
1371 01:43:16 it had the allure of a chance to do an epic fantasy in China.
1372 01:43:22 And my friend Randy Edelman, who wrote the score,
1373 01:43:26 did a beautiful thematic job
1374 01:43:28 and with some additional cues by John Debney,
1375 01:43:34 a terrific composer as well.
1376 01:43:37 The producers, Steve Sommers, Jim Jacks,
1377 01:43:40 Sean Daniel, Bob Ducsay, were fantastic to work with,
1378 01:43:44 and they helped me complete this journey.
1379 01:43:50 I hope you've enjoyed the commentary,
1380 01:43:52 and of course, more importantly, I hope you enjoy the movie.
1381 01:43:56 And I'll see you or talk to you on the next one,
1382 01:44:02 should the next one come to pass.
1383 01:44:04 All right, God bless, and have a great life.
1384 01:44:07 Rob Cohen, signing out.