You know, I am a huge horror fan, and have been since I was 12. I watch everything I can possibly get my hands on. Horror is a very interesting and unique genre in that it seems to be largely defined by the director who is making the film. And I guess you could say that about any genre, but horror is kind of unique in that way because every director approaches scares and suspense differently. Some directors build their horror on showing you a lot of violence. Some directors build there horror on showing you none. The movies that, as a kid, affected me the most found an extraordinary balance between teasing horror, holding you in a state of suspense and then showing you some really, really scary shit. I love that and I love the challenge of that. And if you didn’t expect it from me and then felt I delivered something, that’s nothing but a compliment to me.

Were there horror movies, I mean obviously The Mummy, but particular horror movies you referenced?

My favourite horror film of all time is The Exorcist, which is a cliché because it’s probably everybody’s, or most peoples. Tom (Cruise) and I watched it quite a bit. We watched it actually less for the scenes in the bedroom, which are obviously brilliant, but more for the first 10 minutes of the film, which is a very transportive experience. In the first 10 minutes of the movie, which is essentially a silent film, you are immersed in a world and filled with a deep sense of dread, without any real understanding of why. Friedkin builds this extraordinarily scary tone, and a sense that something really, really bad is coming, and he does it purely visually. He does it with mood and long takes and quiet and sound and light. He went to those real locations, they shot it in Iraq. He just puts you in a world. And when we talked about how we wanted to approach modern day Iraq and ancient Egypt, we kept going back to The Exorcist as a major reference for tone and texture and look and light and colour and the building of suspense in certain scenes.

Tom has worked with Kubrick. So, to be able to work with an actor who has worked with Kubrick is quite something. We watched The Shining. We talked about Eyes Wide Shut a lot. We talked about what Tom calls an atonal rhythm that Kubrick had in all of his films. And it’s a fascinating thing to hear someone who has worked with Kubrick and understands how Kubrick achieves these rhythms with his actors.

You can take the scene in The Shining between Danny and Scatman Crothers’ character. So they’re sitting at the table and they’re having ice cream and they’re talking about what’s in the hotel room. It’s a normal conversation if you were to read it on the page but there are very strange pauses between the questions and the answers that make you so uncomfortable and you can’t tell why. And that’s all designed by Kubrick, long single takes where people are not speaking in a normal rhythm to each other and it makes you deeply unsettled. And so we talked a lot about that.