You will love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time running out. Day after day of the everyday. What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge. Newness strutting around as if it were significant. Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry. I want to go back to that time after Michiko's death when I cried every day among the trees. To the real. To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive.
I went in right up front and said, This can't be about some guy in bandages. I didn't even want to do a horror movie. I took the concept and made a romantic adventure film. I like action heroes who don't take themselves too seriously. I wanted to make everyone take the mummy seriously, but it couldn't just be a guy in bandages. But the main thing was to build in surprises. That's one of the great things you can do with special effects.