WARNING – CONTAINS SPOILERS

The Mummy Returns Poster $12.95

The press day for The Mummy Returns began with a presentation by John Berton of Industrial Light & Magic.  John was the Visual Effects Supervisor for the film.  (Something I learned that day – though we routinely talk about “special effects,” in today’s world of high-tech moviemaking, that phrase actually refers to actual physical effects done on the set in front of the camera – i.e. explosions.  Armies of dog-headed warriors invading an ancient city, hordes of pygmy mummies, a giant monster with a celebrity’s head – CGI stuff – are called visual effects.)  He played us some cool video clips which showed how certain stuff in the movie was done.

One bit in particular was actually scarier to watch before the effects were added than after it was actually completed:  soldiers from the Moroccan army on horseback, playing members of Ardeth Bay’s Medjai troops, have to pretend they are fighting nine-feet tall Anubis warriors.  So they’d know where to look and swing their swords at, Czech stuntmen stood among them, holding poles, which the Moroccan troops would strike the tops of.  For the stunt guys, it must have been pretty hairy.  Later on, of course, CGI dogmen would be added to where the poles now were, their necks going where the “succesful” blows had struck.  The stuntmen would be laboriously hand painted out; to facilitate this work, they wore blue during the filming – not for any “blue screen”  reasons, but just because it more easily differentiated them from everything else.

 “Brendan Fraser doesn’t need a blue guy,” Berton gushed in admiration as he showed us a very funny clip illustrating his point.  During a scene set on a double decker bus, Brendan’s Rick engages in hand to hand combat with a soldier mummy, who was totally added later by CGI.  Instead of filming the scene with another actor who would have to be painted out, Fraser vigorously mimed the whole fight.  Seeing him realistically pretend to be strangled by someone who isn’t there was an eye-opening demonstration of just how fine a physical actor he is.  He also added his own contribution to the sequence.  The script called for him to poke his fingers into the mummy’s eye sockets.  During one take, after Brendan did this, he then looked at his fingers in disgust, pretending to shake off some ancient goo.  He did it as a joke, and apologized right after the take, saying he knew that would just mess up the visual effects guys.  But they said no, no, that’s cool – we’ll use it.  It’s an added challenge, but we like it.  You’ve given us another fun hurdle to overcome.  And now it’s one more funny, clever bit in the movie.  Berton said this was an example of the terrific symbiosis that can occur when between the visual effects team and an actor who’s really good at this sort of stuff, as Brendan truly is.

A similar type of clip showed two stuntmen running, then falling onto the ground, and then flailing their arms as they pretended to be stabbed in the back.  Later on, the reasons for their death throes would be added in – pygmy mummies!

Sometimes besides adding in monsters, things other than blue stuntmen need to be taken out.  A very impressive example of this involved the scene where Imhotep causes a wall of water to rise up at the mouth of a picturesque canyon in Morocco.  As they were preparing to shoot, real-life tourists, there for the scenery, showed up on the other side of the river – 2,000 of them!  And the production coordinator couldn’t get them to leave, no matter what he did.  The filmmakers desperately asked the visual effects guys – who are always there when scenes in which effects will be added are shot – you can paint them out, right?  Right??  And, indeed, they did.  You’ll notice no tourists in the scene now, though they were on film originally.  (They probably were wondering why in the world a bald guy was being filmed standing in the water raising up his arms over and over.)

The scene continues in the movie with a chase between the cliffs of the canyon (actually a different canyon, in Jordan).  Berton pointed out that the cliffs are in reality two to three hundred feet high.  The visual effects team, however, treated the cliff footage as if it had been filmed on a miniature set, so that in the finished product, after the zeppelin carrying the story’s heroes had been added in, the walls appear to be 3,000 feet high.

A real constructed miniature set was used for the foreground buildings (the backgrounds were CGI “mattes”) of Thebes which appear in the opening Scorpion King prologue.  For the invasion and destruction of the city, different types of effects were combined – CGI for the Anubis warrior and Theban citizens, REAL smoke behind the miniature buildings, etc.  ILM animators who had been working hard on the scene were “rewarded” by getting to be the models for the tiny people being killed by the dogmen.

For the monstrous incarnation of the Scorpion King seen at the end of the movie, a completely CGI creature was made, which had to look like it had the Rock’s face.  To begin this process, he was filmed – in  hotel room, of all places – turning his head in different directions, pretending he was trying to crush Brendan with a giant pair of pincers, etc.  The ILM team spent ages trying to get their computer animated version of him to look believable.  Berton spoke of the painstaking details which needed to be taken, up to counting the number of hairs in the Rock’s eyebrows!  He told us that things like this mattered – that, for example, until they did things like correct the eyelashes to make them the same exact length as the Rock’s real ones, somehow the face didn’t look like the Rock.  Berton is very proud of the finished result – the first ever totally CGI animated “person” (well, the face of a person) with anything close to this kind of detail.

Another thing he proudly mentioned was the statistic of 32,000 Anubis warriors – the most digital creatures ever seen onscreen at the same time in a movie to date.

If you weren’t fully aware before the presentation, you certainly were afterwards, of just how extraordinarily important the contributions of the visual effects team are to a movie like The Mummy Returns.  Without them, an incredible fantasy adventure like this could never get further than the writer’s imagination.