Caffeinated Clint
Moviehole caught up with “Mummy : Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” director Rob Cohen for a very frank and intriguing chat this past weekend.
Among topics discussed, Sony pulling the pin on Cohen’s planned “Sinbad” film because they weren’t happy with the returns on the film he’d previously shot for them “Stealth”.
”Well, here are two very beautiful things that happened out of that”, Cohen tells. ”By them publicly blaming me, my career went very cold. I had had two massive hits in a row, one for Sony. It was very bitter and very painful to have people turn on me that had just recently benefited from me and didn’t have the faith to go, “Hey, you know, we win some, we lose some, let’s get on with our next movie.” However, because my life slowed down dramatically, I really had a chance to analyze my life and meditate and get myself together again and focused on the better angels in my nature. And, as Lincoln said, I realized that I had broken up with the best woman I had ever been with and would ever find. And so I called her and begged forgiveness and we got married. And now we have triplets. So, I’m pretty sure that if that movie had been my third big summer hit in a row, I would have been off on cloud nine, I’d have had another movie right away. We’d be making Sinbad, I would have been off in China and I would have lost her. Now maybe I would have awakened some time later and gone, “Oh God, what did I do?” You know, lying there with some bimbo and you go, “This is what my life is. I’m getting older and this is all I’m going to have now is this. And pretty soon I’m going to have to pay for it.” You know? ‘
”That was one, and the other one was that all of my thought work on Sinbad, all of my thinking about China and mythology and fantasy and Joseph Campbell and the whole thing, was thwarted, and through The Mummy it was released again. So, in the end, I got to make a better movie. Because I think the Mummy was always going to be a better story than Sinbad. And I got to do ultimately what I wanted in taking this franchise to this next stage.”
Having said that, Cohen isn’t sure he wants to do a fourth “Mummy” movie. If he did he’d like to take it out of Egypt and set it somewhere new.
