Journeys With Dinosaurs and Mummies

July 11, 2008 -- This summer, Brendan Fraser will once again don his action-adventure hero hat — not a fedora — with the latest adaptation of "Journey to the Center of the Earth" and will star in the third installment of "The Mummy" series. But the versatile actor insists that he is interested only in being a storyteller, as he sat down to chat with "Popcorn With Peter Travers" on ABC News Now.

In "Journey," which opens Friday, July 11, Fraser plays Trevor Anderson, a scientist whose brother disappeared while searching for the mythical center of the earth. During the search, teenage nephew in tow, Fraser joins forces with a sexy Icelandic tour guide as they find their way deep inside the earth's crust, encountering glowing birds, dinosaurs and more.

This was going to be a different kind of adaptation, though. While fielding the script, Fraser recalled, "I saw a screenplay — it said adventure film, 'Journey to the Center of the Earth,' based on Jules Verne's classic. And the sentence that was left off the page was, 'This one's going to be shot entirely in 3-D.' I thought hold it, wait up, I love 3-D. What does that mean?"

To make this movie something new and different, filmmakers shot it entirely with a new process called RealD. "What we needed to use right now to view this film as it was conceived to be seen, which is in 3-D, is a convergence," he said. "An upgrade needed to be made."

It's notably been used in U2's recent concert film "U2 3D" from their Vertigo Tour, as well as James Cameron's upcoming sci-fi film "Avatar." With traditional 3-D, a RealD spokesperson explained, "you get dizzy, you get eye strain, and if you're sitting in the wrong part of the theater, it doesn't look good. Because Real-D is digital, it's perfectly calibrated."

Following "Journey" later this summer is the third installment in the successful "Mummy" franchise, "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor," which will be released nationwide on Aug. 1. Of the second sequel, Fraser says, "We've taken the core group of characters and located them this time in China [rather than Egypt], and they discover the tomb of a despotic emperor and his terra-cotta army."