Interview: Alex Kurtzman Talks Working with Tom Cruise and Blending Horror and Action for THE MUMMY (2017)

Now in theaters everywhere is The Mummy from director Alex Kurtzman, and earlier this week, Daily Dead had the chance to speak with the filmmaker about his approach to resurrecting the classic Universal Monster for modern audiences, marrying horror and action, his experiences collaborating with Tom Cruise, and more.

Congrats on the film, Alex. For The Mummy, was there a lot of pressure on you coming into this as a director?

Alex Kurtzman: There was, but at the same time, I feel the same way you feel about it, you know? I've loved these movies since I was a kid, and I just think it's such a special and unique world, and the idea of getting to play in that world and to bring it to modern audiences while honoring the classics was too good to pass up as much as it terrified me that I didn't want to mess it up.

And I think for me, part of why I love them so much is that there's an amazing kind of mixture of feelings you have from those classic films. It's really about the beauty of filmmaking and the incredible actors who played the parts. To me, the universe is defined by being scared of the monster and feeling tremendous empathy for the monster. I wanted to make a big studio film that had all the requirements for that, but to do it in a way where the function is that the character is broken.

You’ve created a fun horror/adventure film, which is something that I don't think I've ever really seen done, or at least done successfully, anyway. Was that intentional, and will the rest of the films be similar in style?

Alex Kurtzman: Well, thank you for that amazing compliment. I think that I'm a huge fan of horror. I basically gobble up any horror movie I can take, from the wonderful to the terrible ones. I just want to watch it. I think the tricky thing is that horror is often very small and that's what makes it great. So figuring out how to use that scope and scale was kind of a new challenge. I liked that challenge and I think it's just a matter of knowing when you're shifting gears in the balance of the filmmaking so that you can actually deliver big adventure, but then when you make the segue into horror, it feels like it's part of a whole, and connected, as opposed to two things colliding into each other.

There are a lot of brilliant stunts in this movie. Particularly the underwater scene might be one of my favorites that I've seen this year, I just felt that was so freaking cool with the mummies swimming underwater. And obviously, you have somebody like Tom, who is really known for being a guy who can get these kinds of things done. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges of making sure that those set pieces work?

Alex Kurtzman: Thank you, thank you for all that. Yeah, we wanted to do as much practical stunts and effects as we could do. These are classic films, and I think to bring a classic sensibility, and marry that to something modern was critical for me. So, in the case of the underwater sequence, you know we could have done all those mummies as CG characters, but you kind of would have felt it.

So we spent about six months working with an incredibly brilliant dancer developing strange, odd, weird movements with a woman who kind of led the way in helping me work through the movements, and once we got our movements down, we ended up removing the hands and the head, so what you're looking at is a real human body moving, which is why it feels so real. And then, with the head person and the hand person, the idea was to create a world where you really couldn't tell a difference. Because the human eye will pick everything up, and it's very hard to trick it, so it was all about keeping it as grounded as we could.

Can you talk about working with Tom, because I know he's very collaborative when he comes in on a project like this, and what he brought to the table in terms of the character of Nick. Also, I believe he also produced as well, so I know he was very involved in this project.

Alex Kurtzman: I've worked with him now for almost ten years. We look for the same things in film, and we look to create an experience where you completely dissolve into the movie and submit to watching the film. This was me filming my second film, and so I had a lot to learn, and I feel like I inherited the benefit of Tom’s wisdom in the form of all the other directors he's worked with. He's a totally open book about the films that he's made, to be able to say, "All right. How did Kubrick do this? How did Scorsese do that? And how does Oliver Stone do this?"

He was an amazing teacher in a way, and at the same time he puts his trust in you completely. He makes a handshake agreement with you and he says, "I will do what you ask of me." There was never a single moment where I asked him to do something he didn't want to do. So, there was a wonderful partnership there, and to inherit the benefit of all that, it was a gift and I think a gift for any director who works with him.

One thing I thought was really interesting in terms of incorporating Russell Crowe into this as Dr. Jekyll, is that it almost feels in a way that, and maybe I read a little bit into this, but maybe he's going to end up being sort of this connective tissue through a lot of this franchise, which I think is interesting. I don't know if you guys have thought about where his character goes in the future, but I'm really intrigued by how Jekyll is going to play into future films.

Alex Kurtzman: So, there was a lot of conversation and debate early in the process about bringing Henry Jekyll into a mummy movie, because it's not necessarily an intuitive idea. In the film we were constantly asking ourselves, "How do we deliver something new to the table?" What we wanted to do was obviously give you a satisfying mummy movie experience on its own terms, and then if we could open the door to a dark universe and plant seeds without having an overwhelming narrative, we thought that would be the way to go. What you don't want to do is smash characters together just to have them together.

So there was a lot of debate about whether or not to put him in the film. Once we came to the idea that part of the storytelling would be about the fact that the mummy is just in a larger world of gods and monsters, it became very clear that we were going to need somebody to help us understand that. And then we started asking questions, like, you know, you'd want that person to have their own relationship to good and evil. Obviously, there's a medical side to this now, because in the modern world, you're interpreting monsters medically and scientifically. Dr. Jekyll has been where Nick is going. He has a good and human side of him, and the minute you can justify these story terms and say, "Actually, he's there not only to help guide Nick through the world of gods and monsters, but in fact to echo his character.” Now you've got a really strong reason to put him in the film, and I know we'd love to bring him back for more movies in the future.

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Stay tuned to Daily Dead for more interviews with the cast and crew of The Mummy, and in case you missed it, read Heather's review of the film and her interview with co-star Jake Johnson.