The Mummy (1999)

Hi, this is Stephen Summers, the writer-director of The Mummy. Actually, Steve Summers, but my mother makes me use Stephen professionally. And with me is Bob Doucet, who's been editing every one of my movies since we were in film school. We've been together for 12 years. 12 long years. Don't make it sound that long, Bob. It's mainly been enjoyable. Mainly. So what do you think of this logo? We're not big fans of the new logo. We like the old logos, but maybe we shouldn't say that here. Anyway, this shot... It took us about two years of development. It's a very expensive shot. We went into it, I think it was budgeted originally at $200,000. This shot actually cost about as much as Steve's first film. Yeah. So we kept saying, see, there's a dog there. See that dog? We had them put that dog in and all those people. There were people in there, but we wanted a lot more. Now, the wall on the right here is real, and the pharaoh's real, and those soldiers kneeling are real. Everything else is ILM. Didn't they do a good job here? Thieves. City of the living. Crown jewel of Feral Seti I. This shot here is another ILM matte painting composite shot. And it was done, actually finished before that previous shot. So you can actually see some differences between the two and the lighting. No other man was allowed to touch her. I think that last shot is about the most popular shot in every TV commercial and trailer. People always cheered at that shot. You're talking about Ankh Sanaman? Ankh, yeah. Ankh coming towards camera was a big winner. But for their love, they were willing to risk life itself.

We debated this shot. This is kind of an afterthought, because we realized people didn't know that she was just wearing body paint. It's just paint. She's not wearing any clothing at all. I think even after we put that shot in there, a lot of people don't understand that she's wearing body paint. I know. She's in a heap of trouble now. But for the airline version, they painted in a little bikini for her, which I find very amusing.

Her petting the cat was my idea, I have to say. That was a nice touch. She was good. By the way, all the ancient Egyptian spoken is as close as we could get to ancient Egyptian. The language hasn't been spoken in over 3,000 years or 2,000 years, but we had a professor of Egyptology go over the script and phonetically write out how he thought the ancient Egyptian would sound, and then he put it on cassette tapes for all the actors so that it wouldn't just be... They wouldn't be just spewing gibberish. It's actually what this professor believed ancient Egyptian would sound like. Arnold was pretty good at it, but Ankh was terrific. If we do a sequel, we'll bring her back big time. Getting those extras to look down at the body must have been like, ugh, it was a nightmare. I think it was nine takes or something. Extras are your favorite group to work with, aren't they? Not much rattles me, but extras can get to me. Extras just are difficult. You've been known occasionally to throw a thing or two at them, I think. This shot here is a pretty interesting sequence. It was done by our friends at Cinesite. And this shot here done by ILM, it's a combination of live action and matte painting. The whole background, the moon, the sky, a lot of those statues are visual effects. I love this shot. This will be fun. This is Alan Cameron, my production designer at his finest. Alan also did Jungle Book with me. This sequence was a problematic sequence editorially. As we get a little further into the ceremony here, as the ceremony was staged, Arnold is going to lift a sword and basically he's about to remove her organs. And unfortunately the audience read that like he was about to kill her, which seemed kind of strange given that she had just come back to life. So it's a little hairy in there, but we seem to have gotten away with it. The audience seemed to go with it rather well, I think. ...and Naksunamun Sol had come back from the dead. See, right there. ...had followed Imhotep and stopped him before the ritual could be completed. These shots were very difficult to deal with. They were some of the last visual-effect shots to be finalized. Edward Monk. Edward Monk. Yeah, exactly. Nice screen there. Now, this shot right here, this guy pulling the poker out, this was like 12 shots. Right as the camera would roll, he'd walk away, and we kept telling him, no, no, stay until you hear background action, background action. And after about take 12, I said, don't move until the stone hits you in the head. See, that's what we're talking about, throwing things at the extras. It doesn't seem like a good idea to me. We actually never threw anything at them. This shot worked out really well, so we wanted to get very close to his tongue before that guy slid in. It really grosses the audience out, which I think is interesting. Yeah, they actually think they see his tongue being cut off. They don't see a thing. Now this, Arnold really, he was such a trooper, but it's really creepy being mummified like this because you can't move very much, you can't really breathe. It kind of freaked him out a bit. Here we have a little ILM work here, CG scarabs. If you see the original plate for this shot, the guy who walks in there dumps out about half a dozen plastic... scarabs just as place markers. ILM did a great job on that shot. Now this next shot's a combination of every trick in the book, first unit photography, second unit photography, ILM, so you went from here to miniatures, models, matte paintings, the whole thing. And then a main title by Kyle Cooper, ...which was one of the last things that was actually done on the picture. It was composited over the ILM shot. Those are supposed to be mummy bandages pulling off there. Those who didn't catch it the first time. All this is a build. We built this city except for that far wall. It was a 400-year-old Portuguese fort inside this dormant volcano. and all these pillars and the ruins we built ourselves. And way out there, see all those thousands and thousands of charging horsemen? There was really only about 100 of them at that point. This guy needs some dental work. And we multiplied them. But then we did have, there's 500 guys racing around on horses, firing guns. Every time you see any guy on a horse firing gun, it's a Czechoslovakian stuntman. Because no matter how many times we went over it with the extras on horseback, they didn't understand us for some reason. A little language. gap or something. So we had to constantly use the same 20 Czechoslovakian stuntmen who were really good. This sequence actually changed a great deal editorially. This wasn't initially Brendan's introduction. There was a sequence where we learn a little bit about his backstory and why he's there with the French Foreign Legion. And also the introduction to Benny is more involved. It was cut out for time purposes. Mainly for pacing. It didn't Right, exactly. The scene needed to get going, we needed to get into the movie, and this opening sequence took a little bit too long. The other thing that happened in the sequence, too, is that those guys on the hill, the Magi, that was actually inserted into the sequence in post-production and was not originally there. It was used, hopefully, to clarify the fact that they were different from these Tauric warriors. You know, we may have been partially successful, but I'm not sure in the end that we totally were. It's very difficult to have two sets of separate people both wearing black and expecting the audience to understand that they're different. Yeah, originally the Magi were going to be completely tattooed from head to toe. But then when I cast Oded Fair, I just couldn't do that to his face. He looked too good. And in fact... And seemingly the right choice, by the way, as it turned out. I think it was the right choice. He seems very popular. On the Internet, he has many a female fan base, and so to completely tattoo his face would have been a mistake. Pretty much every time you see Brendan fire a gun here, the muzzle flash, the flash that's in there, has been put in optically, which is actually kind of a common thing in films. Guns don't... I mean, they do make flashes for real, but they don't do it every time you need it to, and sometimes the actor's not actually firing the gun for real, and we need them to shoot at a particular point. This whole sequence is just a blast to film. I mean, it was very hot. It was about 130 degrees in the desert, but just to have all these guys on horsebacks firing guns, I mean, you know, this was so much fun. We were just, the whole crew and I were just laughing. We were having so much fun doing this, as difficult as it was.

This is a very challenging sequence to edit, too, because there's an enormous amount of film. I don't know, it must have been at least 50,000 feet of film, which is in the neighborhood of about 10 hours' worth of stuff for a sequence that's only a couple of minutes long. So it takes a long time to sift through all that and figure out what the best material is to use. It's a combination of first unit photography and second unit photography. Second unit actually photographed on the scene for quite a while. A lot of guys on horseback, unsure of what they're doing. Yes, exactly. Which is one of the things that makes it so challenging to cut. Finding those little bits that make them look like they know what they're doing. See, we actually hired a huge troupe of... It's this traveling entertainment troupe of guys on horses. And we heard that they go around the country in Morocco riding their horses and firing guns. And we thought, oh, this is perfect. These guys would be perfect. They must be great horsemen and great riflemen and... And we find out, no, that's literally what they do. They just wander around the country firing their guns in the air and riding their horses aimlessly. And aimlessly is what they're doing in a lot of the shots. Actually, some of the wider photography, it's pretty interesting. If you go and take a look at it closely, you'll see that there's just guys going around in circles. And in fact, if you look at it closely, it's quite lame. But we try to move things along. We shot a lot of footage and cut quickly. And it turned out quite well. Now this is a practical effects. ripping the sand up. And then we island slid in here right here and did this. Oh, that guy gets hit there. It's fun to see that dummy there as that guy gets, I think one of those horses runs right over his head. I hate when that happens.

I have no idea how this is going to play in a foreign country since there are so many different languages and subtitles that when we go to a foreign country, they have to add more subtitles. I wonder what that's going to be like. Get another matte painting by ILM. This wasn't my favorite just because there wasn't enough stuff moving around in it. I had the second unit shoot this shot twice the first time. The sun sucked. It was really dark and ugly. So I made him go back and do it again. It was beautiful. Stones, sculpture, anesthetics. Introduction to Rachel Weisz. The lovely Rachel Weisz. Volume one, volume two. That was one thing that was great. All the actors were complete sweethearts. None of them ever complained. And in certain movies, a lot of people treat the director different than they do the crew. But I'm so tight with my ADs, I always know how the actors really... act behind my back, and every one of them in this movie was just spectacular. They were so sweet. And we put them through a lot. Okay, now check out here. We got a stuntman in drag here. Freeze frame right here, and look at that guy. Oh, it is a hideous sight. Right here, right here. You do not want to see that. It's like Rachel, she saw the dailies, and she just hoped we could cut it together well. That's also the stuntman, of course, there too. Now here, watch this. This shot was take one. We only shot one take, that's it. Rachel's now crawling in as the stuntwoman is crawling under the camera and I told her to stand up and perfect. Take one, one take only, that's it. 12,000 bucks. Steve called me from the location saying, okay, so what does it look like? Do we need to shoot it again? And I thought, well, I'm not sure what else you'd do to that shot. I think it's about as good as it could be. Yeah, it was a real pain because we arrived on the set And Adrian and I, my cinematographer, had gone over it and discussed it, and when I arrived, the lights were... He had already pre-rigged the whole thing, but unfortunately the lights were at the top on the ceiling, and I realized once we got there that we were going to see them. And Adrian tried to talk me into doing a 180 camera move instead of a 360-degree camera move. And I kind of held out, and he and everyone else was very pleased when it worked. It was a lot of work. I think they spent five hours pre-rigging it and then they had to de-rig it and re-light it. It took another four hours. So to get that one shot was a full day. I really like this scene because we learn everything we need to know about Evie and her backstory without it seeming like lame exposition.

Not that there's anything wrong with lame exposition. No. We love lame exposition as much as the next person. Another Alan Cameron set design. We shot this in some big old mansion outside of London. Which is... This room is going to show up much later in the movie as a different room. Just reset decorated. This scene is interesting editorially because it's almost identical to the way it was when it was first cut. Every once in a while, a scene just drops into place when you're cutting. The director shoots it right? Well, that's actually what I was thinking, but I was going to try to be kinder and say... You know, something just clicks when you're first cutting a scene and it all comes together. And there were virtually no changes in here. That's about the biggest jump in the movie because it's the first one. People really... I really had to make sure that I got the movie off to a jumping start and people, you know... I wanted to scare them very badly there. it's very well executed too it's interesting because i mean it's it's one of the the cheapest gags in the right in the book i mean it's it's a really it's it's shameless in fact but but it works it's it's fun to be in a preview audience or or even better with a paying audience and sitting there watching them all jump when he uh pushes that mummy out now i shot this scene in this in the script i told john hannah that he was going to be drunk And so he started playing it that way, and then I changed it on him. Because I wanted him to play the character a certain way and get into the character. But I didn't want him to be a drunk. Which, by the way, presented a wonderful challenge for me editorially. I always love when directors change things in the middle of shooting a scene. That shot was ad-libbed, where he picks up the leg and finds the box. I thought that was really funny. John Hanna, originally, he was very nervous about doing the movie because... I don't think we have his real voice here. I wish we did. He's Scottish. He has a very thick Scottish accent. I used to tease him on the set all the time, asking for an interpreter. Because literally the second I'd call cut, he'd go right into his thick Scottish accent. And he was nervous about playing this role because he had to play English. And I told him, no worries, he'd do it. He'd have no problem. even though I wasn't so sure he could do it. But he's such a good actor, I just figured, you know, what the hell. And I wanted him in the movie, and he was fantastic. Who the hell was set in it first, and was he rich? He was the second pharaoh of the 19th dynasty. We shot this in the basement of that same mansion. When we first arrived there, this whole room was filled with mattresses, wall to wall. It was some sort of like Hare Krishna yoga thing going on there. Or so we were told. I don't know, wall-to-wall mattresses? What do you think? I don't know. Seems kind of scary. Yes, yes, I know all the silly blather about the city being protected by the curse of a mummy nonsense, but my research has led me to believe that the city... That's a scary cut right there. That jump in on Evie. Ah, you know, we cut a line out. Yeah, every once in a while you... you get stuck, and you just make the cut. Everybody knows this story. The entire Acropolis was rigged to sink into the sand and Ferris command a flick of the switch and the whole place would disappear beneath the sand dunes. This scene is actually very similar to the way that it was first cut also. With the exception of the end of the scene, there's actually a fair amount of stuff that's cut out at the end. The curator goes for the key that Evie had found the map in and we cut all that out for both pace reasons and also to not tip our hand too much, show our hand too much here. Do you tip a hand or show a hand? I'm not sure what you do. I think you tip hats. Step over the threshold. Welcome to Cairo Prison, my humble home. You told me that you got it on a dick down in here. This, we'd already picked a courtyard in Marrakesh for the jail scene. And on our way back to the hotel, we pulled up to somebody who needed to buy some stamps or something. I happened to look down an alley and saw this thing. So that's how we found this courtyard. which was much bigger than the original. And everything here is just a build. This is in downtown Marrakesh. It's George of Jungle. George of Jungle. Marrakesh was actually, I was gonna say fun place to shoot him, but I'd say more interesting. I really wanted to get the feel of Cairo in the 20s, and I think this is about as close as you can get. I don't think Cairo nowadays even looks anything like Cairo in the 20s. And so Marrakesh doubled very nicely, and the people were great, and the extras were very authentic looking. It was kind of a fun scene, especially the next one coming up where we had 500 prisoners. It was a lot of fun. This is, I think, the first day of filming, actually, this scene right here. because that's where I was when I found it. I was there. And interestingly enough, presented a challenge cutting from a tone and character standpoint, because what you'll find is early in photography, the actors are figuring out their characters. And in this particular scene, there was actually an enormous amount of film shot. And so there was a lot of latitude as how the scene could be cut. And it's a scene that we revisited a lot. attempting to make the tone a little bit less jokey than how we'd originally had it cut, although a lot of the stuff was very, very funny that we cut, and in some ways unfortunate, but you have to do that sometimes to make the tone more appropriate. Right, we had to ease into the humor as much as possible because eventually the audience seemed to really, in theaters, they love the humor, but we didn't want to have too much of it right up front Trying to make the audience understand the tone of this movie was an interesting problem. And at the end of the day, it really worked out. I think a lot of people in the first Ancient Egyptian sequence assume it's going to be a horror movie. But thankfully, the marketing campaign was so brilliant, the audience knew what they were getting into when they sat down. So the humor all played wonderfully. Brendan actually knocked himself out cold in this scene. He kept asking that once we hang him, he kept asking the stuntman to, you know, as he was hanging there and we were going in on a close-up, he kept saying, tighter, tighter, I want to really look like I'm choking. And next thing you know, he collapsed on the ground out cold. We all looked at him, kind of laughed, thought it was Brendan just screwing around. And then he didn't get up. And suddenly there was a big panic and everybody's like... Brendan tells that story a lot. Yeah. You'd see that a lot on Entertainment Tonight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was fun. Actually, that shot's coming up. I think it's the next shot. Yeah, this shot right here. Great hanging rig there that Simon Crane, our stunt coordinator, he'd just come off of Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, and it really looks like someone got hung. Brendan was just about to pass out there. Interesting, geeky, technical note here. Most of the scene is looped, which means that the dialogue was replaced in post-production. And not because the performances were bad, they were actually quite good, but the actors didn't quite project well enough to get over the crowd when the scene was being photographed, so we went back in the studio and revoiced those lines with them and had them projected more so that it could get up over the crowd sound effects that were put in later in post-production. Now, right after this shot, there used to be a whole other scene where we realized that the curator is in cahoots with these other bad guys, with the Magi. And we decided to cut that out, and we used to introduce the Americans and Benny in this scene. And we cut all that out just to, because we realized in post that we wanted it to be more of a surprise later on. It was actually interesting because Stacey Snyder at Universal was quite insistent on cutting that scene for that very reason, so that we find out that... that the Magi are in cahoots with the curator much later in the film, which actually works out as a good reveal. Now this scene was shot in Chatham Docks in London. Almost every exterior in the movie is in Morocco, was shot in Morocco, out in the Marrakesh or the Sahara, but this sequence we actually decided to shoot in London because we had some water there and... It turned out well. It rained the entire summer in London. Every single day we were there, except this day. This is incredibly lucky. Although in Brendan's close-ups, you can actually see the sky clouding up a little bit. All the rest of this is in fairly good light, and his close-ups are a little bit overcast. Complete scoundrel. Nothing to like there at all. Bright good morning to all. Oh, no. What are you doing here? I'm here to protect my investment. Thank you very much. Now this shot was just a nightmare because the two canoes, the stuntmen knew how to paddle them, but one of them was an outrigger and it kept slamming into this canoe and we just kept doing it over and over and they couldn't get up enough speed and they kept crashing into each other. And so eventually, as you see there, we just got rid of the outrigger, kind of paddled off into the reeds. John Burton, the visual effects supervisor, suggested to Steve at one point, like on take 35 or something, that perhaps the Magi could be rewritten as hapless, which I think probably would have been a good idea. So the reason we cut the earlier intro of the Americans is because it made this poker game important for the bet that they make. But now we're meeting these characters for the first time, so it became a much more important scene, whereas before we'd already seen these guys. What makes you? We got us a man who's actually been there. Oh, what a coincidence, because... Whose play is it? Is it my play? I thought I just... Gentlemen, you got us a wager. Good evening, Jonathan. Night. Now, this shot right here was shot in a soundstage. And in post-production, we put off to the right, the moon there and the clouds, and there's some land mass. We added that in post. Sorry, didn't mean to scare you. Our friend Kevin at Cinesite. Steed up many a night trying to make the scene look like it wasn't shot on a soundstage. Oh, if you call that a kiss. Um, did I miss something? Props department doing a brilliant job. Are we going into battle? Lady, there's something out there. Something underneath that sand. Yes, well, I'm hoping to find a certain artifact. A book, actually. My brother thinks there's treasure. What do you think's out there? Any word? See off to the right of Brendan's head there? It's just blue. Bob really wanted us to replace all those shots, but the cost was too much. So we just replaced a few. And I don't think the audience seemed to really go with it. Now that you look at it, hopefully you've seen the movie several times before you listen to this channel. You probably never noticed it before, but now that you know it, it'll probably feel like a soundstage. Or if you did, what are you paying attention to the sky for? Yeah, why don't you listen to the dialogue? Like, hello, let's see you do it better. Um, by the way, why did you kiss me? Now here's, uh, here's O'Connell being a significant dumb guy. He's, he's just not, he's not following the lady's line of logic there. And so here's where we meet Benny again. So it becomes more of a surprise. My good friend, you're alive. I was so very, very worried. Well, if it ain't my little buddy Benny. I think I'll kill you. Thank God, my children. You don't have any children. Someday I might. Shut up. We were shooting these scenes. This was the last week of photography, and we were all just punch drunk. We were so exhausted after five and a half months of nonstop filming and 130 degree heat trekking all over the desert and I remember MTV showing up and trying to do interviews with us, and we just were, like, incoherent, trying to get through the last couple nights. For those of you who weren't really following what Benny's nationality is, his accent should have led you to understand that he was of Hungarian descent. But I think the fez indicated to the audience otherwise. You learn these things later. In fact, we discovered that Benny was Hungarian in one of the, or maybe in both of the two scenes that we cut prior to this. I wrote that role specifically for Kevin J. O'Connor, who was in my last film, Deep Rising. He's just so brilliant, such a great improv actor, that when I was writing this role, I knew Kevin J. was the guy. Bob was always worried about that insert of the footsteps. Like, are we going to know those are footsteps? Kept hammering me about that. I don't remember that. Yeah, I kept getting notes. Really? Yeah. 1865 was... It was... Oh, for heaven's sake, girl, it wasn't that good of a kiss anyway. This again is on a soundstage in London. I love the way the scene looks. Warm, candlelit.

This character, Hook, was also introduced in that scene with the curator that was cut earlier. I think it's always best to use two guns. Oh, yeah. I mean, if there was some way to hold three, that would even be better. The map! The map! I forgot the map! Relax. I'm the map. Oh, that's comforting. This whole next sequence, because it was the last week of photography and the set had just been built, I just winged it. And I'm really pleased how it turned out. I was, like, just coming up with stuff left and right and trying to, you know, keep it so it all cut together. And I kept adding new gags every day, which I'm really proud of. leads, they seem to work with the audience. Especially this little thing right here where Brendan about gets his head blown off. I added this the night before we started shooting it right here, this whole thing. And I was just hoping that they wouldn't take Brendan's ear off before I finished shooting the movie. I'd say that actually looks quite dangerous. I think the look on his face was, I'm going to kill the director. I mean, those squibs are awfully close to his head, but you know, whatever. Yeah, Brendan was such a trooper, but no... Nobody got hurt on this movie, not a single person and not a single animal. Can you swim? Of course I can swim if the occasion calls for it. Trust me, it calls for it. No, I take that back. We did dislocate one stuntman's shoulder, but... We'll have to point that out. That was because of his own rig. He built this rig that... They convinced me it was going to be a good thing. So what you're saying is it's his fault. Yeah, it's his fault. He knows it too, by the way. When I came up to see how he was, his shoulder was dislocated, I think his elbow was broken, and he was more embarrassed than her. That was Brendan getting really close to the fire. He insisted on doing those things, which scared the hell out of everybody. Wait here. I'll go get help. This line I came up with, Omid right here came up to me and said, hey, how do I get off the boat? And I realized I hadn't written his exit into the script. We just see him on the shore later on. And so I came up with this on the moment. I just said, well, you have a relationship with Brennan. Run up to Brennan and say, you know, what do we do? What do we do? And I told Brennan to say, wait here. I'll go get help. And it was a great laugh in the movie. I was really pleased because that was the last night of filming. And I don't even know how I was standing on my own two feet. Let's talk about the tenacity of Hook here. The guy is on fire, and yet he's still trying to get Jonathan. I mean, he's been on fire for what, like three or four minutes? What was he doing? He burns well, that guy. What was going on? I want to know what was going on between the last time we saw him and now. He stopped for a drink in the bar. He just continued to ignite. I'll tell you, that is incredible tenacity. Now we go from a soundstage in London...

somewhere in the south of England. A pond, actually. Frencham Ponds, they called this. And with a little help from ILM, we put the boat and the Americans in the background. The Americans aren't big enough, I think, at the end of the day. You don't really get to see them back there. Also, I had to do a little... The paintwork on Evie's costume there was a little bit too sheer. That shows my professionalism. I was so concentrating on her performance and her face that we didn't realize until we got the dailies that basically it looked like she was completely naked because, well, the white little gauze thing she's wearing, when wet, it's completely see-through. So we had to do a paint job, which many of my assistant editors were not happy with. They thought it was fine the way it was. It was an unpopular decision, I have to say. No, they thought it was fine the way it was, but, you know, it was a PG-13 rated movie, and, you know, I don't think Rachel has nudity in her claws, so. This was out in the desert in Air Food, about four hours past where they filmed some Lawrence of Arabia. I love this, the camel merchant there. I mean, if you watch him, he's such an expressive actor. He does such a great job, and just off to the periphery there.

This was great. Look at Rachel's eyes. We saw that all the belly dancers in Marrakesh did their eyes like that. And it's just so gorgeous. And so Rachel asked, came up to me one day and asked if she could do her eyes that way. She said, I know it's a little out of character, but maybe the Arab women would do that to me while I was, you know, getting my new clothing. And I said, oh, okay, great. Yeah, it looks really great. And it was a knockout shot. Again, this is way out in the desert.

It's always good to go dragging cranes around in the desert. Yeah, I had a world-class crew, just fantastic crew. Didn't matter what I asked them to do, it would always be done within 15 minutes. I'd say, oh, I want to dolly up this sand dune. I want to crane over that mountain there. And everything was rigged so quickly. It was just fantastic. And this was, we got up at 2.30 in the morning to shoot a lot of these shots because the desert photographs beautifully from about 4.30 in the morning till 8.30. But at 8.35, as soon as the sun crests, or a certain mountain or it gets to a certain point in the sky, all the shadows go away and the desert looks ugly. So we really had to finish by 8.30 in the morning and then shoot close-ups and go in tighter. And then we could, again, about 5.30 in the afternoon, it would start getting good again for shots like this. In the second unit, I just kept pushing them to, you know, shoot a lot of stuff, and so some of those shots where you see the sand blowing, they just shot right into the, we got hit by two sandstorms and everybody just kept filming. Hey, that doesn't look like Jonathan. A lot of those shots, they're actually doubles. It's rather amusing to look at some of them because Brendan is, or Brendan's character, Rick, is covered throughout so that you don't see his face, not that you would anyway.

This is all photographed with a technique that's an old-time technique called Day for Night, in which it's actually photographed in the daytime with a particular filter pack and then printed in a certain way so that it, well, kind of looks like night. This shot, however, was shot day for day. and the moon was put in and it was processed to look like day, as was this shot. To look like night. To look like night, rather. And if, in fact, if you go back to the beginning of the picture, you'll see a shot from the sequence with Ardith Bay. We used the same close-up twice. That we stole from this scene. Again, trying to clarify that problem in the first scene, which... But you don't notice because one's during the day and one's at night. Now, all this is, if you know, sky replacement. This was a, we shot this early in the morning. but it wasn't early enough, and coming up is this mirage, it's supposed to be a sunrise, and so we had to replace all the skies in this scene so that it would look like pre-sunrise, when actually it was shot post-sunrise. These shots, again, were done really late in the game. CineSight really helped us out here by doing this stuff very last minute. I mean, these shots were being put into the negative, I don't know, eight or nine days before the movie was released. Now, camels are interesting. They're beautiful, and they're really, I mean, they're cute, and they seem really cuddly and fun, and I think they're great to have in a movie like this, but boy, are they a pain in the rear end. I mean, they're not like horses. They just really refuse to do almost anything you ask them to do. Their spirit hasn't been broken, has it? No, and you cannot break a camel, or teach a camel, or train a camel.

Now, this scene, I was running out of time. I shot this entire sequence in one day, the whole camel race, and with my cinematographer on his back in a truck. Very, very sick. I think almost every member of the crew got sick at some point. I, however, did not. I learned in India making Jungle Book that when I was in Morocco, every day all I eat is mashed potatoes and chicken. I don't know what it is, but in India I almost died from being... getting so sick. Well, it's good eating, too. Yeah. And then suddenly after, I started sticking to mashed potatoes and chicken and never got sick again. So that's what I did in Morocco. I was the only crew member to not get sick. I was very sick and tired of mashed potatoes and chicken, however. Benny just got wiped out by a camel there. That was a funny thing. When the stuntman, they kept throwing him off the back of the camel. And I kept saying, can't you pull him between the camels, Simon? Simon said, no, no, he might get hurt. And I said, oh, OK, I understand that. And after about take four, it always looked like the stuntman was throwing himself off the back of the camel. And I just said, Simon, this is looking so fake. And Simon kept talking to them and saying, you've got to make it look more real. And the takes went on and on. And finally, Simon got mad and said, just yank him down between the camels. And he did, and he got completely run over by the camels. And it looked great, and it's in the movie. And the stuntman didn't get hurt at all. And they all kind of thought it was quite humorous, the stuntman. Little stuntman humor. Little stuntman humor. Hey! Joe got run over by a camel. That wasn't supposed to happen. Would you do that for any amount of money? I mean, I'm sorry. They get thrown off a camel and get trampled by it. It doesn't seem right. Shooting inside this volcano was a little difficult just because of the lighting. We were always losing lighting, and it was just changing dramatically throughout the day. So, as you can see... White sky, blue sky. White sky, blue sky. Sort of like... Jaws. But in the desert. But in the desert. In fact, when we were shooting this scene, sequence, we shot one side and it was so beautiful. The lighting was just, the sun was just so perfect. that we stopped because the sun went down behind the mountain. I lost a bit of time here. I actually lost about four hours. We just stopped early because I just didn't want to shoot the other angle with lesser light. I just thought it wouldn't be fair to the other actor. I think we were on Rachel first, and I didn't think it would be fair to have Brendan's light be bad. But we made the time up elsewhere. We came out of Morocco right on schedule. And that's after being wiped out twice by sandstorms. Hey, look for bugs. I hate bugs. Did you realize we're standing inside a room that no one has entered in over 3,000 years? If you look closely at the warden's right hand, what's he holding there? Watch his right hand. Watch his right hand right there. Oh, what's he doing? That was a wire that we had to remove. We thought about putting a bouquet of flowers in his hand because it looks like he could have been holding something. Or a chicken wing. He could still be munching.

island light gag with these mirrors. Pretty nifty, really. That's actually based on fact. We had a professor of Egyptology, like I mentioned earlier, really helping us out and going over my script and giving me ideas. And we tried to keep everything as fact-based as possible. I mean, most of this movie is based on real myths and real legends. Even though it's a story about a 3,000-year-old walking, talking corpse, we wanted it to be as real and factual, if you will, as possible.

The part where the mummy comes back to life, that's based on a true story, right? That happened to me when I was younger, yes. I love the photography in this scene. You really, well, you feel like you're there. Torch lit. Creepy. Although, before we added sound effects, it sounded like they were walking on... which they were. Our sound designer, Leslie Schatz, did a great job in this sequence, because basically what he had to do was he had to make the sounds of humans seem like it's some scary sound, so you have to... It's a very difficult task, and I think that he came through really well. Also, these guns. Guns don't make that much noise. They just don't. And I kept telling Leslie, it's got to sound like 30 guns lifting up or 50 guns lifting up, and he really went for it. The audience always burst out laughing in every screening I saw. It worked out well. It's funny because people would... corporations and people stopping by and checking out the set and whenever we have a gun battle they inevitably somebody would say it doesn't really sound like a gun battle looks great but it doesn't sound like i said well you wait to see it in the theater we add all that stuff post-production there are other places to dig according to these hieroglyphics we're underneath the statue Brendan's actually destroying the set. That was one thing. As prepared as Alan Cameron always is, he wasn't prepared for Brendan to be smashing into the set. So at the last moment, we have a grip standing above Brendan, dropping that sand. But he was basically just breaking into the plaster of Paris of the set and kind of destroyed the rooftop there. Second unit photograph. These couple of shots here. It was initially a A longer sequence. As scripted, it was... He was supposed to moon us. As he went around the corner, the warden was doing one little shot. It's where his pants were halfway down around his butt. But second unit, for some reason, decided that they should show his entire ass. And it was clearly a disgusting R-rated shot, and we could not use it. And then what... I bet you're all sorry you missed that. Yeah, I'm sure you did not want to see that shot in the movie.

Let's get us some treasure. Seti was no fool. I think perhaps we should let the diggers open it. Oh, I think we should listen to the good doctor. These have got to be the worst extras in the history of extras. I've had worse. But they were pretty bad. There's a lot more photography of these guys. It makes cutting a scene like this very challenging when the extras are... Not there with you.

Let me get this straight. They ripped out your guts and they stuffed them in jars. And then they take out your heart as well. Oh, and you know how they took out your brains? Evie, I don't think we need to know this. They take a sharp, red-hot poker, stick it up your nose, scramble things about a bit, and then rip it all out through your nostrils. That's gonna hurt. It's called mummification. You'll be dead when they do this. For the record, if I don't make it out of here, don't put me out for mummification. This gag coming up, all the actors were expecting a huge crash, but it was so silent that none of them reacted. And actually, it kind of worked well for the scene. Afterwards, they all told me they were just wondering if they should continue on or what they should do. And their lack of reaction actually makes it more humorous. Now, this next scene coming up with the warden, as we mentioned earlier, he was supposed to, as he was coming around one of the corners, he was supposed to moon us, meaning, you know, that his underwear and pants were pulled down. For some reason, the costume department thought that maybe it would be better that if he wasn't wearing any underwear at all. And so, which turned out to be rather an unfortunate choice. I had two monitors in front of me. I was watching the scene on two monitors. We had a closeup shot and a wide angle shot. And I was watching the closeup camera, you know, for performance reasons. And first time when he rips off his shirt and he starts screaming and yelling, I loved it. And I called cut and I was all excited. And my script supervisor, Sylvie Chanel, who's been with me on every movie I've ever done. She tapped me, she said, no, no, you can't use that shot. I said, what are you talking about? He did a brilliant job. She goes, no, look at the wide shot. And unfortunately, when he rips his shirt off open there, his genitalia popped out of his crotch because he wasn't wearing underwear and there were no buttons on it. And as he's flailing about, he's showing the world what he's made of. So we had to do take two, and of course, his buttons popped open and everything came out again. And... Take three, I said, all right, tape it up. Do whatever you've got to do. Just tape that thing down. And tape three, somehow it all popped out again. And we were shooting some sort of strange pornographic thing going on there. And by take four, finally they'd taped him down properly and it worked. You did not want to see that either. That's what you call an amusing anecdote. I'll tell you, Jonathan... is the keeper of the key. I mean, if you watch throughout the picture, see how often Jonathan is keeping track of the key. It's mine. I've got it. See, watch. Look, he grabs it. That key is well taken care of by Jonathan. Now watch this shot. This shot was a big winner with audiences. This is a, bam, a stuntman on a wire, and he gets within about a quarter inch of that wall. It works well. Yeah, speaking about that key, that's what, when the director's also the writer, I get very anal about story points. I don't want there to be a single story hole. So that's why we keep such good track of that key and the two books and all the other really important props. And then in post-production we realize the audience doesn't really care. Right, exactly. In post-production then we blow huge holes in the movie just to make it faster. So all those things that you think are story holes, those were all taken care of in the script and were all photographed but just unceremoniously ripped out of the picture. Just to be faster. Bob's being facetious. This is one of those, it's like strange relationships where usually directors are begging to keep everything they shoot in the movie and editors are wanting to take it out. In this case, usually I want to make it tighter, faster, and Bob loves this stuff. Bob falls in love with photography more than I do. Well, he may have been a stinky fella, but he had good taste. Here's a little glitch. I just realized no one's going to ever hire me now. You might want to rescind that. He's just kidding. It works out well. I love cutting pictures very sharply. I mean, the movie's really fast-paced, and yet we understand everything. That's the key. Yeah, what I strive for as a picture editor is jarring and slowly paced.

Okay, here's where the stunt guy gets hurt coming up here. Oh, yeah, this guy got... And he... Now, in a different take, he wanted to... Actually, he was on a rig where he was going to fly, you know, 30 feet back and hit that pillar in the background, and he instead flew 60 feet back and over the top of the pillar and broke his collarbone and cracked his elbow. But like I said, he was more embarrassed than hurt. It's one of those things where you go, I guess we need another stunt guy. The stunt... The guys on this movie were really fantastic. They just did a great job, and they made sure everybody was safe. Because there's so much action going on, it could have been a disaster. All you need is for one, you know, Brendan or Odette or someone to get hurt, and that's kind of it, and you're shut down. Now, where did Brendan get that dynamite? You know, that's Brendan. See, I wanted to insert where we see him pull it out, and he wanted it already in his hand, and I thought the audience, and I said, okay, you know, he'd give it on those things. This scene we did a lot of work on. You'll notice when you watch that there's a lot of lines on Odette's back. Stuff that was added in post-production because the audience didn't accept the fact that these guys would stop fighting just because Brendan pulled out dynamite. And so we did our best to move that along and to give them a reason to... Because the idea is that there's honor between these two warriors and they wouldn't just cold-bloodedly kill each other. But in a longer version, it just didn't quite play that way. There was a shot I always wanted to keep. See Benny in the background there? See what he's looking at? He's looking at that corpse. He steals the ring off that guy's finger, which I always found quite funny. But for pace reasons, we didn't use it. I didn't fight to keep that, by the way. I know. Originally, this was to set up Rachel learning how to fight, so that in the final climactic battle, she would, you know, kick the shit out of Ankh a little bit. But in the final climactic battle, we realize that by Rachel punching Ankh, it just lessened the threat and didn't quite work. So it just uses a romantic... moment here. Well, she really flattened out, too. That was the thing. It looked like she'd dispatched her pretty well, so she learned very well from O'Connell. Right hook. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, this is a scene that Rachel and I were both very nervous about. We kept writing and rewriting it, and, you know, it's when you have your heroine and she's drunk. Or female lead, not heroin. Never mind. When you have your female lead and she's drunk, you're always a little nervous about scenes like this. You want to make sure they work like gangbusters. And we really took some time and kept rewriting it and rewriting it and massaging it. And at the end of the day, Rachel did such a terrific job. The audience really went for it, especially these lines that are coming up. or an adventurer or a treasure seeker or a gunfighter, Mr. O'Connell. But I am proud of what I am. And what is that? I... am a librarian. And I am going to kiss you. These close-ups of Rachel are slightly out of focus and they're re-photographed actually a couple of times and you know we have ones that that are sharp but it's one of those cases where the technical side is compromised because the performance is better in the original photography. And actually the focus on this movie was really ...done very, very well. It's just that when you get in such low-lighting situations... ...and the actors are so close and such long lenses... ...it gets impossible to hold them. Jonathan Hyde was really great here. I remember it was at the end of a day when we were doing his... His speech, and I suddenly, we're all getting really tired here, and we're looking at each other, and I suddenly realized that his speech was taking forever, and I just went, oh my God, I walked up to Jonathan, and I said, Jonathan, you know, this speech is taking a long, long time. I'm going to have to cut around it. And he just looked at me, smiled, nodded, and we did the speech, and he picked it up really quickly, and we did it all in one take. We never cut away from him. It's a speech that's coming up in a little while.

A sign of a knowledgeable actor, by the way, because if he had gone on and continued doing the speech too slowly, we would have likely cut away to other actors to speed it up. See, right here, he kept this going. Experienced actors know if they pause, we're going to have to cut away, because you end up cutting a lot of pauses out in post-production, especially on movies like this. And so experienced actors will keep it going so that you keep the camera on them. And Jonathan Haidt is a very experienced actor. If you notice, he says, Amod MacDool. We always thought that was like an Irish mummy. The MacDools. The MacDool mummies. Amod MacDoo. Oh, that's what it is. Isn't it, pal? Something along those lines. He says, Amod MacTube. Which I always thought was an Irish mummy. What's that? Irish mummies. You know what I love is that these guys, after all of that, open the box. What do you make of that? I don't think they're playing with a full deck. I like the way Evie puts her hands on her hips there. She's all miffed. Because they're not taking her seriously enough. I always wanted to try to get a boo scare there, but it really... It made people jump a little bit, or some people jump, but it didn't work out as well as I wanted it to. Even though they're cheap thrills. Oh, yeah, but they're cheap. Even though they're cheap, there's a lot to doing them. And there's a lot to doing them, too. They're slightly mysterious. I always thought it was really cool, the concept of a guy's trying to scratch his way out of a... And that's how you find out he was buried alive. This man was buried alive. And he left a message. You do have to admire how well he carved in that coffin. It must have had long fingernails or something. It's very well done. Now, this shot... I always debated because if you look real close at that mummy... ...and then the one that later on comes alive, the coloration isn't correct. It's because that one was a prosthetic and the one later on was... you know, an ILM computer-generated mummy, but, you know, we went with it, and I think the audience doesn't really bump. He's also juiced up a little bit. Are we supposed to be telling our flaws here, Bob, and, like, letting people know that there are times when we make mistakes? I think it's all right. Considering, you know, five months of filmmaking, there are only three mistakes, I think, Bob. Minor little things, nothing. You notice that box, that comes undone pretty easily also. I don't know if you noticed that or not. Just a little kick. Well, now we're on to something. There we are back out in the Sahara Desert at night. It was really just wonderful shooting at night in the desert. It's very quiet and peaceful.

I believe you need a key to open that book. A lot of people ask me if I hated shooting in the desert because of the heat and the bugs and the scorpions and the snakes and sandstorms. But actually, I loved it as a director. It's the perfect place to shoot a movie because cell phones don't work. No one's worried about getting back to their, you know, boyfriends or girlfriends or getting home for dinner, taking the kids to the ballgame. Everybody's focused on making the movie and working as hard as they can, as fast as they can to get the hell out of the desert. So as a director, it's... This scene actually used to go on a little longer. In fact, I think it will again for the television version. They used to explain all the plagues, like they'd name them. And for pacing's sake, we decided to cut them out. And also we figured, you know, most of the audience... If they know what the plagues are, they know what the plagues are. And if they don't, they're about to see. So we cut that at the end of the scene out. Snapped it up. That bad, huh? It's always a real balance when you're cutting the movie, figuring out those things which you need to leave in the movie so that the audience understands what's going on, and those things that you have to take out so that the audience isn't ahead of the movie, which is, you know, equally as bad as the audience being confused. So there's a real... between a real push-pull in choosing those things. Are they confused or are they ahead of us? We never want the audience ahead of us, but we don't want to confuse them. So we want to keep the pacing going, but not put holes in the story. We hate story holes. In the end, what you end up with in most movies is a compromise between those things. You do end up punching some holes in the story out of necessity for pace or... Or, you know, other technical problems with a scene or, you know, a scene just isn't working, it's better to not have it in the movie, you know, sort of cut the cancer out. But on the other hand, you want to try to give the audience all the information they need to enjoy the movie because if you put too many holes in the movie, the audience stops caring about it and they just shut down. When we talk about holes in the movie, we're talking about little minor details that, in the end, in a movie like this, we tested it rigorously and... found that the audience didn't notice any holes. And so they're really minor little things that we as filmmakers get really anal about. Like, oh God, are we gonna confuse the audience here? It's gonna be a story hole, but the audience, you know, it's so minor that it's us overreacting. It was a very nice piece of work by ILM. The first shot of the CG mummy. Although Arnold Vosloo, who plays the mummy, plays Imhotep, he was a little disappointed because he was hoping it would be like, you know, gooier or scarier. But being PG-13, we had to, you know, there was a certain limit as to how gooey and scary and disgusting a mummy could be. These next special effects shots, we shot them at dusk, right as the sun was setting. so we could light up the desert. And then we'd turn down the sky a little bit in post-production and added all the locusts. Funny enough, these are all digital locusts from ILM. But this next shot, all the locusts on Jonathan there are real. Those are all real. We pour buckets on them. We're all trying not to laugh, and he's trying not to laugh. The ones flying were all digital, but the locusts on him, I personally pour buckets of locusts on Jonathan Hyde. And he loved it. Well, it was hysterical because some people couldn't believe how disgusting it was, and other people, we all just thought it was mainly hilarious. Wait for me! Benny is such a weasel. He takes his torch and everything. For me as a director, the hardest thing about this movie was to combine the humor with the horror. I set out from the very beginning, I didn't want to make just a straight horror movie. I think it would be much easier to do a straight horror movie where you know just every scene you're trying to scare people. And as difficult as comedies are, at least if you're doing a straight comedy, you know you're just trying to make people laugh all the time or as much as possible. But with this movie, it was much more difficult because we wanted to scare people, but we also wanted to make them laugh quite a bit. So we really went for it on the set. We were always trying to go for the humor and go for the horror and try not to pull punches and try to be as scary as possible and yet as funny as possible. And then in post-production, Bob and I sat down with audience previews, seeing some things were really funny, but at the wrong moments. And we would cut them. Some of the humor, some of the biggest laughs in the movie got cut because they were at inappropriate times. They cut down on the tension. So we had to make sure that the humor worked for the movie and not against it. I always liked that mechanical effect. Chris Korbel at his best. He had a spectacular mechanical effects crew. Those are all computer-generated scarabs. There was a bug-splosion at the end there. Yeah, that's what ILM called them. When you shot scarabs, bug-splosions. If you look closely at these effect shots, you'll see that there's some hapless guys going over the side there. Some of the less intelligent scarabs going off the ledge. Committed suicide. And that one guy, I love that guy who's bringing up the rear there. He's never going to get to munch on anybody.

Speaking of tone, this shot of Burns coming up here is a very difficult shot because the movie was always intended to be a PG-13 film. It was very important that there be little to no blood in the picture and unfortunately it made it difficult to show things like his eyes being pulled out. So that shot was digitally enhanced in post-production to make you see it a little bit better than what was done in location.

Arnold Vosloo actually performed much of this CG character's movements through a process called motion capture. He was dressed in the suit that had all these targets on it, and he would basically do the movements that you're seeing there. Not all of the detailed stuff like the hand motion and the expressive face, but the walk and the broader movements are all actually Arnold Vosloo performing his his digital, the digital version of himself there. Right, a motion capture room, what happens is you have cameras in a 360-degree pattern, and Arnold would stand in the middle of them, and I'd direct him through each of the scenes. Like this scene right here, I'd say, okay, you do, you move five steps to your left, you know, and he would do them so that all this motion here is actually Arnold Vosloo. Even though it's a computer-generated mummy, it has Arnold's movement, Arnold's performance.

always key to me. I always told ILM, I've got to see through him. I've got to see through him. I kept really pushing them to make sure that we got to see through his head, see through his ribs. It can never feel like a man in a mummy suit. And I think they really did it. There's some very impressive work on those last couple of shots there. All those bandages that are dangling from him there, those are basically just a bunch of zeros and ones on a computer. None of that is real stuff, and it looks very convincing. You have unleashed a creature that we have feared for more than 3,000 years. Relax, I got him. This was our last night of photography in the Sahara Desert, shooting this scene, and we were desperately racing through it because we knew that the moment the sun came up, that was it for Morocco, and we couldn't stay another day. We were coordinating with the Moroccan army, and they had to fly us out, jet us out of the desert the next day, or we'd have to basically... caravan 12 hours back to Marrakesh and fly out of there, so it was really important that we get out the next morning so that we didn't have to spend 12 hours driving through the desert. We could get in our Learjets and comfortably fly back to London. It's good to be the king. It is good to be the king. Oh, Dad, he was fantastic here.

My favorite part about these shots was added in post, it's Benny whimpering. I like the shots and I like his performance, but we added all his little whimpers in post. There's nobody who can whimper better than Kevin Jay. This is a particularly impressive shot, technically. The interaction between the two, the lighting in particular is quite extraordinary on that shot. As the torch comes around his face, you can see him And, of course, all that's just phony because he's not really there. This is one of my favorite scenes because I was really nervous about this. I needed people to be very scared at the beginning of the scene, but then to slowly build the laughs. And it seemed to work great in an audience. Everybody jumped when they saw Imhotep, and people seemed really frightened. And then, of course, Kevin Jay here. He just ran with it. And the scene... It turned out better than I'd ever expected. Of course, ILM came through for me 100%, as they always did. This scene, in many ways, exemplifies what we were shooting for in the overall tone of the movie, in that you get that mixture of horror and comedy all within the same scene, which is very difficult because the comedy tends to undercut the horror elements, and to have both of those things living in the same film is a very, very... ...a difficult task, and in fact the tone of the picture... ...is probably the single biggest editorial challenge. And that scene, really, I think that was one of our home run scenes. Sort of that was what we were aiming for. That's a prosthetic hand there, popping through there. Not CG, not everything is CG... ...although a lot of the work in this picture is, or the majority of it is. Fort Brydon, Cairo, we got that name. almost everything in here you're going to say pulled it out of our ass weren't you? Yeah, I was going to say that. Almost everything in this movie is based on some sort of fact, but actually we just stole that name from Sam Neill played Colonel Bryden in Jungle Book, and I just thought it was a little homage to my own movie. We originally, or for a time rather, we had the front end of the scene cut off, you know, again for pace reasons, but what it did was it removed the In doing so, we cut the introduction of that cat there. So when the cat reappears later in the picture, it seemed to come out of nowhere, which is one of those holes that I was talking about that you want to try to avoid. We put it back in. Brenda didn't trust me. They showed me that suitcase slamming down. It's a simple little gag, but it looks like it really hurts, and actually it's just foam rubber and kind of fun. Had a big sound effect. I have done that. End of job, end of story. Contract terminated. That's all I am to you, a contract. Look, you can either tag along with me or you can stay here and try and save... Now, if you watch Brendan's hand as he exits the room here, he's actually holding a teddy bear, which we used to do something with that. He used to throw it to Evelyn and he used to go out the door, then he'd come back in, throw it to Evelyn. There used to be a gag here, but we just cut it. Pacing. Wasn't that funny? This always got an applause in almost every screening we ever shot. It's the introduction of Bernard Fox, Winston Havelock. And so many people know him now as Dr. Bombay or Colonel Crittenden from Hogan's Heroes and Bewitched. And it's really fun that his career has just come back like gangbusters thanks to Nickelodeon. Everybody knows who this guy is. And it's funny, in the world premiere of the movie, the projector ball burned out and they had to stop the whole movie And when they started again, they cut out this scene. And so here we are in the world premiere, and his whole introductory scene was missing. And so I had to go scurrying around in the middle of the world premiere trying to find him to explain to him that, no, we didn't cut him out of the movie because he was such a good guy, such a wonderful person to work with. I didn't want him thinking that he'd hit the floor. So I found him and explained to him and his wife that he would be there in all the other prints except for at the world premiere.

Now look off to the left. Look off to the left there. See that? That's my AD's hand. See that? He's looking at his watch. Cliff Lanning. See, you never noticed that before because you were looking at the guys. But we used it anyway. Something else that's fun in that scene because of the way it was photographed and we cut out some dialogue in there. Check out the continuity there. Brendan is drinking and not drinking and it's one of those continuity nightmares that we just powered through to. Make the movie better. Benny is so mean-spirited here. Kevin loved this, and he begged me, let me take off my fez, let me take off my fez. He wanted to show off his haircut. So this is Kevin Jay thinking he looks his best right there. I think that tells you a little something about Kevin Jay, doesn't it? We added those scarabs. those bugs going into, you know, scurrying off his face, sort of last minute, because the shot just wasn't that interesting, and we'd seen his face before, and as we pushed in on him and he pulled off his mask, the audience was expecting something more than just seeing his face again. So John Burton came up with a little idea of having the bugs scurry off his face. He's here.

This is a set in the back lot at Shepperton Studios in London. We've got problems. This, of course, is a huge mechanical effect. We had a blimp above Cairo and shot thousands and thousands of these flame balls all over the streets. We didn't have permits and they got a little pissed off, especially the blowing up of the mosques and stuff like that. or it may have been a shot by Cinesite. Yes. That shot is a combination of models, CG elements, and good old-fashioned matte paintings. This is a very strong shot. Very well accomplished. We are in serious trouble. Again, you can see his muscles form. By the way, that's Bob talking, not the director. Otherwise it'd sound like I'm patting myself on the back, Bob. Well, somebody has to. Rachel really pulled it off here, because obviously she's acting against nothing. There's nothing there, and... The way those shots are accomplished is that they're rehearsed initially... ...with Arnold Boslow in the scene with her... ...so that the eye line is figured out... ...and exactly what the performance is and the timing. And then the actor, Rachel, in this particular instance... ...has to go it alone and work without anything else in the scene. And, of course, the mummy is added in post-production. What is he doing here? Do you really want to know, or would you prefer to just shoot us? After what I just saw, I'm willing to go on a little faith here. We are part of an ancient secret society. For over 3,000 years... Again, this is the same room, actually, where we first met John Hanna at the beginning of the movie. We just redecorated it. It was really interesting watching the chemistry between Rachel and John Hanna, who is supposed to be her brother. Rachel was a little... I don't want to say intimidated because John's such a sweet guy, but John's so famous in London, Rachel was a little nervous about working with him. But very quickly found out that, you know, the kind of guy he is, which is actually, he's a complete sweetheart and a bit of a goof. And so it was really wonderful that I'm so happy that we shot their intro scenes as brother and sister late in the movie because if you notice that in the scene where they first meet, or we first meet them, Rachel just reached across and slapped him and told him to get out of the sarcophagus. And I think if we would have shot that up front, she would not have slapped him. She would have been more intimidated. But by the time we shot that scene, her and John were such good friends, she felt completely free to slap him upside the head and yank him out of the sarcophagus. Bad luck, old mum. On the contrary. It may just give us the time we need to kill the creature. This shot coming up here, this effect shot of the eclipse, was a real pain in the ass because we'd actually finaled this shot, meaning that we'd approved it from, approved all the work from ILM, and we showed it, the picture to the studio, and people, you know, studio executives who had read the script and knew exactly what was supposed to be going on in the shot had no idea what the shot was supposed to mean. Of course, it's an eclipse, and it was in no way clear in our original shot. We had to redo it to make sure it looked like an eclipse as opposed to just a black hole in the sky that apparently was going to be filled in later. Which, by the way, the shot, when we approved it, it was very clear to us that it was an eclipse. But, you know, that's one of the difficulties is you're so close to some of the details when you're working on a movie that you find when you preview the movie or you show it to people who haven't seen it before, you're often surprised by things that they do understand and things that they don't understand. Rachel almost gets her head hit there. Yeah. O'Connell, you are not leaving me in here! This door doesn't open. She doesn't come out, and no one goes in. Right? Right. Right? Right. Let's go, Jonathan. Oh, well, I thought I could just stay at the fort and, uh, reconnoiter. Now! Yeah, right. We're just gonna rescue the Egyptologist.

This shot was also photographed day for night, or actually day for eclipse, I guess is what we really call this. This shot was originally not intended to be an effect shot. It is now an effect shot at the end when the mummy is revealed behind Jonathan. That's now digital makeup that was there originally. We were just gonna go with the makeup that was there and we decided that it needed to be enhanced. This was a fun scene. Every movie that I've shot with Kevin Jay, there's always a scene where he has to get a little bit beaten up, and he bruises easily. I remember the day after this scene, he was covered from head to toe in bruises. There's a scene on Deep Rising where the same thing happened. He gets beaten up by a bunch of mercenaries. Again, he was head to toe, bruises. On both movies, I hired a masseuse on me to try to bend him back into shape. That was to get him back to work the next day. Yes, exactly. He... He really is getting thrown around. He's wearing pads and stuff, but, you know, Brendan's a big guy, and Kevin just got... beat to a pulp here. Immune from what? Piscachalot. What did you say? I don't want to tell you. You just hurt me some more. What are you looking for? And try not to lie to me. The book! Piscachalot. This is sort of just winging things. I saw the fan on the ceiling and thought, hey, what if we do this? This is... I got tired of throwing Kevin around. I thought, we gotta do something else. I saw the ceiling fan up there and went for it. But that's all he just wants, the book, I swear. Just the book, I swear. And your sister. But other than that... If you notice, the sky up to the top left, we replaced that, too. It used to be a bright, sunny day, and we added those clouds.

Again, this is shot day four. Eclipse. Eclipse. This is a fantastic shot. The makeup, or the majority of the makeup on his face where you can see inside of him and in his throat area is all digital. And that's all been tracked in there to give you that effect. Look closely at these extras. Look at the guy coming here now. Watch this. We covered him up with flies because he was not our favorite extra. Okay, I'm now eating miniature Hershey bars to get my blood sugar back up. That was a product placement. It's okay because Hershey is actually sponsoring the video release, so we're okay there, aren't we? If it was any other candy bar, I couldn't say that, I don't think.

He's quite the gunslinger, isn't he? He is. He really practiced. Every day I'd see Steve Dunham walking around practicing with that gun. He knew it was coming. He knew we were shooting this scene soon. He'd be practicing every day on the set. And there it is. It paid off for him. The reverses on this shot, this angle coming up here, these were photographed by the second unit. And originally, the double that they were using was about a foot shorter and about 100 pounds heavier. And his hair looked like a football helmet. had sort of this John Davidson looking... In fact, there's a short cut of him right in there. And this is, by the way, nothing against the actor who was the double, but that, needless to say, didn't work. And that shot, this whole thing right in here that you see was just a nightmare. This shot took so long to get together, but it eventually paid off wonderfully. But all through the audience previews... Oh, there he goes. I love that. I love the strands of skin being pulled there. That was worth the whole weight. But that shot took about nine months. It was just... Every time the studio executives would see that scene, they'd go, can't you just cut that scene? Do we need that scene? Because all they saw was a guy being lifted up on wires, and then nothing happened. And then eventually Arnold Voss would walk in with LED lights on his cheek, and he would start chewing for no reason. Everybody would go, why does he start chewing? What's he eating there? I mean, we don't see him put anything into his mouth. Did he cut the thing where the candy bar he's eating or something? And we said, no, no, no. A scarab's going to come out of a hole in his chest, go up into his mouth. He eats a scarab. The studio was very unconvinced about that scene until it was completed, and the audience reaction kind of sold it. But for nine months, it was just man on wires, blue screen, LED lights on Arnold's face. That's pretty gross. Hey, get your ugly face off of her. I bet his breath smells really bad, too. Look what I got. The cat, I wonder if you, I think you can see the cat trainer, her shadow exiting in one of these shots. I kept telling her, don't move, the cat can't get out of the room. You know, once Brendan sets him down, and of course, the minute he set him down, the cat person kept running out and grabbing the cat. You all right? Well, not sure. It was a John Hanna ad lib that worked wonderfully.

I like Brendan's exit here. So, according to legend, the black book that the Americans found at Hamunaptra is supposed to bring people back from the dead. Until now, it was a notion I was unwilling to believe. Once again, this is a place called Mitmore, which is a big old mansion out in a sort of a mini castle outside of London. Maybe the gold book can kill him. That's the myth. Now we just have to find out where the gold book is hidden. So, this is outside of London, this shot, those last few shots. And then... This shot is in Marrakesh. By the way, we've been pounding on the extras pretty hard. This is actually a very good group. A lot of good work here. A lot of good extra work. Yeah. And then this shot again is in Marrakesh. Last, but not least, my favorite play. Boils and Sores. They have become his slaves, so it has begun. Eventually we go back to London somewhere in here. Not quite yet, it hasn't. Come on, then. In this shot, if you look at the extra left of Benny, see his eyes? He kept looking into camera, so he painted his eyeballs out. That's what happens if you look into camera. According to Benbridge scholars, the golden book of Amun-Ra is located inside the statue of Anubis. That's where we found the black book. Exactly. That looks like the old boys at Benbridge. It was funny, this prop, this big stone prop, it used to be a small stone tablet. We suddenly realized right a couple days before we got to this location, we said, well, if it was a little stone tablet, and you've got a thousand guys pounding on the door trying to get in, wouldn't they just lift it up and run out to their car? And so we quickly made it into a big, huge stone tablet so they couldn't pick it up and run with it. She had to translate it right here and now. Not right now, it isn't. I think I'll go get the car started. I've got it. The golden book of Amun-Rai's... Now, this next scene is another little fun thing. John Hanna was just petrified that this next shot would never work. He knew I wasn't going for any coverage. It's all done in one big one-er. And he was so nervous that he would come across badly or that it wouldn't work. There was no coverage. It was a big winner for audiences in every screening I ever saw. Sometimes you just got to go for it and do it with no coverage. This was one of those times. If you notice, Daniel's right arm, he's always having, it looks like he's always hiding it or playing with it. Because in an earlier sequence, he actually got shot, but we cut that out of that action sequence, so I don't think you ever really notice. That's one of those minor holes that Bob was talking about. You're gonna get yours! Oh, like I've never heard that before! These scenes were... We were in the souks, near the souks in downtown Marrakesh, and there were just thousands of people who lived in this area, and so we'd have to block off either end of the street, and every hour we'd have to let people go through, and it would take us 20 minutes. We'd be sitting there as thousands of people streamed through the street, and they'd all be checking out the car and the actors, and it was very difficult to shoot.

Never want to be a fruit cart in the midst of a car chase. I always liked that eye poke. I always thought that worked out well. Here's another good little stunt right here. Just did a little wire removal and it looks like he hits the whole thing. If you notice carefully in some of the background shots right there you saw a light go by, one of our lights. It happened so fast we just kept it in the movie.

See, there's Daniel's arm. There's the bullet hole in his arm that you never saw hit him. This sequence was shortened a great deal in post-production. There used to be a longer interchange between Imhotep and Daniels here, but it seemed like we got the point the way that it is now, and so we cut a couple of visual effects shots, and this is the result. These were about the only visual effects shots that ever hit the floor. Out of 160-something CG special effects shots, only one hit the floor. So Bob and I were very diligent about getting every frame of special effects into the movie because they're so expensive. In fact, there are more frames of special effects in this movie than we actually paid for because ILM gives you five frames of heads and five frames of tails on each shot. And Bob and I would always factor those into... the storytelling, so we'd always get ten free frames. And at one point we were told that our average special effects shot cost was $125,000 per shot, because they were so, you know, elaborate and integrated, so they weren't. So free is kind of a loose definition of the word. Free is good. All eternity, idiot. This is one of those scenes where there actually was more humor and interplay between the actors, but we thought that it slowed the scene down and it took away some of the tension. So we'll just tighten this scene up a little bit. Keep it going. When Evelyn saw Imhotep, she says, he's gorgeous. All the guys react to her and look at her. It used to get a great laugh from... preview screenings, audiences, but we thought it hurt the tension. Take me to Hamunaptra to perform the ritual. She is right. Live today, fight tomorrow. I'll be seeing you again. I love this shot. It was really a fun shot. Arnold was so good there and then we Brack focused to Rachel, and she walks away. I just think the look of this scene, I just really thought the cinematography was beautiful, and it reminded me of movies like, you know, the original Frankenstein, all the villagers with torches. Villagers with torches, it's hard to beat. You can't beat villagers with torches, no. You know, there's a little bit of a, you know, wet down. You've got some smoke. You've really got something going on. We tightened all this area up right in here. Because there used to be more of an interchange between the curator and Ardeth Bay right there. We tightened it up so that the curator seemed more heroic. Like he was really, he was saving them, helping them get down into the hole. Before when it was a longer scene, it was sort of like, it felt like he was almost committing suicide. In one version of the script, there was a sequence that took place in the sewers where the zombie dudes chased after our heroes. That was cut prior to photography. Now, there's something funny. In the script right here, it said, the car comes steaming across the desert, because my attitude was, well, this car just crashed. So it would be in a bit of, you know, it'd be having some problems, and it should be blowing steam as it comes up. Well, in American, when you say steaming across the desert, it means, you know, steam is coming out of the front of the car. In British speak, steaming means it's hauling ass. And so, uh, Steam wasn't available that day. They thought I was supposed to be going quickly across the desert. Just one of the language barriers between Americans and British people. So what you've got instead is a sound effect of the car sounding a little bit distressed. Another way to solve the problem. Winston Havelock at your service, sir. There's something about the phrase hauling ass that always amused my British crew. I think it must be a very American thing.

This was a very difficult sequence to visualize during the editorial process prior to getting the visual effects in because it depends so much on post-production, it depends so much on visual effects, on sound effects, on music, that this sequence in its raw original cut form is rather lifeless and in fact is virtually identical cut the way that it is now that it was in its original cut. is one of the audience's favorite sequences in the movie, which is very exciting to see the post-production bring the sequence together. Those are two stunt people on a swing set. The swing set was digitally removed, and the twister was thrown in there. John Burton, I'm sure, will have more to say on that. And this shot here, we just did very simply, that shot of Rachel and Kevin. ...just superimposed a little sand swirling on top of them. So it's high-tech right next to low-tech. This shot here had these markers in it... ...that marked a road that was going through the desert there. So those had to be painted out. Unfortunately, some of these shots with the biplane are not my favorite. The second unit got some really bad weather. They're not very pretty. All right, there are two reasons for this tilt-up. One, just for coolness sake, and the other, because you can actually see Arnold Vosloo's ass. For some reason, Arnold, they had him in a thong bikini, and he really mooned us in that shot, and so we kind of tilted up off him. Paddle faster!

This was a really, really fun shot. It turned out very, very well. An excellent flying by the pilot. Right over the camera. This was not a shot that was originally planned. It was added in post-production to help enhance the sequence.

This was really difficult. That was Rachel acting to a blue screen out in the desert. This was a very complicated shot, sequence to shoot, just because of all the special effects and the mechanical effects involved and the amount of coverage. It was just, it seemed like, as well as we had it storyboarded and figured out, it always seemed like a jumbled mess until the special effects were completely finished. It was somewhat hard for us to visualize how it would all come together, but it worked rather well in the end. A little flame-out was added in post-production. That's a live-action shot with an explosion happening behind the airplane to give that... We're not using the explosion part, but the aftermath of the explosion to make the appearance of the cloud dissipating. That was a little Kevin J ad lib there that worked out quite well. Isn't it interesting in movies how when airplanes and things crash, it's... That's not so bad, really. I think that it worked out pretty well for everybody aboard, don't you? Yeah, well, I just did the airline version. Well, maybe not everybody aboard. I did the airline version, and you can't show the plane crashing or even hint that a plane crashed. So you can imagine what this scene... If you saw this movie on an airplane or, you know... You did not see much of this. Winston! Hey, Winston! Poor Winston. Bernard was quite a trooper. We had to actually kind of crane him into that cockpit, and he actually stayed in there as we sunk it. And he trusted us not to kill him, which I thought was rather nice of him.

Well, he was a Titanic veteran, so he'd seen worse. I love this shot. It's very... formal. Shooting out in the desert was just so wonderful. That's what I think made the movie look so big. And we did it on a, we had a big budget, but not that big of a budget. This movie cost slightly under $80 million. And I think that the desert just added so much to the production value and to the size and the scope of the whole thing. Once again, we're right back on a big soundstage in London. I think it was Stage D, Shepperton Studios. Rachel just loved playing with Kevin. She just loved acting opposite him. She had so much fun. Interesting story about John Hanna. This day he realized that he was going to have his shirt ripped off. And we start shooting this scene and John was complaining about how stiff he was and how sore he was. And I didn't quite understand why he was stiff and sore that day. And finally, after we shot the scene and Brendan rips open his shirt, John asked if I noticed how... Rippled his chest muscles were. He was all proud of me. I said, what are you talking about? He said, well, I knew my shirt was going to be ripped open today. So I actually, first time I've ever gone to a gym and pumped some iron. That's why I was so stiff and sore. Somehow he thought that one day's worth of pumping iron would like really get those chest muscles there going. Hold it. Do something, do something. Not that, not that. CG bug. I like the hair on his legs. I'm talking about the bug. You learn a lot doing a movie like this with all these special effects. Every movie you tend to learn a lot, but especially one that has this many special effects. As much as I like these shots, In hindsight, I've learned something. I would light up the background much more so that we could see through these mummies. That was always bothering me that you couldn't see through them as much as I would like. I think they look pretty cool, but next time I'm shooting mummies, I'm going to light the walls up so you can see right through all their ribs and heads easier.

Now this sequence was shot on stage C, Shepton Studios, outside of London. And the entire foreground and off to the right is actually a set, and those are real props coming up. We'll see in a moment. But off to the left and the top probably maybe one third, that's Matt painting there.

For all you people who love continuity errors, we have a doozy coming up here. This wasn't my continuity girl script supervisor's fault. We just, in post, tightened up the scene. And so you'll see John Hanna goes from the right of Brendan to the left of Brendan. Not here. He's... Yeah, right there. He's coming up. As they start shooting, you'll see they kind of... Ardeth Bay and John Hanna kind of swap positions a couple times. I was just tightening up the scene, taking a few things out. Watch, see? John's over on the right. And now he's over there. I don't think you really notice that. He moves around a lot in here. A lot of the sequence was condensed, if you can believe it. They actually gunned down a lot more guys than... It really became a mummy massacre, basically. And we decided that we might want to tone that down a little bit. What we found is you started feeling sorry for the mummies. And we didn't think that was a good thing.

We rehearsed this scene over and over without the rat. And then we put the rat in for this take. And Rachel, you know, here she is, she sees the rat, feels the rat, she sees the rat, and she turns and the rat happens to jump over onto the female mummy. And right as I called cut, the female mummy flapped off the altar screaming. She wasn't expecting the rat to jump onto her. She was petrified of it. But I thought she was a real trooper to just sit there and not move until I called cut.

There was a rhyme with that match strike that took place later in the scene that we eventually cut, where Brendan goes to light the dynamite off of Jonathan's face, and the match doesn't strike, which we always thought was really hilarious, but unfortunately got no reaction from the audience, so it hit the floor. This camel here, you're wondering, I mean, this is the way camels are. This wasn't planned. Camels just don't like to do anything.

This whole underground sequence took about nine days. The whole climactic battle with the priest mummies and the soldier mummies took about nine days to shoot. So for nine days on and off, Rachel was manacled to that altar, and she did not like it one bit. She never complained, but it kind of creeped her out somehow. And even though she could break those chains, she was not a happy camper being on there. And every time I'd let her off the altar, she'd be very happy. These guys just don't quit, do they? Keep thinking. Watch this camel. From either angle, he was perfect. That bag weighs nothing because there's not really anything in it. It's all just paper with some little gold trinkets on top. It weighs about two pounds. But every time Benny would throw it over the camel, the camel would moan in agony like we'd shot it or something. And no matter what angle you shot that camel from, he would moan on cue. This sequence had a fair amount cut from it. Some mummies burst through the floor and grab Brendan and Jonathan and fight with them and throw them off. And they're trying to get the book back, which Jonathan just pulled out at the top of the sequence. And they get it with a bunch of acid. And that hole that just went by there, that's actually one of the remnants of that part of the sequence. And you see it again there. What are you waiting for? Get out! We cut it for pacing. And it was one of the few times that the mummies didn't really look good. We could kind of see the bandages moving. We were very particular about making the mummies look like mummies and not just guys wrapped in bandages. Quite a bit of it is computer generated mummies, but the ones that weren't, Nick Dedman did an excellent job. You can only hold on them so long before an audience catches the trick. So we were always tightening up that sequence. This is another ILM. I kept instructing them. I really love this smoke, but I wanted to see Rachel. I said, clear Rachel as soon as possible. I want to see her face. So if you can see that, they kind of dug a hole for me through the mist. So we always got to see Rachel's face. I didn't want to lose her performance. When Akshan Amin comes alive here, it's hard to see because of how dark this is, but you can actually see through her mouth into the... that she's sitting on. Shut up and get me off here, Jonathan. Open the book, Jonathan. It's the only way to kill him. You have to open the book and find the inscription. You can't open it. Now, this whole climax was just... There were times I thought my head was going to explode shooting this thing. We used every possible stunt piece of equipment known to man, as well as every special effects trick that ILM had up their sleeves. We just did everything here, as you'll quickly see. And we were shooting in every direction. I storyboarded this probably six months, on and off, working on it, working on it, all through production, every Sunday morning, getting up with my storyboard artist and going over this This battle here with the priest mummies, the upcoming battle with the soldier mummies, it was just mind-boggling because so many of the shots were so extremely expensive, being completely computer generated. And it was just about the hardest thing I've ever had to shoot. You can see this, as we go along here, the massive amount of coverage needed to get all this stuff working and all the keep all the actors going in the scenes and all the special effects stunts here's a description This is also a very complex sequence to cut because there's so much interaction between all of the characters and you need to keep it moving because Imhotep is really just commanding the various other mummies and is not playing an active role. So you need to keep him in the scene, but at the same time, keep everything else moving. And you didn't want to slow it down. You didn't want anything to slow the scene down. So it's a matter of really great intercutting throughout the previous scene and this next scene coming up. That was about one of my least favorite shots, is Ankh jumping up. It was kind of a pain in the butt and didn't work out the way I wanted it to. These guys are cool as hell, these soldier mummies. Yeah, we love the soldier mummies. Those flapping tongues were a late addition. Right there, those are stuntmen on air rams. So we're doing a lot of intercutting between stuntmen and, you know, looking like soldier mummies and computer-generated soldier mummies. That's a good gag with Brendan there.

It was funny, all in pre-production, the head of special effects department here at Universal kept telling me, cut the soldier mummies out, cut the soldier mummies out. There's going to be no soldier mummies in this movie. We can't afford them. And then you get shots like that. And I'm very glad the soldier mummies made the movie. And so is he, by the way. We figured out a way to afford them. A lot of their animation is originally done via motion capture, which means that there are stuntmen performing a lot of these events with suits on that the computer can track. But then, of course, all the details of the animation are done by the ILM animators. The shot with Brennan fighting all these guys on the stairs, there were stuntmen in black suits and blue suits coming running at Brennan, so that would actually look like he was sword fighting something, and then we would remove the stuntman digitally. and put in the soldier mummies. Because when he's sword fighting, you need to feel tension. You need to feel his sword stopping. So he couldn't just sword fight air all the time. These are guys in suits again right there. So again, there's a high level of integration between CG and... Those are CG guys there now. So now we've switched back to CG guys. Who touched the momentum first?

We were really pleased with how these soldier mummies turned out. They were a real big bonus about three-fourths of the way through post-production. Many of these shots didn't come in until the last few weeks... ...before the picture was in the theaters, which... was a little nerve-wracking we felt the sequence was working very well but again it's hard to tell until you have when you have characters that are in the scene that you can't see when within the scene while you're making the movie it makes it a lot more complex i shot a lot of this movie a lot of the deaths in shadow and i really like you know german expressionist filmmaking which mainly i learned from watching michael curtis movies michael curtis being my favorite all-time director. He did, of course, Casablanca, but also Captain Blood and the Seahawks and Robin Hood. I highly recommend Captain Blood, by the way. I think it's one of the most romantic adventure movies ever made. Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone. Keep him busy! No problem.

Brendan really gets launched there, doesn't he? Yeah, stuntmen on air rams. But Brendan took his fair share of licks. He was always willing to dive face first into sand or concrete for us. This is a very fine piece of work from ILM. I mean, a minor shot, but his tongue and his mouth are all CG in that shot. Very impressive, because it's all photoreal.

I love these shots, this one and the next one of the chariot taking off. They're totally reminding me of, I don't know, Ghostbusters or something along those lines. Really 80s fantasy visual effects shots. Right, a lot of stuff with the soldier mummies and the priest mummies. I was always a big fan of Ray Harryhausen's movies, especially Jason and the Argonauts, the big skeleton battle in that movie. In fact, I used Ray Harryhausen's name several times in the script just to pay homage to the man who... I think was one of the great special effects designers of any generation. This sequence is kind of interesting because originally Arnold was just supposed to go into this bog and sink into it and, you know, say death is only the beginning and that was the end. And we felt in post-production that... More had to happen. More had to happen for sure. Otherwise, he kind of looked like a guy hopping into a really dirty jacuzzi. So these visual effects shots were added in post-production, and they were not photographed to be done that way. They were not photographed to be visual effects shots, so it was very complex for ILM to have him degenerate back into what's called stage one form. If you notice, we haven't really mentioned much about cutting out scenes. That's part of the reason I always have Bob read my scripts before we start shooting. And I ask him to have me cut out anything he doesn't think will make the final movie. And so the two of us working together, we managed to get pretty tight scripts. So very little hit the floor in post-production. I mean, we tightened up a lot of scenes, but we lost very little. You can see the soldier mummies in the background. See them back there, way back there? They're frozen there. No one ever sees them. But I put them there anyway. All of the sequence has been enhanced in post-production... ...with shake to sort of simulate the collapse of this... ...of this place. I love this moment with John Hanna spinning around. It's nice because it rhymes with the previous sequence... ...where Evie wants to stay for the book. This next scene, Kevin kept burning himself, that torch. He kept picking up and he'd run with it. The liquid from the torch would spray back on his hand. I don't know why I'm laughing, but I find Kevin so... immensely amusing that anything he does, even when he's in pain, I laugh. Sorry, Kev. But I'll put you in my next movie, too, okay? And again, another huge set by Alan Cameron. Here it was really fun. When we did the audience previews, we were previewing the movie without any of the special effects or with them in very small stages, or very preliminary stages. And with the scarabs coming up here. What they were is little white ping-pong balls. So that's what the first preview audiences saw, is a little white ping-pong ball going up there. It looked like he was playing the lotto. But the preview audiences seemed to love the characters and the story so much that no one walked out, which we found really amazing, because our first preview screening had no special effects in it. And by the second one, these were all ping-pong balls. Thousands of ping-pong balls coming... Suscating down there. Surrounding Benny, as if he was going to be eaten by a giant... ping-pong tournament, and yet audiences went with it. So this whole set was rigged to fall down. Alan Cameron and I believing that if you're going to build something, you might as well wreck it at the end, since it's all going to be bulldozed. And coming up now, this is where I know that when the Moroccan authorities see this movie, they're going to be screaming for my head, because see this wall? It's going to look like we destroyed a 400-year-old Portuguese fort, when actually that was all CG, that wall. And the wall was real, but ILM added the CG elements where it collapsed. And in that close-up, it actually looks like we blew out the wall. So I can imagine people jumping up and down, screaming, saying, get out to the Sahara Desert, check out that volcano, make sure our wall's still up. That series of three effects shots, plus the shot at the opening of the movie, were... supervised by Scott Farrar at ILM. Really very impressive shots that were added kind of late in the game. Originally, Ardeth Bay died. He died in that earlier scene with the mummies. He sacrificed himself for our heroes and he was going to die, but working with him, he was such a sweetheart and such a good actor and so good looking. I just had a feeling that he was too heroic to kill off. So we brought him back here at the end. And I was always a little nervous about how the audience would accept that, but it went over like gangbusters. And in fact, he has many teenage girl fan sites now on the web. So I think it was worth bringing him back. John Hanna was wonderful during this scene. This is all John Hanna just ad-libbing with a camel. Because you can't, like I said, you can't... train the camel to do anything. How about you, darling? Would you like a little kissy-wissy? Now, we always found that about 80 to 90% of the audience understood that this was the treasure that Benny put on the camel. But some people didn't catch that. So if you didn't catch that, there it is. They actually go away with a bag full of treasure. which I'm sure will be important in the sequel. Thank you very much for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed the movie. It was very, very, very informative.