Rob Cohen on his Mummy
Posted by bob in Films, News on July 7th, 2008
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor director Rob Cohen spoke with ShockTillYouDrop about the movie, opening August 1.
Bucking current practice, Cohen shot the movie entirely on sets around Asia and noted, “There are no green screen sets in this movie. I went all over China - the deserts of Beijing. The truth is, I had a list of ten commandments when I went in for the first meeting. One of them was that we were going to shoot all location stuff in China. We went to Western China near the Kazakhstan border then down to Hengdian then we wound up at the Shanghai studios where we had a basic standing set of The Bund, then we expanded it for this chase featuring a chariot drawn by four bronze horses.”
Being Famous Monsters, we were particularly interested in Cohen’s comments about the various creatures we can look forward to starting with the Mummy but including several others. “The Yeti was in the script,” Cohen said. “The three-headed dragon was not, nor was the Foo dog, but I had been developing Sinbad with Keanu Reeves and I had become interested in the character that was going to be Jet [Li] - the villain in that was going to be a shape-shifter. So, I put it in here. Once he reaches the pool of eternal life at Shangri-La, he could now change form when he needed to. When he gets back to raise the army, he turns himself into a three-headed dragon so he could fly out of the Himalayas, not hike. Then he turns himself into the temple guardian dogs and can just cross the battlefield. You get the opportunity in a movie like this that you can’t do in Indiana Jones because in Jones when it got more slapstick, it still had to be in the world. This is a magical world and when you start talking about the undead, you may as well go
all the way. Take your opportunities and make it something unforgettable.”
Speaking of Indy, with Alex O’Brien now 21, there’s the inevitable comparison with Mutt. “First of all, the son is not a caricature. [Alex is] a real identifiable kid who found a diary in the stacks and got [his expedition] financed and found the tomb,” the director observed. “Steven was making a very extreme character out of Shia [LaBeouf]. Whenever you bring someone in on a Harley doing Marlon Brando, you’re not taking off on this level. I think the rapprochement here is totally emotional. It’s a very different intent.”
For the rest of the conversation, check out their site.
