Now that you've seen the insanity that director Alex Kurtzman's The Mummy has to offer thanks to the first full trailer, we can dig into the monster movie's details a bit more. Luckily, our own Steve Weintraub had a chance to sit down with Kurtzman himself, along with a small group of visiting journalists, to talk about the making of the film, working with star Tom Cruise, The Mummy's place in Universal Pictures' shared cinematic universe, and much more. Look for Steve's full interview later this week. Be aware that some potential spoilers follow below.

In the meantime, we wanted to bring you Kurtzman's comments on the film's visual effects work, which not only includes an affirmation that they prioritized practical effects but also a bonkers story about Cruise insisting that the big plane sequence seen in the trailer was done practically. How, you ask? Why, by using the "vomit comet", of course!

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Image via Paramount

Before we get to that colorful story, it's important to mention that Kurtzman and The Mummy team aren't just making a green-screen movie that'll be put together in post-production. Kurtzman addressed the balance between practical and digital VFX as follows:

Our goal was to do as much practically as we could, and we really committed to that.

 

How much is that, nowadays? 

 

So there’s a plane crash sequence and traditionally when you do a plane crash sequence inside of a plane, what the studio will tell you is, “Okay, fine, you’re going a rotisserie set and you’re going to do a lot of green screen work on the set and we’re going to do cables and blah-blah-blah,” right? Now to some extent, if you want it to be a visceral experience and you want to go there, you do need to build, at the very least, a rotisserie, which essentially is a massive set that rotates so you can have the visual experience of it, so you and the camera can move through that space steadily enough to capture all the actors tumbling all over the place. It’s the kind of thing that [Christopher] Nolan did in Inception, [Stanley] Kubrick pioneered it in 2001. It is kind of the most immersive way to go.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

So far, so good, right? But it seems that Kurtzman wasn't the only person who wanted to focus on practical effects:

That being said, when I brought this up with Tom [Cruise], I said, “Here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to build the set,” he said, “Yeah, yeah, but we’ve got to do it for real.” I was like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “We’re going to up in the vomit comet and we’re going to shoot the whole sequence there too.” I said, “Yeah, but we can’t do it ALL in the vomit comet because the sequence is so extensive.” He said, “I know, we’re going to build that rotisserie set, we’re going to do part of it there and we’re going to do part of it in the vomit comet.”

 

Do you know how it works, the vomit comet? So you go up, basically with the Gs of a rocket going into space. Then you even out and everything starts to go weightless, and then you free-fall for 22 seconds and everybody goes up in the air. We had grips holding lights and puking while the shot was going on. I mean, it was the craziest experience ever and ultimately worth it because I think, again, our whole thing was “Let’s do this without cuts. Let’s really do this so that you can actually stay in this shot and watch these guys float around and go, ‘How the hell did they do it?’”

 

So that is what we did. Everything in that plane is totally practical and, traditionally, a lot of that would have been people on wires against a green screen. And the funny part is, if you were to cost both at the end of the day, it actually is probably the same. So for what we wanted to do, which is put you guys in this totally immersive environment and make you feel like you were there, it’s those kinds of decisions that make a huge difference - huge, huge difference - just the experience of a moment like that.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

Sounds totally safe and easy on the cast and crew, right?

Here’s the thing, you have to take a bag with you and you have to hold it right here, and the hope is that when you do vomit you manage to grab all of it in the bag before the chunks float off into space.

The sequence was captured over "four flights, sixteen [parabolic arcs] each flight" to bring you the insane action beat you saw in the trailer. Part of the reasoning behind this was the aforementioned priority to use practical effects, but another reason was to take Cruise out of his expected heroic performance:

When we were developing the script and I knew that Tom was going to do the movie, the first thing that we talked about was, I said, “Listen…” I’d worked with Tom on Mission [Impossible] III, and I said, “I have 30-plus years of embedded ‘Tom Cruise is going to save the day’ in my experience and my relationship to you, as an actor. And the problem is in a monster movie, the scariest monster movies are the ones where the protagonist starts to feel very out of control. So how am I going to believe that you’re really out of control, because I know you’re going to save the day, you know?”

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Image via Universal

Now here's where things get a little nuts. Consider this your second spoiler warning, because what appears to happen to Cruise's character in The Mummy will certainly come as an unexpected twist to moviegoing audiences:

And what we came to is the idea that if you present him as somebody who thinks he knows what’s going on and then you throw the craziest thing at him in the world, which is, “Oh shit, he dies and then comes back up in that morgue,” now I go, “Okay, he doesn’t know what he’s into, I don’t know what he’s into, I don’t know that he’s going to save the day.” And everything became very unpredictable at that point. So in terms of what I want the conversation to be about there, it’s interesting you said “Oh my god, I’ve never heard Tom scream in fear before.” That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. He’s never been in that position before.

 

If Tom Cruise is coming back from the dead in this narrative, does that make him “The Mummy?

 

Great question. [Long pause.]

Let that plot point sink in for a minute. We'll have much more on The Mummy coming soon, but unfortunately we still have to wait until June 9, 2017 for the film's theatrical release.

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