Hi, I'm Rob Cohen, director of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,
and the next hour and 45 minutes
is going to be a commentary of a free association sort,
trying to give you some sort of insight into things that went on and went behind
the making of this very large, epic-scale film.
Here, you see the Universal logo used as a geography lesson.
I wanted to make sure that the audience understood the relationship
between North America and China,
and to get the feeling of the scale of that country
and its position in the world.
Here, a messenger arrives at high speed
in the second century B. C. by the pyramids of Ningxia.
Ningxia pyramids are a real thing. Those are they.
And they represent
some of the great artifacts and architecture
left by the early Chinese civilization,
which, of course, is a 5,000-year civilization.
Here's the great international martial arts star, Jet Li,
who is playing the mummy in all his different forms.
We're creating here the atmosphere that was around what was called
"the period of the Seven Warring States" in China.
Up till about 200 B. C.,
seven territories that were within the boundaries
of the Han Chinese empire
were at constant civil war.
And ultimately, each king tried
to become the emperor and rule the other six.
And here, based on some true history,
assassins were sent out to murder
the one king that would be able to unite the country
and dominate the entire political system,
which is the character Jet Li plays.
And, by the way, the assassination attempt was the subject of Jet's movie Hero,
which was also loosely based on the history of the Qin Dynasty
and that emperor.
Here, in short strokes,
I was trying to show the misery
and ruthlessness of this editor...
Emperor,
not the editor. The editor was ruthless in other ways.
Anyway, the fact is that his drive across China
led to untold millions of deaths
and enslavements, executions, torture
and suppression of books
and Confucian laws
that had been in focus in China
for a thousand years before that.
And here, ultimately, we show you,
through slave labor, how the Great Wall of China was built.
However, the Great Wall that we depict
is a wall from 1200-1300 A.D.
And the northern wall, as it's called, came from 200 B. C.,
was actually made of tamped earth and mud brick.
And like John Ford said,
"When given a chance between printing the truth and printing the legend,
"always print the legend."
And I wanted the audience
to see the Great Wall that they knew,
not a mud wall that would have been very confusing,
even though we're historically inaccurate.
Here, Jet calls his favorite general,
and we see in the map of China that their garrisons
and his army has spread out throughout the land,
and he has total control of what is called Qin-a,
our Qin Dynasty China.
You know, the fact is that at the height,
the first emperor was able to field a million-man army.
We have 140-some-thousand in Iraq.
He could field a million.
And so that gives you some idea
of the power of this man.
As all emperors of China, they're symbolized by the dragon.
You'll see the three-headed dragon is a very important symbol
behind Jet and on his armor and everywhere,
his flags, banners, everything.
Also, the fact that emperors were like man-gods.
You were not allowed to look directly in their eyes.
You could not ever turn your back on the emperor.
As you see, people are treating him with deference
that we now associate with kings and popes.
But the despotic concentration of power,
thank God, has rarely been seen again.
Here, we shot out in Turfan at the actual monastery
near the Kazakhstan border.
Of course, this is a set we built in Shanghai,
where the two ill-fated lovers
realize that even though they've been warned
not to engage,
they are fighting a force even greater than the Emperor himself,
which is a transcendent love.
The book that's coming up
is actually a scroll called the oracle bones in the movie,
and if you look to the left,
those bones with the writing on it are the true oracle bones.
I had to give a form of concentrated knowledge,
but the real oracle bones were discovered
in the early to mid 20th century
with predictions about the future
etched on cow scapula and other bones.
So those were called the oracle bones.
So that is the basis of our idea of the book,
which, of course, had its antecedents
in the other two Mummy movies, with the Book of the Dead, et cetera.
This book was in fact rumored to have existed.
These libraries, like the Alexandria Library,
were repositories of all the knowledge of the ancient world,
and very little of it, unfortunately, has survived.
And here, Michelle Yeoh is reading the curse on the Emperor.
He thinks it's a blessing to become immortal,
but she's reading the curse in Sanskrit,
which is an ancient Aryan language
that very few people speak.
And today, there's almost no one.
And we got the only oral Sanskrit speaker in North America
to teach Michelle how to speak that curse for real.
Here, the horses to quarter the victim
was a favorite form of execution of this emperor,
as well as the cutting people in half at the waist
and, of course, sentencing them to living death,
building the Great Wall.
Whoops! That has to hurt.
I told Michelle there, "You do not give the Emperor the satisfaction of carrying on,
"when she sees her lover executed in such a brutal way,"
starting a show of strength in all the female characters in the film.
Now, the Terracotta Army of Xi'an is a real thing.
It was a tomb that was started...
The construction was started on it when the Emperor was about 14.
He died around 44,
and for 30 years, 700,000 artisans worked
to create the tomb,
waiting for the day when he would need it.
Of course, he wanted to be immortal, this is based on truth.
Now, we're twisting this to say
that the Terracotta Army came about
not as an homage to a living man-god despot,
but as a curse put on by this good witch.
And now, we see that his entire army and he
have been turned into Terracotta Warriors,
which were rediscovered in truth
in 1974 when a Chinese farmer was digging a well
and kept pulling up clay shards of eyes and hands and helmets
and so on, and that's when this wonder of the ancient world was rediscovered.
Okay, so, here's Brendan Fraser.
I needed an opening scene to show how he was bored out of his mind.
I, from time to time, go fly fishing,
and I thought, "What better image
"than to show the comedic talents of the great Brendan
"pursuing something quite different than where he was left in Mummy 2,
"no longer an adventurer,
"in England, bored out of his mind,
"having a Rick O'Connell-type fishing expedition,
"in which, of course, the Peacemaker comes into play?"
We shot that stream scene outside of Montreal,
and now we're at an estate outside of London, in Aylesbury.
Now we're back in an interior in Montreal
of the St. Stephen Club.
So with the magic of movies,
we basically made three locations into one.
And again, here's Rick,
about to get a blast from the past
and look at this costume of his from the French Foreign Legion,
which is the actual costume he wore in the first Mummy,
and to long for the days of adventure,
which clearly he's not having.
Now it's time to meet the new Evy, Maria Bello.
Rachel Weisz chose not to come back into the movie for personal reasons,
and I looked for someone with her beauty, strength, intelligence,
but someone as unexpected to be in a popcorn, summer tent pole movie
as Rachel was herself in the first Mummy, and I hit upon Maria Bello,
a very wonderful actress from The Cooler, from A History of Violence,
and a very beautiful and gifted woman.
And I thought, why not take a hot American woman
and give her a British accent,
rather than just assume this has to be a British actress?
And Maria brings her own unique American fire to this part.
And I spent a little time
in this first movement of the film
to introduce you to this new relationship,
which is in fact very different
than the Rick O'Connell-Evy Carnahan relationship in the first two films.
They are now married 20 years, they have a 20-year-old son
from their early relationship in Egypt.
And they're living on the wealth of her family
and the great Egyptian discoveries that they made.
They've been spies during the war for the British, so they've been...
They've had their war service, and now they're retired.
She has turned into a romantic novelist
who's novelized their first two adventures,
but now is struggling with writer's block
because unless she lived it, she doesn't know what to write.
And we begin to see that the new Rick and Evy
have lost a lot of the fire and a lot of the romance, heat, sexual attraction
that the old Rick and Evy had in the other two movies.
And of course, this will be rekindled through adventure.
And that really is my idea about life,
that you don't really get the juices flowing
unless you're out there on the line, out on a cutting edge,
where all of your systems are pumping at full speed.
And it's part of why I like to direct action movies,
because they are cinematic, they live on the motion factor
of film and what film does so well, capturing this action
and taking you on these different perspectives within action.
And it also gets the blood going,
and when the blood is going, all the senses come up or peak,
and when it comes to romance or sex,
definitely it's good to have those fluids pulsing through your body.
Here we're introducing the new Alex.
When we last saw Alex, he was eight. This is 13 years later.
Here he's 20, 21,
and he's played by a newcomer, Luke Ford,
who I found in Australia.
He's 6'3" and seemed to me to have a lot of Brendan in him
and a lot of Maria in him.
And he worked really well in a screen test,
which we may include in this DVD, with Brendan.
And you can see how the character came along.
He's acting against one of the great English theater actors,
David Calder, who was King Lear this last summer,
and to rave reviews.
A very capable guy, capable of many faces
and many, many moods, as you shall see.
I wanted to have a scene where, like Rick's fly fishing expedition misadventure,
that we showed Evy's, sort of, private life
and her longing for the adventure that she and Rick had in the past.
I thought, no better than to give her
a little Errol Flynn-Basil Rathbone kind of moment with the candles
and the running and jumping and fighting the enemy,
and of course, the butler, always good for a joke.
Here, the flip side of his wanting to seduce her,
she tries to seduce him.
And this is where, I think, Maria is so great,
because she is so unafraid to do whatever the scene demands
and to put her all in something
as silly as this little seduction scene that goes totally wrong,
but I loved her guts and gusto.
And, of course, you can always count on Brendan to take things to the max, too.
Coming up is my favorite cut in the movie,
the pinched nose to the blowing up of the head,
from London to China in a cut.
And now, we're at last going down below, into the tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
This is a very large set I had built in Montreal.
My wonderful production designer, Nigel Phelps,
shining in this set and in all the sets,
in their scale, their beauty, their period correctness
and the way they gave me a setting
to do the various action and information that the film needs.
Here, we're in the first section,
where the royal reality
of these Fu dog sculptures
and the gold ceiling that was collapsed
that you saw very briefly.
And, of course, what's a Mummy movie without a few mummies?
Here's number one.
Anyway, all of these ideas in this tomb
are based on the real tomb in Xi'an
in terms of its layout and the hypothesis
of where the army was and where the Emperor was actually buried.
The army has 800 of the warriors.
They think 8,000 warriors have been reassembled,
and these are the exact replicas of that actual army,
the chariots, the weapons,
which are no longer in the hands of the Terracotta Warriors.
They were taken away by the son of the first emperor,
who was a usurper and was afraid of rebellion,
so he had all the weapons removed.
But here, for the first time,
we see the exact replica of the army and the true weapons
and the way they were designed to hold them.
The pikes, the halberds,
the cavalry officers with their little hats there,
and the horses and their swords, being the cavalry,
and the layout of the army
and the chariots, I think, are all fairly accurate.
This mercury gas is another thing that's based, believe it or not, on truth,
that they had these rivers of mercury
that would vaporize over time
so that any grave robber who found the tomb
would instantly be poisoned.
And as strange as it may seem to you,
these crossbow guns are also a true Chinese design,
not just a movie design.
But when I saw them, how could I live without them?
Of course, throwing stars are a long-time Chinese weapon.
And so we bring all sorts of reality
or truth, historical truth, in a fictional context.
And none of the ideas... I did not limit myself to the ideas of,
"This is 200 B. C., everything has to be specific to that period."
There's so much great Chinese history
that I just wanted to get in the astrolabe and things that came later,
but I know my stuff, and I know when I'm diverting
from the historical points or truth to what works well
in the fantasy fiction form here in The Mummy.
Here, the feng shui compass is in fact normally set the opposite
to our polar orientation.
And again, using something that was Chinese
to have fun with an idea, as you'll see,
but these horses and chariots you see in the back of each frame,
these are these magnificent things that you can see in Xi'an
at the tomb site at the museum there.
If you are so lucky as to be able to go to China and see this,
it's something you will never, never forget.
These are concubines.
The Emperor was buried with his concubines
and with his pets and his horses, his favorite horses.
Anything that the Emperor had in life,
he was buried with and was supposed to pass or come back,
pass to another world or come back to this one
and have everything that he knew.
As life sometimes imitates art,
I had hypothesized that the Emperor would be buried underneath the army,
that his real "tomb" tomb, the crypt, would be underneath the army.
And sure enough, while we were shooting,
Chinese archeologists, through using radio cryptography or tomography,
found a tomb, an inverted pyramid, underneath the pit site of the army.
So they say they are not gonna dig it up for 50 years, which I don't understand,
but that's the last we heard about it.
I'm sure it's a complicated idea
to find the remains
of this first emperor that has become immortal,
not through taking potions, like what happened in his real life,
but became immortal through the tomb that was erected in his honor.
Here, we're introducing
a wonderful, bright, up-and-coming female star, Isabella Leong,
a wonderful actress who was born in Macau,
now lives in Hong Kong, but is a great beauty
and a wonderful presence to have in this film,
very fresh and remarkable in her loveliness.
Not here, because here she's trying to kill our young hero
because she doesn't know who he is or understand what he's doing in the tomb,
and she's doing everything she can
to make sure that this emperor is never raised.
Because what's a Mummy movie if we don't try to stop a mummy from being raised,
and then, of course, they're raised, and then we've got to stop them
before they rule the world?
I'm really proud of this scene, the scale of the set which you see here.
And it's a hope that you all get to Xi'an
or at least look it up, Google it,
so you can see how much verisimilitude is actually in the film.
Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist,
a guy I actually personally knew in college
when my girlfriend was going to Sarah Lawrence, where he taught,
he had many phrases that broke down a myth,
but one of them was the call to adventure,
and that each hero gets this call
and either listens to it or doesn't.
And here, Rick and Evy are getting their call to adventure
in the offer of the Foreign Office
of Britain, but our equivalent of the State Department,
saying, "We need you to courier this priceless artifact back to China."
And of course, Rick and Evy made a compact with each other
that they're going to retire and they're not going to risk their lives
and gallivant all over the world anymore.
And here, Maria and Brendan are so desperate
to get out of the house and have some adventure,
and each one doesn't want to be the first one
to break the compact between them.
So it's a fun scene where they're slowly
working their way towards mutually breaking the compact
and making a new compact to get back to the life
they were meant to have, meant to live.
Does this mean we can count on you one last time?
And again, we're off to Shanghai.
Now it's a few months later. It's Chinese New Year,
which takes place in February usually.
It's a two-week celebration.
Here's a set we built and refurbished on the Shanghai studio lot.
The set, most of it, existed before, but we gave it quite the facelift.
And here is a set, also right there in Shanghai,
at the Shanghai studios, of Jonathan's nightclub,
which... How could it be more perfect than to be an Egyptian-themed nightclub?
That's my dear friend Marcia Nasatir, my first agent,
literally my first friend in California,
who's acting with our inimitable John Hannah.
She plays a Russian princess, just, you know, after the war.
After World War II, Shanghai was one of the last places
that Russians and westerners could go easily,
so a lot of Russian Jews fled to Shanghai.
In fact, one of my producers on Stealth, Mike Medavoy,
his parents fled to Shanghai, and he was born in Shanghai.
Of course, this is all before Mao and the Long March
and the shift in China from these decadent days
in Shanghai, when westerners ruled the city,
and the Germans, the English, the Americans, the French,
all had their own quarters,
and sex, drugs and rock and roll, well, swing, was the order of the day.
Yeah, working with John was a fantastic delight,
because he's inventive, he's bold,
and he knows this character really, really well.
And I wanted to give him more to do in this film
than either of the other two films,
which you'll see as his character develops.
Coming on stage now is a wonderful Irish actor,
Liam Cunningham.
I definitely...
I saw him in The Wind That Shakes the Barley
and had to have him.
And of course, the kid over his right shoulder
actually is my son, Kyle, who was going to university in Shanghai,
at Fudan University, so I said, "Here, I'm gonna put you to work,
"make you a fly boy who's a bully-boy intent on beating up Luke Ford."
Now, that would be an interesting fight to wager on,
since they're both... Kyle's 6'1 ", Luke's 6'3",
but Kyle's a Krav Maga guy, which is how I got to Krav Maga
for Brendan in this film.
Krav Maga's an Israeli martial arts system of great brutality and directness,
which is what we trained Brendan in
to fight Jet Li in the third act, in the mano a mano sequence.
Now, here's a relatable situation that I really loved, which is,
the father cannot see that the son has grown up.
He's lied to them. He's been in the deserts of China
and not at Harvard, where they thought he was.
But the big problem in the film for the parents is that
they don't know who their son really is.
They were busy during the war, helping with the war effort.
They parked him in Australia, in boarding school,
and they thought they were being good parents.
But they have grown out of touch
with the fact that their son is now a young man.
And Rick, especially, the old bull, cannot acknowledge
that the young bull has the strength that he does.
And part of what I liked doing in this film was building it around the family,
and some true, relatable family issues,
father and son trying to understand each other,
husband and wife trying to deal
with the weight and complexity of a 20-year marriage
that has lost a lot of its fire,
and to make The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
have an emotional core that was relatable,
so that the action was about characters you care about,
and who, hopefully, you're interested in,
as opposed to just a bunch of action strung together.
Here is an extraordinary actor, Anthony Wong,
one of the great Hong Kong actors, star of a zillion Hong Kong films,
the most famous of which is probably Infernal Affairs,
where he played the part that eventually became
the Jack Nicholson part in The Departed.
A wonderful face, a very lovely guy,
but plays a very tough, dark villain in a lot of his films.
I guess his physiognomy is destiny.
Next to him is a young woman doing her first part,
Jessey Meng, a wonderful, tall,
six-foot-tall woman from Hong Kong
who is a TV presenter and game show host and that sort of thing.
And I wanted a physically imposing woman,
and when I met her, I had to have her,
and she was so beautiful that I gave her a scar.
And that way, it would be easier to tell her from other women in the film,
and also to try to mess up that beautiful face,
and of course, it only made her sexier.
So what can you do? Some people have it, some people don't.
Here's another set we built, the Shanghai Museum set,
on the Shanghai studio lot.
Jonathan and his Rolls, which will not have a great fate by the end of this night.
And here is a museum archeological laboratory,
where, in fact, they are working on restoring an artifact.
Anne Kuljian, our great set decorator,
did a great deal of research, and all of the tools, the whole layout,
is completely correct to the skills
and inquiry of archeologists
and how they would go about restoring such a priceless discovery,
this chariot and this bronze statue of the Emperor
with the sarcophagus in the back on this wagon,
and all the things that this would lead to if it were a true discovery.
So having Brendan lean against the horse's ass
while he's being a horse's ass was something I enjoyed.
Just the subtle imagery of it, I don't know if anybody would get it
if I didn't say anything, but every time I see it, I like it.
Just an interesting filmmaking thing, this hallway
was one hallway that we dressed three different times
to make it seem like the museum had all these hallways.
And just, again, a little bit of movie switching reality
and making it look like something else.
Here, the couple is beginning,
in their new sense of adventure and the unexpected,
being in a foreign place,
to get rekindled,
to have the romantic element of their relationship rekindled,
interrupted by Professor Wilson, David Calder.
And we're now beginning
to bring all the threads of the plot together,
to begin the next big story movement of the awakening of the mummy
and the pursuit of the mummy in the film.
Here, Brendan did an improv. This was totally Brendan,
this idea that he would be so clumsy on purpose,
and with the Eye of Shangri-La,
the precious artifact that they were supposed to return to Wilson.
And of course, right here, the plot is about to thicken, as they say.
Yang, a warlord from western China, this was really true,
after the Japanese were defeated,
many of the powers that helped defeat the Japanese
had their areas of complete control, very much like Afghanistan today.
And they were called warlords and they had great power,
sometimes controlled illicit trades like the opium trade or illegal arms,
but they had resource and standing,
and many of them were vying for the control of China.
And here in our story, Yang has the crazy plan
to awaken the Emperor
and to restore him as an immortal on the throne of all of China
and probably all of the world.
Because you know, mummies never just want a small thing,
especially when they're played by the great Jet Li.
One of the things I really wanted to do is have a...
Always wanted to have a kung fu fight in an evening gown,
which is coming up, but as you'll see,
Maria is not just the damsel in distress,
she carries a switchblade in her garters.
She's ready to fight,
and I don't wanna give anything away, but you'll see that soon.
Here, the challenge of this scene as a director was that,
literally, seven of the eight leading actors
are on set at one time.
And this is a wonderful opportunity
to stage a complex scene.
But it's also one of complexity unto the logistics
that all these actors have to be covered at all these different moments,
and the screen geography,
the dramatic emphasis that comes in the editing phase,
all has to be thought of as you're directing it.
And it was always interesting to me,
because in this film, more than any I've done,
there were so many leading characters onscreen at the same time.
Now, you have Wilson, Yang and Choi, three villains
and two heroes down below,
now you have two more heroes going to come into the action, that's seven.
And then, you're gonna have the Emperor very soon.
And that is eight characters in a smaller space.
It's not a large... It's a big set, but not huge.
So eight characters interacting,
and trying to make sure that each moment is covered.
Here's one of our big, first... Not big, but first complex special effects,
visual effects, the gold snakes unraveling and slithering off.
And the Eye of Shangri-La, this giant blue diamond
opening up and containing the elixir from the Pool of Eternal Life,
which is not water. I wanted it to be something else.
So I decided, what would happen if diamonds were liquefied?
If we could shrink diamonds to the level of a pixel,
and have them faceted and reflective and so on?
And so, as you'll see, as the movie goes on,
the substance is actually something other than just a normal liquid.
Here, the first stunts we did in the movie.
The movie was choreographed by Vic Armstrong,
my amazing... Well, everybody's amazing stunt coordinator
and action unit director.
He was my partner in all of this madness,
and a greater guy you'll never find.
His name is synonymous with all the great action films of our time,
including the Bonds,
and all the Indiana Jones except the last one,
and you just look, IMDb him,
and look at that résumé,
and you'll understand why it was an honor to have him on The Mummy,
and why it's an honor now to have him as a friend.
And of course,
the mummy is about to make its entrance into the film.
There was a lot I worried about with this idea I had called liquid solids.
How could I make things that were bronze,
things that were terracotta, to move?
And I came up with this idea of this cracking and re-melding of the material,
and you'll see that in both the Emperor
and the horses in the film.
Here is the Terracotta Emperor,
full CG creation, based on Jet Li, his face,
and the burnt under-mummy
that was what is left of the horrible death
that Michelle Yeoh gave him with the curse.
Again, Jet Li's voice modified to reflect the burnt,
wispy, and cicada-type end of his larynx,
the horrible disfigurement
and the curse of eternally being encased in the terracotta.
And his abilities, remember from the prologue,
he has the control over the five elements, including fire,
which you just saw him use
by heating up his hand to cauterize Wilson's head off.
And it was a sad thing to kill off David Calder,
but you know, he chose to be a two-faced villain, not me.
No, he was great all the way through.
You see the horses.
You see the molten interior
and the fact that the plates, the vectors of stress break and reform,
and this was all very complex algorithms that we did at Rhythm & Hues,
the visual effects company that did all the horses
and this chase through Shanghai.
The other company was Digital Domain,
who did the conversion to terracotta when the Emperor's cursed
and, as you'll see, the entire battle sequence in the third act.
What? No!
There are over 1,0003-D effects in the film.
It's a huge load that we got done in record time,
using two companies primarily, Rhythm & Hues and Digital Domain,
as well as my old friend Syd Dutton at Illusion Arts.
We used CIS and Pac Title,
all of which worked very well together, and Cafe Effects.
But a thousand visual effects is no small order.
And you'll see many of them in this chase sequence.
When I read the script, by our veteran and very witty writers,
AI Gough and Miles Millar,
they had a form of this chase in there, and I went, "There is..."
I'd been to China many times.
There is no Shanghai, 1946-1947-era, left.
The Bund, what's left of it, is all on the waterfront.
It's all high-class shopping, Prada, et cetera.
And there's no way to control it,
and there's no way that you can have an extended chase.
And that's when we found the Shanghai studio had
a very nice-sized standing set of period Shanghai.
So we went there and began to lay out
how something that was on the move
at 30-40 miles an hour, whatever horses can do,
was onscreen for some six minutes,
and how to do all these stunts.
And this was one of the best
and most fun technical challenges I ever had,
because I had this one idea, the actors should do it all.
And if you watch the chase,
you'll see that there are very few times
when there are stunt actors in the chase.
And Vic and I had to work really hard
to figure out how to make Brendan and Maria and all,
John Hannah, all of them safe.
And of course, we did set John Hannah on fire.
That was not a trick. I mean, it's a fire trick for movies,
but John actually had his ass on fire and told me it got quite hot.
Anyway, Brendan riding these bronze horses
was a complex rig to...
This, by the way, was a full CG shot.
If you go back and see Brendan catching up to the wagon,
it's totally CG Brendan, CG horse.
Here, we have CG Emperor and CG horse,
but real Brendan on a bucking horse.
All along the perimeter of the chase are observations
about Chinese New Year in Shanghai in that post-World War II period.
There were 500 dressed extras we had every night
to give you the feeling of life and people on the streets.
But the costumes that Sanja Hays did for the whole movie are, I think,
rich and textured and befitting and becoming to the actors,
as well as descriptive of who the actors are,
and the 500 costumes, the nightclub, the armor,
the tunics, the entire look of the film.
Sanja, who did The Fast and the Furious for me and xXx for me,
you know, brings her great taste and lovely flair for design to the film.
Here, we have this twist that,
how could she get shot point-blank and just be fine and...
I chose not to show the bullets healing up
and hope that the mystery would be even greater
by not explaining it at this point.
Here, we have the Beijing Opera doing The Monkey King.
We really staged the opera with the real Chinese opera stars.
And it was a fitting climax, operatic climax,
for Brendan and Luke and Isabella's adventure.
And here, the bail out of the truck in an evening gown,
done by our very fine stunt people from Montreal,
not only sexy, but speaks French.
And a stunt in an evening gown, I love it.
Anyway, we had the Chinese experts, the people who...
A descendant from the people who invented fireworks
do these fireworks, various fireworks displays in the movie.
And it was wonderful to see all the things of which they're capable.
Here was a challenge, again, as a director, trying to figure out
how to do the Johnny-the-explainer scene, or the exposition scene,
and put a sugar coating around the pill that must be swallowed.
We must know the rules. We must know the goals.
We must know the logic that will set the adventure in its next movement.
And I chose to keep these people wrecked
and in pain, burnt, ripped, destroyed,
so that as they are talking about the rules,
there's a certain amount of comedy, and the family story is continuing.
Here, the romance, the attraction of the young actors is beginning to surface.
And I said to Isabella, "The more you talk
"about the truth of your life, the crazier you sound."
And to give Maria as much to play against as possible.
But again, little moments of levity and fun
as we're getting all of the loose ends wrapped up
from the previous first act of the film,
and the second act rules being laid out, the goals.
This was a good scene.
Now, they commented on my beads, and I'm rattling them so you can hear them.
I'm a practicing Buddhist, and these are Buddhist prayer beads.
One set comes from Tibet, this set,
and this was given to me by a Chinese monk, Buddhist monk,
while we were shooting The Mummy.
And this beautiful blue amber one was given to me by Jet Li
as a gift at the wrap, and from his own collection.
And that is not the real gift Jet gave me.
He gave me many gifts that were not material.
He's a Buddhist, he's a generous man, and his One Foundation
is truly an effective charity group,
totally involved in, like, the rescue of people in the earthquake
that hit China this spring.
He has a beautiful vision, he's a beautiful man,
and if you wanna support the One Foundation,
he'll take a penny or 10 cents.
He doesn't want big donations, he just wants a lot of small donations.
Kind of like my man, Obama. Obama's got a lot to do with The Mummy,
because he's also gonna lift the curse
and bring the country back from the dead.
I thought I'd just put in my political plug.
Hopefully, by the time you're getting this DVD,
he's the president-elect of the United States.
Here, this crash-landing is totally CG.
We, of course, never could go to this kind of location,
and to do a crash-landing on a glacier
would be very hairy indeed, as you now see.
And through the power of the computer,
we're able to do these sophisticated 3-D environments
and bring a kind of thrill to the filmmaking process
that, if you don't overuse it, you use it correctly,
can really enhance the movie and bring us into realms of imagination
that we weren't able to explore before the advent of CG, you know.
I got in on it early with my film Dragonheart.
It was the second CG film ever made, after Jurassic Park,
and the first one that used CG to create a character.
And now, I look at this under-mummy character
that's acting out here, and you go,
"When I was doing Dragonheart, this was unthinkable
"that you could do a human or a human-like character
"in full CG and have it be this lifelike and expressive."
My friend David Fincher is bringing out this film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,
in which Brad Pitt, at different ages, is fully CG.
So it's come a long way, baby, from those early days
in 1993-94
when it was first developed at ILM.
So here, we have a combination of aerial photography
in mountains on the west coast of Canada
combined with full CG characters hiking through the snow.
This, of course, was on a stage, with no glass in the canopy, I might add,
that's all digital glass, digital plane, real plate.
Here, a set in Montreal,
it was 90 degrees and just so hot.
I was in shorts and a T-shirt, and I just...
The actors, we needed to do everything to keep them cool,
as cool as possible.
So here, again, real mountains, CG people.
Real set in Montreal in a parking lot.
It was so good when we filled in the parts so we couldn't see all the parked cars.
This was an interior on a set in a warehouse in Montreal.
So we were able to,
hopefully, create the persuasive illusion that they were trekking in the Himalayas,
trying to find Shangri-La,
and do it in a way that made it possible to do it,
either interior or exterior sets, plate photography, complete 3-D modeling
and human elements, or all of the above mixed into one scene.
Now, we take a little time, now, to further the character development.
The mother and son reaching back to each other,
and the son putting his foot in his mouth.
I love the way Luke did it, where he knew it was a mistake
even while his mouth was still moving to form the words.
And a great comeback for all young people
whenever their parents ask them uncomfortable questions,
just shoot back,
"Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answers to."
So, a little bit of bridge building between mother and son.
And now, another abortive attempt at romance.
Isabella... I totally love the way she looks in this sequence.
You see the beauty of her face
and the loveliness and the intelligence of her acting.
This is a young woman who did not speak English, really, when I cast her,
and through the course of the production, became totally fluent,
and now can speak it almost without an accent.
She's a very clever and very talented young woman, just turned 20,
and I wish her the best of long and fruitful careers, to Luke also.
We used to call him Lukey.
She used to call him Lukey Long-Long for some reason.
I can't figure out what that reason might be.
The expression is "kick my ass."
And for the record, you didn't.
Here you're way up.
I always get almost
a sort of height phobia,
looking down there.
I... It has a very visceral effect on me.
I wrote this thing about John Hannah and the yak.
I kind of needed him to have more to say
and more to say to someone,
but as each couple is paired off in their private scenes or the family,
I thought, "Why not give him a yak
"and let a certain kind of sweet relationship
"form up between him and the yak?"
Now the yak, we called Geraldine,
because there was a sort of female idea around her,
is actually a yak named King, who's a male
and was a gift to the queen...
From the Queen of England to some people in Canada,
or at least his parents were these royal yaks,
and so King is actually Sir King.
Anyway, here a scene I asked Gough and Millar to write.
I wanted to see the father and the son,
both who are weapons fanatics,
get into it, and of course,
they're talking about everything but weapons.
And through this gun comparison,
they're actually testing the limits of their relationship,
and who's worthy with the current knowledge
of how to proceed against the Emperor,
with Brendan kind of in the old school and Luke in the new school
with the new-school weapons.
And of course, all the weapons are, in fact, period-correct.
That is, this Russian PPS-38 or whatever it was called,
and Brendan has the Thompson machine gun,
which he is famous, from the other two movies,
for using like a signature weapon.
Of course, Brendan will use swords
and his son's guns and the Peacemaker
and everything else before the movie is over,
including his two fists
and the mystical dagger.
Brendan is unique among actors for me
because of his ability to take the pie in the face,
his love of humor.
And here's a guy 6'2", handsome,
the body of an Adonis, as you'll see later on,
and really would rather slip on a banana peel
and face-plant into a mud puddle.
And that is unique.
Most male actors don't want
to play games with their image
and are very reluctant
to ever take any sort of humiliation or show fear,
and Brendan relishes it.
He's also an incredible dramatic actor.
If you haven't seen his films Gods and Monsters or The Quiet American,
please rent them at your video store or Netflix,
because you will be very impressed and moved by his abilities
when he's not being funny.
The other thing that's great about Big B, as I call him,
is his stunt abilities.
This is an actor that you can really ask to do his own stunts.
He's very physical, he's very strong,
and he likes to do his own,
because he likes the authenticity.
He's very methodical and careful
as you lay out the choreography and what you want him to do,
but then, as you'll see over and over again in this film,
it is really him doing the wire ratchets
or the fights.
He took a lot of punishment, but he gave a performance
that I think you can feel great authenticity within it.
This is a set, again, built in a parking lot
outside the studio in Montreal.
All these mountain sequences were shot in August.
It was so hot and humid, and even here,
John Hannah got pneumonia from the sweating,
and whatever else he does at night
that might engender pneumonia.
But he really was a trouper and hung in there even with a high fever
when everybody was sweating,
so he didn't look any different than anybody else.
We created the snow out of about 100 tons of Epsom salt.
So all this crystalline stuff that looks like dry powder snow
is Epsom salt.
And the blown snow is a very beautiful device
that will spin liquid soap
into these flakes that are completely snow-like
in terms of the way they stick in the hair, et cetera.
So you got the soap and the Epsom salt, you could've taken a bath.
Here are my favorite creatures maybe that I've ever done, the yeti.
They are a cross between the polar bear and the Tibetan snow leopard.
You'll see both animals reflected,
the snow leopard and the polar bear, both highly endangered species,
the snow leopard even more than the polar bear.
Both creatures of incredible beauty,
the polar bear, not from the Himalayas, but the snow leopard is.
So I created these bipedal things with creature designer Aaron Sims,
who did all the creatures in the movie,
the yeti, designed the Terracotta Emperor, designed the three-headed dragon,
the lion dog that you'll see later on
and all of the different foundation warriors,
the desiccated warriors that Michelle Yeoh calls into battle in the end.
Now here, Brendan is doing Krav Maga.
It is sort of everything that can be effective.
If you go back and look at the fight,
it is very unflowery, very direct,
full of leg jams and back elbows and head butts
and taking the enemy's weapon and using it against him.
So you find all these things in this fighting style,
which is used by the Israeli army,
and which was an answer
of what Brendan could do to fight Jet Li.
So you had the wushu, the beautiful balletic wushu
that Jet is world champion and master of,
and then you have Brendan with his strength
and this sort of bar-fighting technique.
Now, there's one of my favorite yeti shots, the upside-down yeti.
Working this out with wires to know how to handle Anthony Wong
so that the yeti could really look like he was handling him.
All that took extensive pre-production,
storyboarding, planning, and then, of course,
we get there on the day, and all that goes down the drain,
and you have to make it up as you go along.
There's a lot of that in filmmaking where you have a plan,
but as Napoleon said,
"The plan rarely outlives the first shot of a battle."
Here, John Hannah improvising like mad.
I would give him situations. I'd give him the essence,
but I wouldn't let him have the script,
so he hated me, but got with it,
and we've now become good buddies.
And I love the spontaneity of his performance.
Here, Rhythm & Hues
creating these icicles and creating the yeti
and the mountain,
and the under-mummy is created by Digital Domain.
And both visual effects houses had to work together,
including sharing proprietary software,
passing backgrounds and foregrounds back and forth
depending on who was responsible for what.
So there you have a Rhythm & Hues background
and a Digital Domain under-mummy,
and here we're back to a Rhythm & Hues terracotta mummy.
This is a good example of Brendan doing his own stunts.
The climb up this thing was a long way up.
Of course, he had a guide wire on him,
but still willing to take the fall.
And now coming up to do his own ratchet, which hurts. Bang!
Not an easy thing to withstand so much force,
but Big B, you can always count on him.
Here you have a totally digital shot.
The only real thing is the tip of the stupa, the Buddhist temple, the gold tower,
or the golden tower as it became known in the post-production.
It's part of why I love movies.
It's just the ability to create illusion.
It just is endless and fascinating,
how much new technical progress
and new storytelling abilities that happen each year
in the digital effects world.
The explosion done in Western Canada.
Its effects felt in Eastern Canada.
And all supposed to be in the mountains of Tibet,
shot in August, when it was scorching hot.
And here comes an avalanche.
Now, I've done an avalanche before, in xXx,
but I used particle animation to solve the problems.
And here, Derek Spears and I talked about using fluid simulations
or fluid dynamics to do this avalanche.
So the avalanche is actually, technically, done a different way than the xXx avalanche,
which was done with Joel Hynek, who's a co-supervisor here.
So Derek and Joel, I took different approaches,
because this approach was not technically possible
only four or five years ago.
Blowing snow turbo-rotors at high speed there
to get the human actors wrapped into the experience.
And this little subplot about the diamond was something that I came up with
halfway through the movie,
that John Hannah would have a relationship with the diamond.
And if you track here on the DVD,
you'll see exactly how and when he got it.
And, of course, if we're so lucky as to be a big hit,
and they want to do a fourth Mummy movie,
I think Jonathan is on his way to Peru with the diamond,
and then the diamond has more power than we've revealed in this version,
this chapter of The Mummy.
Again, the actors being pulled up out of a membrane of Epsom salt
and other snow material by the yeti,
but of course it was by
several big kind of weightlifter, wrestler guys in green suits,
and then the yeti put in later.
I did very little green screen, almost none, almost no green-suit guys.
It's now possible, in the digital world, to just skip all that
and create it from whole pixels.
Here, digital yeti on a set in a parking lot.
We made it!
Here's another of my favorite sets that Nigel built.
This hidden Buddhist shrine in a cave,
overlooking the valley of Shangri-La
and the housing of the Pool of Eternal Life.
And the re-introduction of the magnificent and transcendent beauty,
Michelle Yeoh, into the film.
And clearly alive,
even though she was stabbed by the Emperor 2,200 years before.
We are in a fantasy,
and we are at the Pool of Eternal Life in Shangri-La.
I wish I had some of that stuff.
Do you ever think, if you had it available to you,
would you take it and live forever?
I would. I don't even have any doubt about that.
I'd like to have a lifetime as a doctor and a lifetime as an astronaut
or a lifetime as a pilot.
But as a movie director, the good thing is,
you get to explore lots of different lives
right here in the one life you're given, short though it may be.
So with each film, you go into a different life,
whether it's the life of a street racer or the life of an extreme sports crazoid,
the life of a pilot in Stealth on an aircraft carrier,
all of the different lives you get to look into
and examine and get out of,
'cause not all the lives are equally enjoyable.
But here, getting to live the fantasy world of creatures,
a world that I was first exposed to through the films of Ray Harryhausen,
a great pioneer and talent that I had the pleasure of meeting several years ago
when I was planning a remake of Sinbad,
a brilliant guy in his 80s, still sharp as a tack.
And here's Syd Dutton's interpretation
of the valley of Shangri-La
with my conception as this Buddhist valley of peace and abundance
and of a poetic calm and beauty.
Of course, no place like that exists except in our minds and hearts and wishes.
I love this moment where Michelle Yeoh realizes that her daughter has brought home
not a worthy subject of her love.
And she realizes that her daughter is no longer a little girl,
even though she's 2,200 years old or so,
the daughter of Russell Wong, who played General Ming, and her,
but a young woman who's now in love with a westerner and a mortal guy,
when she, in fact, is immortal,
which leads us to some of the more fun lines in the film,
about he had no problem dating an older woman,
which is coming up in the next scene.
But I look at the beauty of Isabella and Michelle,
and the face of Asia
is what I wanted a lot of people to see in this film,
to look and feel my love and respect for Asian culture,
Asian cinema and Asian history.
I have truly been in love with these ideas
since I was eight years old and my mother took up Chinese watercolors,
and I, living in a small town,
started to page through these art books on Chinese art,
and getting a whole other worldview
on a country and a people that seemed so different
and was among the first places I went when I could travel, in college.
Walking the Great Wall was one of those extraordinary experiences
you wish for everyone in their life.
When I first went to China, the Xi'an tomb had not been rediscovered,
so, again, I went back to see the tomb,
and that was a thrill because you really feel...
These 800 warriors that they've reconstructed, each has a different face,
and you feel the long arms of history reaching across the millennia to you
and saying, "We are like you. We were like you.
"You know people like these people."
Some of them are happy, some of them are bitter,
some of them are fat, some of them are muscular
and some seem introspective and others are fierce.
You know these types of people, and there they all are, standing six feet tall,
completely lifelike, in this tomb in the center of China.
Now here, we have the rapprochement scene between father and son,
where the son realizes what it would be like to lose his dad,
'cause he held him dying in his arms,
only saved by the mystical power
of Michelle Yeoh and the Pool of Eternal Life.
And the father finally being able to admit his mistakes,
his blind-sightedness,
and yet his great desire
to respect and love his son now as an equal,
eyeball to eyeball, and it was...
Of course, this is the scene every son would probably like to have with his dad.
I didn't get to have mine. Mine died very young, but...
So here I got to fulfill my wish fulfillment.
And I'm hoping that these parental scenes
with Isabella and Luke that...
Maria and Luke, they give it a kind of heart
that makes these characters worth rooting for,
and that they give it an emotional center.
The actors here are just so charismatic,
and all of them, to the person,
just the loveliest people I've ever worked with,
and I've worked with a lot of people.
And if I did come back to do the fourth one,
it would only be because I can't bear that I won't work with this cast again.
Somehow, we have to make that happen.
Here, the under-mummy fully exposed, not needing his terracotta shell,
or not wanting it, he never wanted it,
but knowing that he's within steps of immortality,
and that, when he's immortal, he will come and get the girl
and have the daughter in a way he never had the mother.
And of course, he does not come back totally the same.
Now, immortal, from the pool,
he has regained his shape-shifting abilities,
can become a series of creatures that suit his deeds
and dominate everything in its path.
Here, a three-headed dragon, a piqiu, as it's called in China,
and the Emperor's symbol come to life
in a very powerful, creepy,
insectoid dragon way, you know.
And I wanted the dragon, this dragon,
unlike Draco, my good dragon, the Sean Connery dragon in Dragonheart...
I wanted this one to have a kind of very unsettling presence
and very weird clicky language, with that...
All that stuff you hear in the soundtrack
was stuff that I did with sound designer and sound effects editor, Bruce Stambler,
who's done xXx, The Fast and the Furious, Stealth, for me,
wonderfully vivid sound environments that are created around those films.
The soundtrack is literally
half of your impact in the viewing.
I hope you're listening to this in 5.1 or better.
I hope you're listening to the Blu-ray version of this,
because it is the quality
that all filmmakers have been seeking
from the beginning of the after-market quest,
starting with videotape and laserdiscs and DVDs,
and finally we get to an ultimate format,
and we've gone to great lengths to give our Blu-ray edition
all the bells and whistles, and more than anyone has ever packed in.
So I'm gonna think that you're all watching this in Blu-ray.
Now we move into the third act in the movie,
if you can break it down like a play.
But we are in the final movements, and this is where
Digital Domain becomes the main visual effects company.
The dragon is still Rhythm & Hues, but from this point on,
all of that which you see is pretty much Digital Domain
in the dimensions of this battle that forms up
between the forces of good and evil, Michelle Yeoh's versus Jet Li's.
So...
The cooperation between those two companies was unique
to my experience.
And something that I hope happens more often, because
these smaller effects companies, not these corporate giants like ILM,
but that is where the artists are.
That's where the new digital artists go,
because they can use this as a form of self-expression.
Here we are with the Terracotta Army taking the field once more
after 2,200 years of darkness.
I had Professor Li, a real military expert on the Qin Dynasty,
advising me as to the deployment of the troops,
which weapons came in what order.
And the entire army is an exact replica
of the Xi'an tomb, in terms of armor, weapons,
helmets and belts, shoes, everything.
So we're bringing to life
that which can only be still in the darkness of the pits,
the excavation pits in Xi'an.
But I recommend you Google "Terracotta Army of Xi'an,"
X-I apostrophe A-N,
and you will definitely have your consciousness expanded
by what you'll see.
This image came to me in a dream,
that Michelle Yeoh threw the oracle bones and it fanned out in an arch above her.
I don't know where it came from,
but I woke up with that as a dream,
and I just decided, logic or no logic, I was gonna make it real.
And that's also a lot of fun,
being a movie director is thinking these things up,
and then having the ability to render them,
good, bad or indifferent from your brain,
to some form of movie reality.
We built this huge head of Jet in the deserts of Tianmo,
a very inaccessible place way above Beijing.
It's a site where the original Wall actually still...
Ruins of it... You can still see the northern wall.
And that wall that you see in the background, we built.
But in bits and pieces,
earlier in the film, when we were doing the "building the Great Wall" sequence,
you can see the actual ruins of the very wall we're saying was being built next to it,
parallel to it, if you go back to the building, in the prologue, of the Great Wall.
Here, these Chinese artisans built the wall
to look exactly like the ruin would've looked at the northern wall.
And of course, the earthquake
and the zipper, as I called it, of the earth opening up,
is from Digital Domain, as is all these foundation warriors,
designed by Aaron Sims and executed by Digital Domain
and supervised by Joel Hynek and Matthew Butler,
the co-supervisors at DD,
which up till now has been my favorite effects house,
having done xXx and Stealth, as well as this.
But now, with Rhythm & Hues in the mix, it's like an abundance of riches.
And there's Russell Wong, the desiccated Russell Wong,
making his comeback in the film.
And one of the things that I'm proud of is, when you watch this battle sequence,
this is not image duplication.
Each mummy is individually animated
in the sense of,
they are unique creatures doing unique things.
You will not find two doing the same thing.
So, we do this through a program called Massive,
and lots and lots and lots of hand animation,
rendering and compositing.
This originally was gonna be shot in three different pieces,
the volley of arrows, and on the site with Joel Hynek that day,
I just went, "Let's make it all one, and here's how we'll connect the three
"into one continuous shot,
"both the launch of the arrows, the flight of the arrows,
"and the impact of the arrows."
I did that little bit of humor, because, you know,
a Mummy movie, you have to keep your sense of humor,
or it becomes
not as effective.
You have to say, "I know I'm having fun. I'm trying to make sure you're having fun."
We know it's all a big fantasy,
but we have rules, and we ground it at the same time.
We get the right to enjoy the craziness of raising the undead.
This sequence is one of my favorite,
because if you look at the choreography of Yang's charge,
there's so much going on,
and each Terracotta Warrior is given its own choreography.
And I love the scale of these shots.
I always like making movies on a big canvas.
It's something I really enjoy, even though it's so logistically complex.
But to me, it's a rewarding scale to work in.
And just this sequence
is really as big as I've ever been able to do,
and it may be the biggest I ever get to do,
but at least I got to do it.
This dismount of Jet's took three different stuntmen...
Two different stuntmen and Jet to execute.
And now we get into
what was billed in the Asian newspapers as the fight all Asia's waiting for.
That put a lot of pressure on us.
But you know, when two icons of the Chinese cinema
are fighting for the first time,
the scene took on another meaning.
Jet and Michelle are great friends and wonderful to work with together,
because they have so much fun with each other,
even though here, it's a fight to the death.
Here's this corkscrew shot I loved.
Sanja and I purposely designed the dress
just so it could fan like that in that shot.
And that's a good example
of costume designer working together with director and DD,
Jet's fight choreographer, working, all of us, together,
to make something balletic and pretty or, you know, beautiful to watch,
at the same time, hopefully, gripping.
Michelle Yeoh sacrificing herself to get the dagger,
the only weapon that can kill the Emperor.
It's interesting that Michelle, with so little screen time,
rates up there at the very top of the list with the audience.
It's a testament to who she is as an actress
and to the character she brought to life
that with so little screen time,
people feel so deeply about her, you know, in the research screenings.
Here's another thing that was really fun to work out.
The idea that the contact between Rick and Evy
would be so intense.
Usually, CG characters and human characters
have a hard time interacting.
But in the ways we constructed the warriors
and the choreography of this,
there is a real sense
of corporealness and weight and gravity that we were getting.
And the interaction between Rick and Evy with the warriors,
I think I'm very proud of
because it's just a fantasy fight.
And of course, much of this I owe to Ray Harryhausen
from Jason and the Argonauts, the battle with the skeletons,
which got me so excited when I was a kid.
Here, the Ni Yuan, the real Chinese symbol,
the temple guardian dog, the lion-dog,
now a thousand-pound creature capable of great feats of strength,
comes on scene,
as the Emperor keeps changing
his form and his powers.
And the son comes to save the day.
And of course, the parents had it all under control.
These transitions of Jet from beast to human or human to beast
are among the trickiest visual effects in the movie.
The idea to not just do a morph,
to somehow feel the organicness of the transition,
was a big part of the analysis of the problem
that we endeavored to solve.
And it's interesting how the ins and outs
of any of the visual effects are so important.
So much of the credibility depends on transition
in visual effects work.
Another parental scene here, the death of Michelle Yeoh, of Zi Yuan,
and the daughter's absolute grief.
Isabella was drawing upon
some fairly traumatic experience in her own life,
and the feeling was incredibly deep.
Also, Isabella and Michelle did very much develop
a mother-daughter relationship during this film.
The underworld, the cog room as we call it.
The Chinese water wheels are a very big part of the culture
and have been for a long time,
as rice irrigation depends on the flow of water.
So, I kind of thought,
"Let's connect it up to the astrolabe in the foundation chamber."
The Chinese invented the astrolabe.
If you wanna see the original one, just Google "astrolabe." L-A-B-E.
And you can see that this is an exact replica
of the original Chinese astrolabe, and
one of the great breakthroughs in navigation,
that the Chinese had long before it was ever known in the West.
The Emperor controlling the five elements
and drawing his victims back under the wall,
to their living death and their grave underneath the wall.
This idea came to me from...
In Polynesian culture, in Hawaiian culture, very often,
they would bury slaves alive under each post of a royal house,
because it was thought that the slave would hold the house up forever.
And I sort of thought the Emperor might have a similar idea,
that these dead workers would, in fact, make the Wall live forever.
And this came partly from the poem Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The idea of a colossus in the desert, now ruined,
that of a king that once was so high and mighty,
and now is obscure to the point of unknown.
And such is human endeavor and human ego.
You know, there are aspects of this
that I totally put into the creation of that head
and the way Luke finds it in the opening act of the film,
very much like Ozymandias is described, I think, you know,
"I met a traveler from an antique land"
It's an amazing poem.
Very short, so check it out. Ozymandias.
I think it's O-Z-Y-M-A-N-D-I-A-S.
And the death of Yang, a very powerful illusion
of not a good way to go, ground between these wheels.
Jessey was not supposed to go in
and got so caught up in the moment
that she got swept in through the wheels as well.
Now, of course, it's an illusion how...
But there was not much space there, and she really could've been hurt.
Jet and Brendan finally having their mano a mano,
and Jet working within his wushu
style of grace and power,
inside spin kicks and, you know, all of the arsenal that he has,
and him getting caught up, torturing Rick,
and the divide-and-conquer theme here,
where Jet is too big a character,
too formidable a villain
for even one hero to defeat,
and even a hero as strong as Brendan.
And it needing father and son to work together
to bring this guy down.
And the one Achilles' heel which is his heart with this blade.
And here, even with the blade going backwards,
the two pieces fusing together
point to hilt, it passed through his heart.
And in the rules of this game that have been clearly set up,
this is the only way he can get it or could be dealt the death blow.
And I made it as gruesome a death as I could get away with in PG-13,
with him being cooked from the inside
and being gone for good.
And the causality with the army, that the army is gone
and blown back underground to its origin,
where it will return to an undiscovered state,
to be rediscovered by the Chinese farmer digging a well in 1974,
some 30 years after this story ends.
It's an interesting journey we took on this film
through the country of China,
the geography of China, the spirit of China
and the history of China.
It's the reason I did the film.
I did not ever...
I haven't done a sequel to my own films.
The Skulls had a series of direct-to-video sequels.
XXx has had two sequels now, a third one coming...
I mean, The Fast and the Furious has had two sequels and a third one coming,
and xXx had one sequel with a cast change.
And you know, I didn't do those for reasons.
There are too many new ideas and too many new things to explore.
That was Marc Pitre dancing by there, my co-producer, right-hand man,
thought I'd give him a plug for all the hard work.
That's Derek Spears, the little guy looking down the girl's dress,
there, to the right of Brendan and Maria,
Maria in a beautiful silver lamé dress that Sanja designed.
Vic Armstrong is dancing with his wife in the background.
And if you go back, and you see this bald little guy
dancing with the tall, beautiful, pregnant goddess,
that's me and my wife, Barbara.
Here, the payoff of this joke, again, that we found, kind of discovered, like,
what the possibilities would be for future stories
with Jonathan winding up with the diamond
and heading to a place that definitely there are mummies.
And so the saga might continue.
Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this journey with me.
And there's so much more I would love to tell you.
There are many, many anecdotes and rich insights to the process
of what we went through and how it was done
in the ancillary materials here on the DVD.
There's also the book The Art of The Mummy,
which is a beautiful art book that Newmarket published which has a lot of...
An essay by me, plus interviews with Nigel Phelps, the production designer,
Anne Kuljian, the set decorator,
Sanja Hays, Aaron Sims, everything, storyboards
and the total way the picture was conceptualized.
Here, in these beautiful end credits
by Imaginary Forces, the title company,
we thought of it as an epic painting,
that if there was a series of paintings that was about the movie,
but in a way as if they were Chinese, different forms of Chinese painting,
and, you know, trying to be consistent to the very end.
But the word "China" has a magic for me that I've had all my life
as I've explained to you, so when I heard that...
Even though it was Mummy 3, as it was called then,
it had the allure of a chance to do an epic fantasy in China.
And my friend Randy Edelman, who wrote the score,
did a beautiful thematic job
and with some additional cues by John Debney,
a terrific composer as well.
The producers, Steve Sommers, Jim Jacks,
Sean Daniel, Bob Ducsay, were fantastic to work with,
and they helped me complete this journey.
I hope you've enjoyed the commentary,
and of course, more importantly, I hope you enjoy the movie.
And I'll see you or talk to you on the next one,
should the next one come to pass.
All right, God bless, and have a great life.
Rob Cohen, signing out.