After a breif hiatus from the big screen, Brendan Fraser's back in a big way this summer, launching two potential blockbusters, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and Journey to the Center of the Earth. While the former is the third in the Mummy series, the latter has no direct relationship to the countless movies of the same name inspired by Jules Verne's 1864 novel. Here, Fraser explains how this Journey relates to Verne's original, what the movie's boundary-pushing 3-D technology meant to him as an actor and, of course, albino dinosaurs.

On working in Journey's new, enhanced 3-D format:
A: We were really on a flagship, like the tippety-tip, pointy part of the spear of technology that is yet to be given to the public as a new offering in cinema.  I mean it’s been developed for years, yeah, but this is the first time it has been done. It really felt exciting. It really, really felt exciting.  

On imagining the center of the Earth:
We kind of gave ourselves license and an open ticket to create a world within the world.  I mean, who is to say what’s really at the center of the earth? I mean, has anyone spoken to anyone who has really been there? It’s only been written about.  That gave us license as story tellers to really create it. 

So we put in a mine shaft, we put in a facility that was still sort of semi-intact and takes it’s audience on a rollercoaster ride.  And we’ve all seen rollercoaster footage of putting on the front and doing the loopty loop and everyone going "Arghhhhh!" like that. But I promise you, this  "rollercoaster ride" — in films that term, "rollercoaster," is very often overused in describing films — but this film has a rollercoaster ride to rival any other, I guarantee you. 

On his strangest experience shooting in the film:
Being chased by a large albino dinosaur. That was exhausting. We were on massive treadmills, and we learned that we could actually run faster than the treadmill would go, so were trying to not run in slow motion.

So there is Josh [co-star Josh Hutcherson] and I, and...he could run a 10K and I would be like sucking wind after 2 or 3, but we’d be like running, running from this dinosaur and going, "Help! Oh no! What are we going to do?" And then we realized we’re at the front of the treadmill and we could just sort of hop off.

On Journey's relationship to the 1864 Jules Verne novel of the same name:
Like Alice in Wonderland backwards, down the rabbit hole they’re born into this new world that they have discovered, and in this world who knows what may be there?  And then, once they think about it a little more closely, maybe this supposed "work of fiction" by someone called "Jules Verne" who wrote about a professor called Lidenbrach in the book — maybe it wasn’t science fiction but actually more or less science fact. 

And knowing that, that everything in the book seems to be in the world amongst them and around them, they realize that they do have a situation on their hands, and maybe if they follow "the recipe," if you will, in the book, they can find their way free of this. 

On some of his more impressive stunts
We went to a rock climbing training facility just to brush up on proper ways to use our gear, because we really were hanging from it and we had to watch out for each other very frequently.  I mean, we were repelling off of set pieces. It was magnificent, shot in Montreal and with really high ceilings in the studio. I think it was like 45 meters high or something like that, that big of a wall, bouncing down this thing.

On the best — no, the only — way to watch Journey to the Center of the Earth
This is an experience that has to be had by going to the theater. It has to bring the group back to the theater. It commands an audience to be there to experience it together.