The Producers of Mummy 3 Interview

MoviesOnline caught up with producers Sean Daniel and Bob Ducsay at the Los Angeles press day for their new film “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” directed by Rob Cohen and starring Brendan Fraser, Maria Bello, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Luke Ford and John Hannah.

Sean Daniel has produced “The Mummy,” “The Mummy Returns,” and “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.” He is currently in post production on “The Wolf Man” starring Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins. Bob Ducsay was one of the original creators of The Mummy franchise, having produced and edited “The Mummy” and “The Mummy Returns.” He is currently in post production on “GI Joe” starring Brendan Fraser and Channing Tatum.

Sean Daniel and Bob Ducsay are fabulous guys and we really appreciated their time. Here’s what they had to tell us about their latest Mummy adventure and their upcoming projects, “GI Joe,” “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” and “Magic Kingdom for Sale”:

MoviesOnline: So, when you got this film in production and you hear it’s coming out the same summer as “Indy 4,” is that something that’s intimidating because you’re going to end up with the inevitable comparisons?

Sean Daniel: Actually that seemed like a good sign to us.  Sort of new chapters of cool movies were coming out and finding a huge audience.  So, I mean, it actually was sort a good omen.

Bob Ducsay: Yeah, and also frankly we’ve been living with the comparisons for decades so it’s okay. It’s okay.  It’s not a problem.

MoviesOnline: What took so long for this?  You know the first two films came one right after another and this is quite a long break between “Mummy” movies. What took so long do you think?  The audience was clamoring for it.  It couldn’t have been that.
 
Sean Daniel: I think it was…there was a real creative problem to be figured out which was what should the next “Mummy” movie be.  There was, in terms of the second one, there was more to tell about Imhotep and Egypt and when it comes to the third we took awhile in figuring out what could we do that was true to it and characters we loved and a theme and a mythology that we loved, but where should it go? 

Bob Ducsay: Yeah, and I think you make a good point.  Obviously the second picture did more business than the first one so the studio wanted another movie.  I think they would have liked to have had another movie in 2003, but we just didn’t have a good idea.  And we had a bit of an epiphany in 2005 when it occurred to us…really the spark of the catalyst was the thought of the warriors and as soon as we had that spark it actually moved very quickly, at least in movie terms, we internally the producers concocted a story—a very rough outline of what the idea of the movie might be—the movie that took place in China.  We went to Universal and we pitched it to them and they loved it and we hired Al Gough and Miles Millar and they immediately started writing. So from that point on the process was relatively quick in movie terms, but it was that period from 2001 to 2005 where the story just didn’t occur to us.  And even though these are big entertainments and it might seem that there’s only a mercenary approach sometimes to commercial movie making, the fact of the matter is we didn’t have a good story that we wanted to tell and we figured out what that story was in 2005.  So in 2005, then we really wanted to make the movie.  You know then we really wanted to do it because, as Sean said, we felt that the story in Egypt was finished, you know, and that’s why we were stuck.

MoviesOnline: Do you remember whose idea it was to put it in China?

Bob Ducsay: I think it was probably a cumulative, I mean just the producers, you know, we were just kicking around different ideas and this was one of the ideas that came across.

MoviesOnline: It also opens up the door for going pretty much anywhere in the world with an ancient culture.  You were talking about Peru in this movie and things like that. These guys aren’t exactly mummies, they’re….

Bob Ducsay: That’s correct.  It is correct and what you’re saying is absolutely true.  We were just talking about this that we thought this might work.  We feel that it does and the reality of it is that I don’t think that we’re bound to any particular place now should we be lucky enough to make another movie.

MoviesOnline: At what point did you realize that it was going to be so grand and expensive?  Or was that always the intent going into Mummy 3 that this was going to be a big-ass movie?

Sean Daniel: Well, they’ve all been big-ass movies.

MoviesOnline: Absolutely. This is the biggest of them though.

Sean Daniel: And we were there at the beginning of the first one and at the time that was a big budget movie.  And the second one clearly delivered on that scale and this one, I suppose you could say technically would be the biggest but obviously it was in 2007 dollars but that does make it very big.  I love that you say it’s big-ass because we love that about it. 

MoviesOnline: How do you coordinate all the effect houses though and make sure that everybody’s work flows smoothly into the next guy’s work?

Bob Ducsay: There’s a lot of really expert people that are in charge of that.  There were two visual effect producers who wrangle all that and at the same time also there’s two main facilities.  So the majority of the work is concentrated in two places and certainly all the heavy lifting comes from those two places but ultimately what it comes down to is the director and that’s the case with every one of these pictures.  In the end you have all the infrastructure, you have all the very talented expert people who are dealing with it but in the end I think Rob’s attention to detail, we could have it at 100 facilities and everything would look consistent because he really digs in deep with the lower…the really much lower level than directors normally get involved.  He couldn’t be more involved in the visual effects of the movie. 

MoviesOnline: At what point was it clear that Steven was not coming back to direct and how did you hit on Rob as his successor?

Bob Ducsay: Well, I’ll take the first part of that which is that before we even wrote the screenplay.  I mean, Steve just felt that he had told the story—the story he wanted to tell—and he couldn’t possibly be more passionate about the Mummy.  This obviously is a very important series for him and his love for it knows no bounds.  But as a director, he just didn’t want to make another movie.  You know, he loves the characters, he loves the actors.  It’s not about that, it’s just that he felt he had done this particular thing and so from before there was a script, he was not making this.

Sean Daniel: But he had been a very active partner in the development of the script, in the origination of the idea, so he stayed close.

MoviesOnline: And the second part of the question is how did you come to Rob?

Sean Daniel: We had a screenplay that was ready to have a director join and it was a question of who’s the best, who’s right.  There was more than one meeting, but there was no question that it was Rob.

Bob Ducsay: It’s hard to find the combination of characteristics and skill sets that are required to do one of these movies because you have to be highly technical.  You have to be able to know how to direct action.  You’ve got the scale of the movie which also requires incredible leadership so it doesn’t go off.  And then you also need…the movies are very difficult in that they’re mixed genre.  There’s romance, there’s comedy, there’s action.

Sean Daniel: There’s character.

Bob Ducsay: There’s character.  You have all of those things and I just think that we thought that Rob was a perfect fit for that, you know?  His movies always have humor in them and the action is always great, so I mean really if you think about it the number of people that makes these sorts of films is a very small list.

Sean Daniel: And then there was this just amazing providence in which Rob loves China.  Really knows it. Really believes in it and I think that was an element that truly excited him.  Rob is a very passionate movie director and, as Bob said, is involved in everything and from the beginning took this very seriously as a film on its own. There were wonderful characters that have come from the previous movies, but his knowledge of China and his vision about it gave it something very, very special and big. 

Bob Ducsay: And you know the other thing too that happens too is, you know, he read the screenplay.  He came in and he met with us and interestingly enough when Rob met with us the first time, he wasn’t available to do the movie. 

Sean Daniel: So we pursued him.  We did pursue him, that’s true.

Bob Ducsay: He was doing another picture and this is always something that’s always interesting too if you think about it.  He came in and met with us and he couldn’t, at the time, do the movie. And so that says something about the director’s interest in the movie.  He already had another movie that was a conflict, but he’s like “I want to meet with you guys, you know, maybe something will change.”  You never know, right?  And it was a couple of months before something changed actually.  But then the other thing too is he read the screenplay and he comes in and he lays out what he thinks is important in the movie and the things he wants to change and the things he wants keep the same and the things that he’s passionate about and you hear those things and they align with what you think as a group and you go, “well this is a really good fit” and I’ll give you a particular example.  Something that we were beyond passionate about in the development about were the Yeti and Rob starts with “first of all I have to tell you I love the Yeti.”  You know, so he had us at hello. 

MoviesOnline: As a follow-up to that, you must have been disappointed that Rachael wasn’t going to do the sequel.  Did you ever consider writing her out and bringing in a new person, a totally new character instead of replacing her, because a lot of people are going to look and go “0h well that’s not Rachel Weisz,” you know?  I just wondered.

Sean Daniel: Yeah, you know look.  We love Rachel and there’s a great chemistry in the first two movies.  She was having a baby at the time, didn’t line up as to….I guess we felt that Evie should continue.  Did we talk about it?  Sure, but Evie is a really strong character and Maria Bello is a formidable actress on her own and a really quality one, so we felt like we should go forward with Evie.

Bob Ducsay: Right and I think too, I mean I hope we made the right decision, but the thing of it is if you look at the story that we wanted to tell it requires Evie in the movie.  You know what I mean?  Really in the end if you want to get right down to it, I mean, the movie regarding of its commercial intent is driven by the story we wanted to tell.  That family--starting with the second picture--but those two characters from the beginning are the core idea and characters of the movie.

Sean Daniel: It’s their son.

Bob Ducsay: So, when you start thinking about that and that’s the story you want to tell, you start to come to the conclusion that we did and then if you look at other opportunities like, well, you’d have to kill Evie off.

Sean Daniel: Yeah, we didn’t want to do that.

Bob Ducsay: There would be no other…because here’s the thing that you don’t ever want a franchise to do—you don’t want a sequel to do I should say, you don’t want a sequel to go and revise the things that people love about the other two movies. So it couldn’t be that Rick and Evie were divorced.  How is that possible?  Because that’s not something that we could ever do to those characters.

Sean Daniel: Neither of them left each other.

Bob Ducsay: No, it’s not possible.  I mean, just because I hate that when I see a movie that I love the characters and they go and did something that makes me now when I watch the other two movies go yeah, this isn’t going to work, whatever, you know?  Because if you’re involved in the story, and we are, you don’t want to….so the only possibility is to kill her off.  And so that’s the only thing that we could do and that just didn’t feel right to us either.  So basically if we killed her off we’d do two things.  We’d do something that we didn’t feel was right and secondly we would also not be able to tell the story that we told.

MoviesOnline: Well, also you have a few years that have passed and there’s a new audience that might not even have…

Bob Ducsay: Well, it’s true, it’s true.  Well look, it’s a complication that we had to deal with and I think we think that it’s worked out beautifully but at the same time, I mean, clearly we love Rachael. We think she’s fantastic and it was just something that didn’t work out.

MoviesOnline: You guys both have high profile projects on the horizon for next year.  Is there any sort of gentlemen bet between ‘Wolf Man” and “G.I. Joe”?

Sean Daniel: We root for each other.

Bob Ducsay: That’s what I was going to say.  I have to say and I say this with all honesty, Sean is one of the few people in Hollywood that I don’t feel competitive with.  What I mean by that is all I want is his stuff to work as well as it possibly could and I bet that it goes in reverse. 

Sean Daniel: No, it truly does so and it’s a movie I’m first in line for.  Steve Sommers, Bob Ducsay doing “G.I. Joe”.

MoviesOnline: There’s a lot of fan interest in both projects. Could you talk a little bit about how “Wolf Man” is coming together and how “G.I. Joe” is coming together?

Sean Daniel: Well, “Wolf Man” just finished photography, so editing is literally beginning as we speak.  So we’ve got a long way to go.

MoviesOnline: Right.  What are you showing at Comic-Con?

Sean Daniel: There’ll be a first glimpse—very short glimpse—of some footage. 

MoviesOnline: Just Rick Baker or anyone else showing?

Sean Daniel: No, its’ going to be Rick.  I think at the moment it’s Rick. And Rick’s work is…

MoviesOnline: Is it gory?

Sean Daniel: Well, it’s an R-rated…it is an intense R-rated movie that will deliver.

MoviesOnline: I’m curious how “G.I. Joe” is shaping up and you’re also editing the movie if I’m not mistaken.

Bob Ducsay: I am involved in that.  I have a….fortunately some days and unfortunately some days I wear two hats and I’ve done that on a few pictures now and this will be the third because I did it on “Mummy 2.”  I did it on “Van Helsing” and I did it on this one and fortunately I’m a full time producer and a full time editor, so what that means is that I work round the clock all the time.  So that’s the bad part of it.  The good part of it is that it is so fun to be so involved.  I do have the fortune that I’m not carrying the heavy load on “G.I. Joe”.  There’s another picture editor on it who’s heavily involved but the picture is shaping up extremely well.  I think the fans will be really happy with it and I think that we’ve done—we’ve made a movie that will reach out to everyone.  I think that if you don’t know a single thing about “G.I. Joe” or G.I. Joe mythology you’ll be able to come into the movie and really enjoy the movie, but if you’re a fan I think you’re going to be really happy with how true we’ve been to…you know, what are the core interests of the fans.  At least I think we are.  We’ve tried hard to do that but it is a little bit of a balance and all films that have a big fan base have to go through this because it’s a very expensive picture, which means that it has to perform commercially for there to be another one and it does and because of that there are certain things that you have to think about.  You can’t expect the entire world knows all of the mythology of “G.I. Joe” so there are certain things we have to do and certain changes we have to make but I don’t think anybody’s going to be unhappy.  I actually think the fans are going to really love the movie.

MoviesOnline: It seems like the “Transformers” model would be something to emulate because it’s the same era?

Bob Ducsay: It’s not dissimilar at all and in fact Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, who…it was his property at Paramount who was producing the picture with me, was also producer on “Transformers” so he actually…I mean the sort of interaction…you know Hasbro is the IP owner of the material also so there is a lot of connection.  But you know the pictures are very different, I mean, they’re different ideas, but there is a similarity.

MoviesOnline: What’s going on with “Magic Kingdom” and with “Ripley”?

Sean Daniel: Well, “Ripley” is a movie that we believe in and are determined to get made. 

MoviesOnline: There’s been a lot of ups and downs with that project.

Sean Daniel: As with many movies.  If you’re a producer who believes in movies, you just have to stick with them.  That is the key to it and we’re working with Paramount on figuring out who the next director should be and want to be gathered here talking about “Ripley” sometime in the future.

MoviesOnline: I’d love that too.

Sean Daniel: Cool.

MoviesOnline: So what’s going on with…?

Bob Ducsay: I’d say it’s a fairly similar situation in that I would say that there’s nothing that we have in development that we are more interested in making than “Magic Kingdom”.  It’s a fantastic story, fantastic material.  We actually think we have a very strong screenplay also.  We’re trying very hard to get the movie made.  I mean, it’s complicated to get any movie made.  It was hard to get “Mummy 3” made.  It’s just there are so few movies that get made.  The stakes are so high.  They cost so much.  “Magic Kingdom” is a very expensive movie.  Lots of digital work.  Anyway, the bottom line is the studio likes the movie a great deal, so it’s not like it’s a complete uphill battle.  It’s just hard to get movies made, finding the right director, getting exactly the right screenplay, having a star being interested, getting the cost of the movie under control.  All of those sorts of things come together that make these particular sorts of movies. “Ripley,” “Magic Kingdom”, “Mummy”, “G.I. Joe”, any of them. Any time you put all those things together it just becomes difficult to get them made, but we feel great confidence that “Magic Kingdom” will be made and I hope this year.

MoviesOnline: You produced something that’s been on TV and cable—“Dazed and Confused”. 

Sean Daniel: Love that movie!

MoviesOnline: One of my favorites. Diid you ever anticipate back when you were making it what it was going to become a decade and a half later? 

Sean Daniel: Here’s what we knew.  We knew we were making this really good heart filled, funny in life terms, movie that was really capturing something accurately.  We knew the cast was really working well off of each other and so we had something that went pretty deep as a movie.  The studio actually at first was unsure of how to categorize the movie and, in fact, we had a huge fight with them about the initial release of the film.  History has born us out as being right but in the first wave, we didn’t get the wide release that we knew the audience was out there for.  And it has now dug in and become part of the culture and really deserves to be.

MoviesOnline: Did you know the cast was going to be “A list”?  I mean, could you see it while you were there?

Sean Daniel: No, we just knew…and I just want to give huge…look this is Richard Linklater’s story.  It comes from his life.  He’s an artist and he had fantastic judgment about humanity in each of those characters. 

MoviesOnline: Do you guys have anything else that’s bubbling that might be ready to burst soon?

Bob Ducsay: I have to say for us I mean we’re honestly; I mean it’s interesting you mentioned “Magic Kingdom”.  It’s a high level of concentration right now for us because it’s something that we feel very passionate about, that we think will be a great movie and also very, very successful commercially.  So outside of the….well this movie’s not in post-production anymore, but between this and “G.I. Joe” for us and “Magic Kingdom,” that’s where we’ve been putting an enormous amount of our energy.

MoviesOnline: Could you give us just a one sentence or a log line for the film for the people who don’t know anything about “Magic Kingdom”?

Bob Ducsay: I don’t know if I could explain it.  I don’t think I could do it in a log line.  It’s actually….because the thing is the story is a little bit more complex than that.  I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful.  Probably “IMDB” has got the best log line.  They probably have the best log lines.

MoviesOnline: Is that about Disney?

Bob Ducsay: No, it’s not.  It’s actually based on I think a 1981 New York Times best seller called “Magic Kingdom For Sale.”  Essentially it’s basically about….see I’m going to give the bad version.  I’m going to be quoted and everybody’s going to be upset about it, but basically it’s about a man whose life has fallen apart because of the death of his wife who is met with an opportunity to buy what turns out to be a literal Magic Kingdom.  And when he enters this Magic Kingdom with his family, he discovers that the Magic Kingdom was not what it was sold to be and in fact was in complete and total disarray.  And over the course of the picture, he mends the Magic Kingdom and his family. 

MoviesOnline: It’s a little “Night at the Museum-ish”?  Is it like a cousin?

Bob Ducsay: Interestingly enough that you should mention that because, of course, in Hollywood you always use very, very…..no exactly you use a comparison like that to get certain people who need that simplicity to make your movie.

MoviesOnline: Or people reading on the Internet.

Bob Ducsay: That’s exactly right.   I mean, I would say that there are some similarities but they’re not in any way a detriment to or a criticism to “Night at the Museum,” which I happen to love and we were actually involved with for a short time.  I think that the movie is a little bit more complicated than that though.

MoviesOnline: So it’s more adult?

Bob Ducsay: It’s a family movie…but it is.  It’s a little bit more complicated and again, that is not a criticism.  And I’m saying that because I do love “Night at the Museum” but it isn’t a criticism of the movie.  I just think this is a little bit more complicated movie than that.  Its goals are a little bit more ambitious. 

MoviesOnline: I may be remembering incorrectly but was this the one that was released on the Internet before it actually came out?  They actually released a version of it like a virtual version?

Bob Ducsay: Of “Magic Kingdom”?

MoviesOnline: Yeah.

Bob Ducsay: Not that I’m aware of.

MoviesOnline: No?  Okay.

Bob Ducsay: Yeah, not that I’m aware of.  Anyway, thanks guys.  Much appreciated.