Pirates director tired but happy

A tired Gore Verbinski, the acclaimed director of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, speaks exclusively to Stuff.co.nz about the second instalment of his pirates adventure trilogy.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was a huge hit worldwide, yet before it was released there were predictions that it would flop. How come you proved the naysayers wrong?
First, we delivered a film that was entertaining and had a fun story. But it was Johnny's portrayal of Jack Sparrow that was the exponential factor that tipped things over the edge. Ironically, it's the very thing that makes studio executives nervous that audiences latch onto. No one had seen a character like Captain Jack before.

When it came to the second film, did you spend a lot of time fixing on the direction you would take?
We thought about it a lot. I knew we couldn't just say, hey, they love Johnny Depp, let's just make a Johnny Depp movie. Captain Jack works because he's an ingredient in this big soup with all these other flavors, so we wanted to continue the story we began in part one and also take a few risks and do some things we weren't completely sure would work. We didn't just want to phone in another version of the first film. I think you want to do something people haven't imagined, to make a movie for which there's no algorithm, a movie which can't be tracked or market researched. So I hope that's what Dead Man's Chest feels like. My theory has always been that when it comes to movies the sure thing is never a sure thing.

So you didn't feel pressured to deliver an even bigger hit with the second film?
I tried to encourage everyone involved with the film to forget about that sort of thing. The first time out we were just like snickering children - you know, like we can't believe they're letting us make a pirate movie, so let's have fun because we're never going to work again. And that was liberating. The struggle this time was to get to that place and have fun, because that's when the good stuff happens.

Dead Man's Chest feels like a bigger film than The Curse of the Black Pearl. Bigger ships, impressive sea monsters, bigger sets. Is that thanks to a bigger budget?
Only in part. On the first film we had to take a lot of short cuts. We filmed set pieces on barges because we didn't have a complete, sea-worthy Black Pearl. We had to cheat. This time we had a Black Pearl that could go to sea. So bigger can be better. On the other hand there were moments when we kept things scaled down. By keeping the crew relatively small and going to exotic locations, like this amazing spot we used for the cannibal village, we got tremendous production value just by rolling a camera. I love films with a sense of space and of landscape, though I must say that those landscapes are getting harder to find. You scout and scout and you discover that the Four Seasons Hotel got there before you.

With regard to the first Pirates film you said "If anything can go wrong on water, it will". Did you have any doubts about taking to sea for two more films?
Knock on wood, we started to get it figured out by the end. You know, we knew what shots we could just park the boat on the end of the pier for and no one would know you weren't sailing; we knew how to use a helicopter for the wider shots. So we had a sort of system in place and the water became less daunting. Of course, we had storms, high tides, that sort of thing, but you kind of embrace it. You get shut down for rain once in a while, but you wait it out and sometimes it's gone in half an hour. There'd be me and Johnny and Keira and Orlando and Jack Davenport all squished together under a tent, the actors on the inside all trying to protect their costumes and the crew on the outside. Half an hour later you're back shooting and you get the most remarkable skies. Obviously with a hurricane - and we did have a hurricane - you have to evacuate. But shooting two big summer movies, you have close to two hundred days of principal photography, so things are going to happen. And you can hype it up and turn it into a story - filming disrupted by hurricane or whatever - but there's no movie that shoots for that long on location and doesn't have hurdles along the way.

The problems don't get to you?
I concentrate on the frame, what?s in the shot and where this shot is going to go in the larger puzzle of the whole film. Sometimes a film is like this huge carcass you've got on an operating table and you're trying to resuscitate it. You know, the ship isn't in place, no one's ready, the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, but when the actors arrive on set, you just have to go, No worries. The actors can't be burdened with the logistical nightmares. And the acting is the most important. The stunts, the great special effects, the amazing sets, it's all worthless if the actors can't act and tell the story.

And how do you stay calm?
My father was a nuclear physicist and one of the things I got from him is an analytical nature. I try to keep things in focus and do the important things first. Directing can be like risk management sometimes. Stressing out is useless.

Does Johnny Depp stay in character on set?
He turns Captain Jack on and off like a switch. Johnny's so close to that character that there's more Johnny Depp in Captain Jack than in any other character he's played. I think if you'd seen him doing Ed Wood for example, you'd have seen him stay in character a lot more on set, trying to find the character and keep it and distill it. But Captain Jack is really close to Johnny. I think his other performances he's been running away from an archetype, from being a leading man, the sort of guy who gets the girl and there's usually a shyness and an introverted quality to those performances. But Jack is a braggart, a liar, a thief and a conman and at ease with it to. So I think there have been these floodgates with Johnny holding all this stuff back for years and suddenly with Captain Jack, Whoosh! The line I always keyed into in thinking how to direct Jack was one from the first movie: 'You're the worst pirate I've ever heard of' - 'Yes, but at least you've heard of me'.

But is it true that a lot of people had doubts about Johnny Depp's performance before the first film came out?
The first time out I think everyone thought, just what is he doing? After the movie came out, Geoffrey Rush [Barbossa in The Curse of the Black Pearl] came up to me and said, Kudos to Johnny because all of us thought he was going to be an embarrassment, that he was operating way outside the quadrant.

There are some spectacular sequences in Dead Man's Chest. What was the most difficult to get on screen?
The actors always complained about the sword fight on the wheel, which involves Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom and Jack Davenport in a three-way sword fight. They were tied into the wheel and they were being rolled through the jungle, so it wasn't easy. But I think it turned out really well.

Any clues about what we can expect from Pirates 3?
The next film goes to Singapore, so there's a lot more Asian influence. You're going to see the pirate lords and a lot more of the Davy Jones love story -- what went wrong and why he did what he did -- and how that mirrors Will and Elizabeth's love story. There's also a different villain, or at least a lot more of the East India Company, which was the 17th century equivalent of a big multinational corporation and determined to stamp out piracy once and for all. With Davy Jones it's personal. When he kills, it's not random. But it's much scarier when a corporation does it. It's much more clinical. It's how the railroad was in the American West and what it did to the gunfighter. There's a great scene in Once Upon a Time in the West where the head of the railroad gets a gun to his head and he says there's only one thing more powerful than that and he pulls out a wad of cash. And it completely neutralizes the villain. And I think that's what the last part of the Pirates trilogy is about, that it's the end of an era because in a corrupt society there's no place for honest thieves.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer has already mentioned the possibility of a Pirates 4. Will you be along for the ride?
Never say never. Right now I'm exhausted, but I always feel different after a rest. What I can tell you is that Johnny Depp has certainly not done playing this character.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is screening now.

source: stuff.co.nz