From filming inside of a dormant volcano to insurance policies that covered kidnapping, here are some lesser known facts about 1999's "The Mummy."
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00:00From filming inside of a dormant volcano to insurance policies that covered kidnapping,
00:05here are some lesser-known facts about 1999's The Mummy.
00:10The fictional Rick O'Connell and Evelyn Carnahan certainly deal with more than their share
00:14of plagues and curses in The Mummy. The crew and cast of actors, including stars Brendan
00:19Fraser and Rachel Weisz, also dealt with a few plagues of their own making the film.
00:25Filming out in the desert was no easy task when temperatures often hit 130 degrees Fahrenheit
00:29each morning. Not to mention the Moroccan dunes were a cozy home to a host of creeping,
00:35slithering creatures.
00:36What do you mean, bugs? I hate bugs!
00:39A professional scorpion catcher was even stationed on the set. Rachel Weisz told the Birmingham
00:44Post,
00:45Quite a few people were airlifted out after they'd been bitten by scorpions. They used
00:48to have a scorpion wrangler who would collect them in empty Evian bottles, then shake them
00:53in front of your face going, look what we've found.
00:56What is a place like me doing in a gall like this?
00:59In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Brendan Fraser talked about a particularly
01:03memorable encounter with a poisonous snake. They sent a memo out describing a type of
01:08snake. I think it had yellow dots on it. They said,
01:10If you see this kind of snake, do not go near it because if it bites you, at best, they'll
01:14amputate your limb.
01:16Anyway, there I was, pissing down a rock, and I look down and there's the yellow-dot
01:20snake. I was like, f-----, I just ran for it.
01:23We are in very serious trouble.
01:26Sure, The Mummy was a fantastical action-adventure blockbuster movie, but there were grains of
01:31historic truth amid all that sand. When director Stephen Sommers wasn't busy animating corpses,
01:36he called in the help of noted Egyptologist Dr. Stuart Smith from UCLA. Since no one today
01:42was around over 2,000 years ago to hear how people spoke ancient Egyptian. So, Mummy movie
01:47star Arnold Vosloo, who played the villainous Imhotep, worked with Dr. Smith to get the
01:52dialogue and the lines as accurate as possible.
01:54Sommers told Cinefantastique,
01:56Dr. Smith really had to coach us.
01:58Vosloo was so committed to making his character seem realistic and plausible, he worked for
02:03hours into the night, learning lines phonetically over the phone with Dr. Smith.
02:07Do re mi fa so la ti do. I'm an excellent voice today.
02:14The crew was just as committed to creating as many authentic props and sets as possible.
02:19Egyptian designer Alan Cameron made long trips to the British Museum to find his inspiration.
02:24Cameron said,
02:25I spent hours in their library, researching Egyptology. I found this amazing volume that
02:30Napoleon had commissioned when he invaded Egypt. He had his artists, etchers, and archaeologists
02:35catalog all the artifacts and tombs they found in ancient Egypt. It became our art department
02:40bible.
02:41Even though The Mummy is set in Egypt, filming for the movie was done in Morocco and London.
02:46The Sahara Desert near the city of Urfoud became the background for the desert scenes.
02:51The city of Marrakech became an excellent stand-in for 1920s Cairo, as it had preserved
02:56much of its traditional architecture. The film crew took down telephone poles and electrical
03:00cables to make the location appear even more like 1920s Egypt.
03:03The Town Hall became the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, which Evelyn promptly destroys in the film.
03:08Marrakech wasn't the only stand-in for another city. Those memorable river scenes in The
03:12Mummy were filmed on England's Thames River, and not the Nile, so when Rick shouts out
03:17to Benny,
03:18Hey, Benny! Looks to me like you're on the wrong side of the river!
03:23he's being more accurate than many might realize.
03:27While it seems impossible now to imagine The Mummy as anything other than the comedy-horror
03:31hokum flick, that's not how the film was initially planned. The Mummy went through over nine
03:35years of development, multiple scripts, and several directors before being turned over
03:39to Stephen Sommers. Previous screen treatments were contributed by Innerspace's Joe Dante,
03:44Night of the Living Dead's George Romero, Hellraiser's Clive Barker, and Shockwave's
03:49Alan Ormsby.
03:50The earlier scripts were generally more straightforward as horror films, though one script set The
03:54Mummy in Beverly Hills wreaking havoc at a local lab. There was even a discussion about
03:59having The Mummy be more like The Terminator. Tom Cruise, Ben Affleck, and other popular
04:03male leads at the time were rumored to be originally offered the part of Rick O'Connell.
04:07None of this gossip is confirmed, no matter how juicy.
04:10He's still… still… juicy.
04:14Stephen Sommers was a childhood fan of the original 1932 Boris Karloff film, but that
04:19classic doesn't share much with the modern remake. For starters, no one is confronted
04:23by a giant wall of sand. Moviegoers in the late 90s were desperate for an action hero
04:27that didn't take himself too seriously, and a mummy that embodied a real sense of danger.
04:32Stephen Sommers explained it this way to Cinefantastique,
04:35If you tossed this idea around town, you'd have people saying you could easily outrun
04:39them or why not just tear their arms off? We wanted to create something that would be
04:42frightening and dangerous.
04:44Stephen Sommers told Cinefantastique one of the reasons Brendan Fraser was cast as Rick
04:49O'Connell.
04:50At 6'4 and close to 200 pounds, solid rock, Brendan was a big, strong guy who could throw
04:54a punch and shoot a gun, but he could also make you laugh, and laugh at himself. He has
04:58that kind of charm.
04:59Oh yeah. This just keeps getting better and better.
05:03For the scene in which Rick faces the hangman's noose, Fraser was only needed for close-ups,
05:07but in volunteering to do more for the scene, he tells of a complete blacking out. As Fraser
05:11recently recalled the incident for Entertainment Weekly,
05:14So, the stuntman took up the tension on the rope and I went up on the balls of my feet.
05:19Then I guess he took the tension up again. I remember seeing the camera start to pan
05:22around and then it was like the Death Star powering down. I regained consciousness and
05:27one of the EMTs was saying my name.
05:29Summers disputes this version of events, saying that Fraser is totally to blame.
05:33I wouldn't say that.
05:34Nevertheless, the two continue to be good friends, but the fact remains that filming
05:38was intense. Fraser needed multiple surgeries, including back surgery, after filming the
05:43first three films due to injuries and physical strain.
05:46I am a librarian.
05:52In The Mummy, Rachel Weisz proved there was more to a librarian than meets the eye. She
05:56did some of her own stunts, including camel riding, which despite what her character says
06:00on camera,
06:01I think they're adorable.
06:03Weisz didn't find them quite so adorable off-camera. As for stunts, one that concerned her was
06:08not her own, but one that injured a stuntman during a gunfight. As she told the Birmingham
06:13Post,
06:14I didn't do that many, but there was one bad one where I had to turn around to shoot a
06:18rider on a horse. He was on a pulley that yanked him off and he broke both his arms.
06:22They still used the shot, though.
06:24Before her role as Evelyn Carnahan in The Mummy, Weisz was still relatively unknown.
06:28She confessed that she had not thought about doing a big-budget movie before until she
06:31saw the script for The Mummy. As she explained to The Mirror,
06:34I read it and I thought, this is a funny character. She's a librarian in an action movie.
06:39Oddly enough, after The Mummy was a hit, Playboy invited Rachel Weisz to model as her librarian
06:43character for the magazine. She declined.
06:47The real-life Imhotep was not a supervillain. He was a high priest, an architect, and a
06:52Imhotep designed the Step Pyramid of Djoser, which is located in Saqqara. The city of the
06:57dead Hamunaptra, however, is purely fictional.
07:00The fictional version of Imhotep appeared in Universal's classic 1932 version of The
07:04Mummy. Boris Karloff also portrays Imhotep searching for a modern-day reincarnation of
07:09his lost love, Anakza Namun.
07:11It appears that the original film's writers, John L. Balderston, Nina Wilcox Putnam, and
07:16Richard Scheer, relied on ancient Egyptian mythology and folklore in their work.
07:22Arnold Vosloo is a classically trained South African actor and horror fan who appeared
07:25in Ridley Scott's 1492 Conquest of Paradise. Later, he played the lead in two direct-to-video
07:31Darkman films. Stephen Sommers recalled Vosloo's audition for The Mummy,
07:35"...Arnold Vosloo walked in. It was funny. At first, there was something kind of intimidating
07:39about him. I can't explain it. He's Shakespearean. He's serious. He's very commanding. Within
07:4330 seconds, I knew he was going to be the guy, and I never do that."
07:47Vosloo intended to play Imhotep seriously, with no hint of silliness or camp. He wanted
07:52to emphasize the character's romance. Vosloo told Cinefantastique,
07:55"...I worked so hard in making The Mummy human. I wanted to make sure it's very understandable.
08:01This guy just loves this woman."
08:02In addition to examining his character's motivations, Vosloo researched his physical appearance,
08:07including the fact that Egyptian priests were fully shaven. Director Stephen Sommers agreed
08:11to try it out, and the results spoke for themselves.
08:15Kevin J. O'Connor played the hilariously evil Benny Gabor, the opportunistic henchman
08:20for The Mummy. He had worked with director Stephen Sommers before, on the action film
08:24Deep Rising. O'Connor created many aspects of his character. He told interviewer Jim
08:28Conlon Chatz that he asked the costuming department for pants that didn't fit. He regretted requesting
08:33open-toed sandals after a wriggling creature squiggled under the sand on the first day.
08:38One of O'Connor's most popular lines was inspired by the giant sand wall effect, which none
08:42of the cast had seen yet. Based on a description, O'Connor came up with this memorable ad-lib.
08:47"...I loved the whole sand wall trick. It was beautiful."
08:50The actor intentionally added the line to reinforce the impression of a slimy employee
08:55man kissing up to his boss.
08:57"...You seen me as a god, right, Smithers?"
08:59"...Absolutely, sir."
09:00"...You'd kneel before me?"
09:02"...Why would I?"
09:03Benny became a popular character, and even though he was chewed up by Beatles in the
09:07first film, Sommers talked with O'Connor about the possibility of bringing Benny back for
09:11the sequels, reanimated as a discombobulated mummy. In the end, with so much jammed into
09:16The Mummy Returns, there was no room for Benny to return to his former spinelessness.
09:21A lot has been learned since Hollywood released The Mummy in 1999. Like Imhotep himself, there
09:26are aspects of his movie that don't come across as very sensitive in today's world. The film
09:31remains a beloved favorite for many audiences, but in retrospect, there appear to be a few
09:35bugs in it due to its portrayals of ancient Egyptian culture and people of color. Since
09:40the movie's release, several actors have rethought their casting. Arnold Vosloo told
09:44Entertainment Weekly,
09:45"...If it were happening today, would I get the part? I mean, here I am, white, South
09:49African. They'd probably cast a real Egyptian."
09:52Omid Jalili had ideas about playing his role of Warden God Hassan from the beginning. In
09:56an effort to avoid offending audiences, he wondered if he could play his role in a light-hearted
10:01manner, even though that wasn't in the script. He discussed this with Stephen Sommers during
10:05casting. In an interview, he explained,
10:07"...I have an Iranian background, so I was very aware that if I ever did film roles,
10:12I had to represent Middle Eastern culture."
10:14This was at a time when there were very few Middle Eastern roles at all that weren't terrorists.
10:18Steve said,
10:19"...We're looking for kind of Rifki from Midnight Express, and that was a Turkish warden who
10:23was really evil. I said, look, why don't we play him differently, because with all due
10:27respect to you, what you've written is not even one-dimensional. I can possibly get this
10:31to a two-dimensional stereotype."
10:34After this film, they found a real volcano — at least, a dormant one. Production designer
10:38Alan Cameron was up to the task, flying to Morocco and heading out to the dunes of Erfoud,
10:43where he discovered the volcano. As Stephen Sommers told FilmScouts,
10:46"...a city hidden in the crater of an extinct volcano made perfect sense. Out in the middle
10:51of the desert, you would never see it. You would never think of entering the crater unless
10:55you knew what was inside that volcano."
10:57Over the course of 16 weeks, the crew built the city of Hamanoptera out in the desert.
11:01These sets were designed to collapse during the final action scenes. Interior scenes were
11:05filmed in London's Shepperton Studios. Imagine being responsible for the housing, feeding,
11:10health, and safety of over 800 actors, extras, crew members, and even Tariq horse riders
11:15in the middle of the desert. And what if the city wasn't used to handling 800 visitors
11:19at once? As co-producer Patricia Carr explained,
11:22"...it was not easy finding enough hotel rooms in a small desert town which only caters to
11:26tourists who stay for one night or two at the most."
11:29During location filming, producer James, a.k.a. Jim Jacks, actually took out insurance
11:34policies for kidnapping. According to Brendan Fraser, the policies were each worth …
11:38"...one million dollars."
11:43While that's not exactly a loose change, Fraser expressed some concern over the figure, saying,
11:47"...we were like, so basically you put a bounty on our head? He's like, that's one way of
11:51looking at it."
11:52"...I only gamble with my life, never my money."
11:54Not all the stars had the same insurance. The insurance coverage for Kevin J. O'Connor,
11:58who played Benny, was for only $50,000. He wasn't too bothered about it, though. He joked
12:02to producer Jim Jacks,
12:04"...Eh, $50,000, that should do it."
12:06With a parade of sequels, video games, a prequel, and an animated series, The Mummy became the
12:11last great action-adventure franchise before the superhero craze. All things eventually
12:15run their course, but you never know when this mummy will rise again.