Development In the late 1980s, the producers
James Jacks and
Sean Daniel decided to update the 1932 horror film
The Mummy for the modern era.
Universal gave them the go-ahead, but only if they kept the budget around $10 million. Jacks remembers that the studio "essentially wanted a low-budget horror franchise". Still determined to create a new
Mummy film, Universal hired
Kevin Jarre in 1996 to write a new screenplay. According to Jacks, the executives were now convinced the film should be a larger-budget period piece. Discussing other classic horror characters, Sommers recalled that "
Frankenstein made me sad—I always felt sorry for him.
Dracula was kind of cool and sexy. But
The Mummy just plain scared me." He had wanted to make a
Mummy film, but other writers or directors were always attached. New chair
Stacey Snider distributed packets detailing the studio's holdings—including nearly 5,000 old scripts and films. and Sommers spent a year working on the screenplay. Fraser's role in
George bolstered his perceived star power, yet he remained far cheaper than the biggest actors working. Evelyn Carnahan was named in tribute to
Lady Evelyn Herbert, the daughter of amateur Egyptologist
Lord Carnarvon, both present at the opening of
the tomb of
Tutankhamun in 1922. The studio originally considered American actresses, and
Rachel Weisz auditioned multiple times before getting the part.
John Hannah was picked for the role of Jonathan Carnahan, despite the fact that Hannah felt he was not a comedic actor, with Sommers saying that, "He had no idea why we cast him." Marrakesh had the extra advantage of being much less modern than Cairo, making it easier to dress like the 1920s. The production set up two weeks before filming, taking down telephone wires and cables and shipping in period cars and camels. Here, the dockyards at
Chatham doubled for the
Giza Port on the Nile River. This set was in length and featured "a steam train, an Ajax
traction engine, three cranes, an open two-horse carriage, four horse-drawn carts, five dressing horses and grooms, nine pack donkeys and mules, as well as market stalls, Arab-clad vendors and room for 300 costumed extras".
The Mummy features hundreds of shots that required optical or digital special effects in post-production. Effects house
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) contributed more than 140 shots, with additional work done by
Cinesite (60 shots) and
Pacific Title/Mirage (45 shots, and the film's title sequences.) Sommers engaged ILM while still developing the script, having previously worked with ILM effects supervisor
John Berton on
Deep Rising (1998). ILM was eager for the challenge the film provided and produced a proof of concept for
The Mummys effects in late 1997 to demonstrate the feasibility of Sommers' vision to executives. The filmmakers sought to make something faster and scarier for the title creature, using cutting-edge techniques to create something never before seen. ILM started developing the look of the Mummy three months before filming started. "We wanted to create a photorealistic corpse that was obviously not a man in a suit, obviously not an animatronic, and obviously alive," he recalled. Over a months-long period, the designers worked on developing four distinct stages for the Mummy. Stage one was the mummy at its most decayed, with tattered bits of clothing, skin, and sinew hanging over a skeleton. Stage two added areas of regenerated skin, with stages three and four having the Mummy almost fully regenerated with only small areas of its innards showing through. The artists developed black-and-white sketches, then moved on to color treatments before building the creature in the computer; models were also made to use as reference for the digital artists. The initial states of the Mummy were created entirely by computer, while later stages combined live-action performance. To supplement prosthetics and makeups applied on set, LED lights and pieces of tape served as tracking points so that digital "cutouts" could be applied to Vosloo's face and body in postproduction; Vosloo remarked that walking around the set he felt like a
Christmas tree. The final creature was created with a combination of live-action acting with prosthetics and digital imagery. A digital representation of the Mummy was created in
Alias, featuring simulated muscles for much of the body attached to a skeleton. The animators controlled parts of the Mummy via procedural animation; animating the underlying bones in turn controlled the stretch and movement of the overlaid muscles. Finally, layered on top of the procedural animation and
motion capture was additional animation to tweak the performance; given the limitations of the technology, subtle movements like facial or hand animations had to be done by hand. Shots that featured Vosloo with overlaid computer-generated prosthetics were the most difficult for the effects team, requiring careful match moving. Rather than using a stunt performer, Vosloo performed the motion capture for the character himself. Scenes were blocked out and performed on set during principal photography (first with Vosloo in the scene, then without). The shots were then replicated in the motion capture studio, with Vosloo's performance recorded by eight cameras from different angles. In addition to the Mummy, the script called for numerous effects shots to magnify the sweeping adventure of the film. Vistas like a flashback shot of the ancient city of Thebes combined location footage shot in the desert with composited actors shot on green screen, model miniatures,
matte paintings, and computer-generated effects. The plagues Imhotep unleashes were accomplished using particle-based computer graphics, with ILM designers swapping out models of different qualities depending on how far from the camera the swarming "insects" were. While the film made extensive use of computer-generated imagery, many scenes, including ones where Rachel Weisz's character is covered with rats and locusts, were shot using live animals. Another close-up shot used footage of anesthetized locusts attached to a stunt performer combined with extra computer-generated pests. Sandstorms used procedural graphics based on programs used to create tornados in
Twister, while the masses of flesh-eating scarabs used techniques developed for
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. A shot of a firestorm engulfing Cairo combined real palm trees, physical models, and matte paintings with computer-generated hail, fire, and rubble. Pacific Title/Mirage also enhanced shots with digital camera shake. The finale involves an army of mummies coming to Imhotep's defense. Many of these mummies were created by Make-Up Effects Supervisor
Nick Dudman, who produced makeup, prosthetics, and animatronic effects in the film. Each suit came with variations for stunt moves or pyrotechnics. After principal photography, the suits were sent to ILM to scan and be modeled in the computer. Using parts of the Imhotep mummy to save time, ILM recreated the underlings digitally to add into the scenes and used motion capture to animate them. The animators credited Fraser's ability to consistently re-enact his movements in multiple takes as saving time when it came to match the motion-captured digital mummies to the live-action fight scenes. ==Music==