Most press visits to an edit bay are carefully orchestrated bits of promotional material. The footage being shown to press has been carefully assembled and the appropriate quotes about the project have been rehearsed with the help of the studio PR team. "Lead Actor A was a joy to work with. I couldn't ask for a better experience with him/her. Working on this movie has been a dream. The studio has been wonderful." Blah blah blah.
Thankfully, Rob Cohen doesn't run his show that way.
When Dark Horizons recently spent a few hours in the "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" edit bay with director Rob Cohen, it was during an actual session where intense sound work was being completed. Far from press shy, Cohen bounced back and forth between conducting the interview and offering input to his team.
The scene they are working on involves a clay-entombed Jet Li beheading a man who asks to be saved. The sound is loud, full and very detailed.
"At this point, Jet Li has had the elixir from the pool of eternal life and he's come back to life," Cohen explains. "The idea is, it's the middle act of the movie and [Li] is a living Terracotta warrior and he cannot get out of the clay. If he tries to get out of the clay, it burns him and reseals him all over again. So he is cursed by Michelle Yeoh and has to get to Shangri-La to immerse himself in the pool of eternal life to finally get immortality and to release himself."
"They are at the Shanghai museum where Rick's son Alex, who's now 21, has discovered the tomb of the Dragon Emperor out in the middle of central China. They've brought the Sarcophagus and this chariot. Everything they've found, they've brought back to Shanghai."
In the scene, Brendan Fraser's Rick O' Connell pulls a man out of a truck and jumps in saying "There's a Mummy on the loose." His wife, Evie (Maria Bello) offers to drive.
"God I love a woman who can drive a truck," says Fraser.
"You two are like Mummy magnets," shouts a frustrated John Hannah, who reprises his role as Jonathan Carnahan.
"There's a big build up to [the scene we're watching]," Cohen continues. "It's a scene with seven leading characters and a CG Jet Li. So eight characters are on scene interacting a very violent and combative way and everybody has a different agenda."
In mid-sentence talking to press, Cohen spins around in his chair. "We can still do better clearing that voice Danny. It's just too fucking big."
"I guess you know from Fast and the Furious or Stealth the kind of energy I try to put in these aural environments," says Cohen. "You'll hear it here. The important thing for me in a movie is not so much what you watch, it's how you feel it; that you actually get a physical sensation when you watch a film of mine."
The scene is reel 3 of 7, approximately 35 minutes into the movie. There are over 1,000 visual effects shots in Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and Cohen and crew have approximately 140 to go in the next two weeks.
Although Cohen has worked on short schedules before, he admits this has been a strain. "I've been slowly drowning. Doing a movie like this is like getting water poured on you. You know you're not gonna die, but you surely feel [that way] sometimes."
Wandering around the edit bay are Cohen's two Border Collies. For the older of the two, Loki, this is old hat. He is sprawled across the floor near Rob's feet, fast asleep. Athena, the younger female, waltzes from person to person demanding attention, never so much as flinching when the piercing sound effects start playing again.
Cohen views his movies as event experiences. He is intimately involved in every aspect of the production. Amidst the disposable entertainment of summer blockbusters, he clearly hopes to create something that will hold up over time. "You have to go for the best and say I want the audience to see it this way. They may never, but I want them to be able to if it can ever be. Now, with Blu-Ray and the home theaters, if the system is [set up properly] you'll hear it the way I wanted it to be heard."
"The idea is that you're unspooling information at a very high rate. But also, for example, last time we ran, I made an observation. I didn't feel the wheel of the chariot that almost crushed Isabella Leon's head felt like it was going to give her the jeopardy. We then call what we call sweeteners, which gave the wheel more mass. So you're now hearing her move under the wheel, but you're also hearing the massiveness of it. That makes a real difference in how scary a moment might feel or how much jeopardy you feel for the actors."
Again, Cohen pauses to offer his input: "Dialogue Dan, give me an exertion on Isabella as she slides under the..."
Now back to the interview: "So we have this massive databank of tracks and dialogue and performances and loop dialogue - all of which I can conduct like a symphony conductor. Underneath this are hundreds of sound blends and sound designs which you don't even know, but you begin to feel and hopefully you feel a sculpted sound landscape..."
Cohen turns to observe some more footage. Apparently happy with the way things are progressing, the director invites us to join him outside of the edit suite so that we can conduct the rest of the interview in a quieter space.
The Mummy franchise begun in 1999 with Stephen Sommer's The Mummy, a loose remake of Karl Freund's 1932 monster classic with Boris Karloff. A surprise hit, Sommers followed with 2001's The Mummy Returns and that launched the 2002 spinoff The Scorpion King starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
Although Cohen, who is new to the franchise, wants to respect the story arch of the other films, it is very important to him that Tomb of the Dragon Emperor stand on its own.
"It was a pretty complete departure," says Cohen. "I condensed the other two movies into two fun bits. One, Evie (Mario Bello) has novelized The Mummy and The Mummy Returns and she's a writer now, but has nothing new to say because she hasn't had another adventure. Jonathan (John Hannah) owns a nightclub in Shanghai called Im-ho-tep's, which is like a kitschy Egyptian nightclub."
"You pick up the O'Connells 13 years later. They're a very different couple. I kept it in exact chronology. The first movie took place in '25, the second in '33. Alex was eight in the second movie. 13 years later he's 21 and we're in 1946. We're following the life saga of the family."
"This a real family story. I wanted to do a story that was a about a conflict between a father who loves his son but has lost touch with who he is and a son who has made a mark now for himself, but has a father who will not recognize it; who cannot see him as anything other than an eight year-old boy who gets in trouble; how the conflict between the father and the son, the tension, actually leads to the father growing up."
Series regulars Brendan Fraser and Josh Hannah reprise their roles as Rick O'Connell and Jonathan Carnahan, respectively. Rachel Weisz opted out of the franchise and has been replaced by Maria Bello as Evelyn O'Connell.
Cohen says the idea of having a 21 year-old son was what made Weisz weary of returning for a third adventure.
"She didn't want to play the mother of a 21 year-old son. That's what her agent told me. She didn't want to go to China. Rachel's like 38. Maria [Bello]'s 41, but that's not the point. Actors are supposed to act, you know? You can't keep them from putting on rubber noses and being blind, but make them the mother of a 21 year-old and [Ahhhh!] I can't do that! I can't be that old. But it was my good fortune because it opened it up to get an actress of Maria's caliber and then create a new Evie."
Shifting locale's from Egypt to China gives the franchise a completely different feel and takes the story in some surprising new directions. "It positively allowed me to reinvent it because now you're weaned off the idea that The Mummy is about Egypt. Any place in the world - and there are many that have in the culture a quest for life after death, [which] becomes fair game for a Mummy adventure... It gives the franchise a whole lot more freedom. I really believe that if we had done another one that was based in Egypt, it would have been a failure because there's just nothing new to do."
A converted Buddhist, Cohen has a clear affection for China's history and mythology. "Since Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story that I made in 1992, I have a home in Indonesia. I'm in Asia all the time. My son goes to college in Shanghai. There's a whole connection that I have with China and I was watching Chinese movies long before I got this [project]... The fifth generation [work of the Chinese directors], their work influenced how I lit this and how certain things get played out. In the end, this love that I have of Asia has been with me since I converted to Buddhism in 1992."
Although mummies are generally associated strictly with ancient Egypt, Cohen says they were far from the only culture to explore the mummification process. "The reason it applies [for a Mummy movie is that] the first Emperor of China went on a quest for immortality. After he'd united China, [he] wanted to be there to run it forever so he started to look for immortality. Elixirs, potions... And basically that's what killed him. A lot of these potions, to make him feel something, a lot of the potions had arsenic [and similar] and he began to drink all this stuff. In 1974, a farmer in Sheeyon was digging a well and every time he'd bring the buckets up it would be filled with these clay shards. Some of them had eyes or hands, so he reported it to the government and they started to excavate and they found this tomb, which was a wreck..."
Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is the largest Western movie ever shot in China. Although the government is grateful for the added jolt the project will offer their economy, the permission to shoot in China came with certain restrictions. "They had complete approval of everything we did and everything we brought into the country," says Cohen. "They knew I had this love of their culture and was not there to exploit. They knew it would be the biggest western movie ever made in China and they liked the script."
One restriction imposed by the Chinese government was the omission of direct references to the Qin (Chin) Dynasty. "The Chinese government doesn't want them identified as Qin in the film. As we all know, that's the only Emperor that built a tomb of Terracotta warriors for himself. [The Chinese Government] just said, 'You're making a fantasy, we don't want it to become political. We're happy for you to come to China, we're happy to be your partner as long as the movie's a fantasy.'"
"You don't do a Mummy movie to become political," Cohen laughs.
Filming in China is a very different experience for those versed in Western filmmaking. In the U.S., union restrictions typically keep each worker from straying outside of their assigned duties, but no such obstacles exist on a Chinese production.
"China is the greatest place to film," says Cohen. "In China, they're the can-do people... Their job is the movie. That's why that economy has been growing 10 percent for [many years]. Their job is to succeed, not to do [only] their job."
Bringing a project of this scale to China opened the door for some breathtaking locations that have rarely, if ever, been seen in Western cinema. "The Ningsha Pyramids where the army is camped in the beginning. There are these huge pyramids in northwest China. We filmed at the monastery of Straffan near the Kazakhstan border. We filmed up north in Hi-Bay at this old sort of village mountain built into this steep cliff. We filmed at Flame Mountain, this amazing desert area. We filmed in the northern deserts of China and then we filmed at Hengdian, the big standing set city and then we filmed at the Shanghai Studios."
In the trailer for Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, you can see a portion of the massive battlefield conflict of the film's climax. "It's the Terracotta Warriors led by Jet Li fighting Michelle Yeoh's army of undead - the people who built the Great Wall of China and were buried in the foundation by this Emperor."
"That [battle is] totally digital. It's been a really big effort to get that to work, but it's such a great battle and it really is how those battles took place in those days. I had military advisors and so on. How did the Terracotta Army or the Army of Chin actually line up and march? There's so much contact between the CG and the human. That's what I was trying to achieve complete interaction and I've been working on this since Dragonheart, to try to create interaction between the digital world and the photo-real world. We did some great, innovative things which you'll see."
As if an army of the undead and immortal Terracotta warriors weren't enough, Cohen and the writing team of Alfred Gough and Miles Miller have also brought another mythical creature into the mix. The Yeti, better known as the Abominable Snowman, pops up in Tomb and this time, he's actually a good guy. "They kick ass mercilessly on the villains," Cohen says with a grin. "They're in the Hymalayas. I made the Yeti a 1,000 pound animal, nine feet high, bipedal. And he's a cross between the polar bear and the snow leopard... They have a slightly feline facial structure, but they have the power of a polar bear... It's just fun when they show up at the O'Connell's darkest moment and just kick the beejesus out of Anthony Wong's soldiers. It's fun."
In 2002, Cohen was riding a hot streak with consecutive summer blockbusters Fast and the Furious in 2001 and XXX in 2002. He soon went into production on the ambitious Stealth, which would become one of the few blights on Cohen's resume of success.
"I learned a lesson on Stealth," Cohen admits. "I had two $600 million hits in a row and then I got caught up with the idea of doing a movie at Mach 3 and I got real tunnel vision about it. I kept thinking, as long as I can make you feel these G forces, this movie will be great."
"When I got to the end of the process and it didn't work, I went 'You know what? I didn't have enough story. The story wasn't that credible. The characters weren't that good, casting wasn't right.' I like to be self-analytical. I don't like to be, 'Oh, the critics or the marketing!' Yes, the marketing was horrible. Sony's marketing was pathetic, but even if the marketing had been great, the movie wouldn't have achieved anything near the connection that Fast and the Furious and XXX had with the audience. They had better stories, better cast... I vowed that I would never make another movie where the characters were not the dominant part of the film."
Cohen is confident that The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor will put his career back on track. "You'll see. This is a really good family story. This is not one of those quick buck sequels. This is a really lush, beautifully produced, beautifully shot and wonderfully cast movie full of really interesting actors playing really fun characters. I have a lot of pride in it and a lot of hope."
"We'll know August 2nd," Cohen says with a laugh.
