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Rob Cohen on The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
By Fred Topel | Image property of Universal Pictures
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
Cohen Directs The Mummy 3
"My mother took up Chinese water color painting as a hobby when I was eight years old and we lived in this little town of Cornwall," said Cohen. "She brought all these art books home on Chinese art. As an eight year old you start paging through the books and my world opened up because I saw the Chinese aesthetic and pictures of China. China was the first place I went when I was old enough to travel after college. I went right to Beijing and to Shanghai. I didn’t get to Xi’an then because Xi-an wasn’t discovered then. It was like 1972 and Xi’an wasn’t re-discovered until 1974. When I first went to the warriors about 10 years ago I was completely blown away because I had never felt the arms of history and of humanity of another time embracing you as in that pit."
Being a filmmaker gave Cohen some extra perks, as he incorporated the terra cotta warriors into his Mummy's legend. "When we went back for the research on this film the museum people actually let us on the floor, because behind the pits which were so famous where the warriors are there is a flatter area and we were allowed down. You don’t touch, but you can go eyeball to eyeball with them. So, my joy in this culture and my fascination with it has been a long standing one."
The Mummy comes after a rocky section in Cohen's career. He turned down sequels to his hit films and had some bad luck. "With Fast and Furious, where the studio wanted to go is where they went, which was not my idea. With XXX I had done two Vin movies in a row. The thing here was I had been preparing a movie, The 8th Voyage of Sinbad and when Stealth didn’t work Sony cancelled it. I had spent a lot of time, like eight months preparing Sinbad. Keanu Reeves was going to star in it and Jet Li was going to play the villain so all my fantasies about a fantasy of China was thwarted."
Perhaps The Mummy 3 was Cohen's karmic reward. "Several years later when this came up, when they told me it was Mummy 3 I told my agent, 'You’ve got to be kidding me. You aren’t really trying to say I should do that.' He goes, 'You know you love China and that’s where it all takes place.' I went, 'Send it over.' Once I realized what it was and what I could do with it I got really passionate and thought of it as a new beginning to the franchise as opposed to Egypt and here we go again with Arnold [Vosloo]and all that. It was a very different story."
Having immersed himself in Chinese culture, Cohen adapted to Chinese filmmaking easily. "I have a much more sort of improvisational style in the sense that even though I do, do a shot list every night for the next day, it is a battle plan. Like Napoleon said, no battle plan outlives the first shot of engagement. You just have to be open to things. I admire the normal guys like John Woo and I really like Andrew Lau. Many of the Hong Kong directors have shown what spontaneity can do where you don’t feel that anything is so over planned, but in a film of this scale and a budget to match you can’t exactly do what they do, like that doesn’t work, let’s go back and try this and shoot that. But within the day as scheduled we take some wild turns and realize that certain things could play better a different way and keep that fluidity so that the ideas will keep coming from everyone. They don’t exactly know where I’m going to move so they have to prepare the day completely and that makes the possibilities really great, because you just say bring in the crane, we were going to do this but turn the lighting around because the real cool shot is over here. That gives the actors a lot of play and the crew has to be better because they can’t rest, they have to be ready to cut left or right at any given time."
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor opens to theaters on August 1st.
For the production blogs, stills, banners and more movie info, go to The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Universal Pictures
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