When the producers and writers of "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" sat down to research pirate movies, they had to go back a few years to find a decent one. To their estimation, it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that the last decent pirate movie was made in 1959.
A panel of filmmakers and moderator, author Frank Thompson (Tim Burton’s "Nightmare before Christmas") spoke before an enthusiastic crowd (including a good number of Jack Sparrows) January 11th at the historic El Capitan Theater in Hollywood.
They discussed the risk of making a pirate movie today, the challenges of incorporating elements from the beloved Disneyland ride into the story, and a few tidbits about "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest."
Frank Thompson: This is just such a pleasure for me to be here in the beautiful theater and not only this so wonderful and lovely to be here, but I’m also relatively sure we’re not in the slide zone. This is quite the experience.
You know years ago they used to make pirate movies by the dozen. When you walked down the street you’d get hit in the face by a pirate movie, everywhere you’d move. They were like cicadas. But they just stopped making them. And so when I first heard that this movie was going to be made, my first impulse was to think “that’s a mistake.” And then when I saw the film I said “that wasn’t a mistake at all!
This was a great, great movie.” I found out that it is absolutely the most requested film in the old Capitan’s history. And the reason that it is being shown tonight is by popular demand. We have some great people who worked on the film with us tonight. They’re going to share some behind the scenes stories. We’re gonna find out what Johnny Depp was really like. So let’s introduce them and bring them out.
I’m going to start with the Second Unit director, the Executive Producer and the Production Manager and that’s all one guy. He worked on Pearl Harbor, Country Bears, and he’s also working on a couple of other movies that I hope you’ll see called Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3. [He’s] a man by the name of Bruce Hendricks.
[Next is] the Senior VP of Visual Effects on Pirates of the Caribbean and those of you that know the film know how spectacular those effects are. He’s worked on an amazing array of films from "Back to the Future," "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back," many many more, "Ghostbusters," it goes on and on. He did some of his most wonderful work, I think on Pirates and his name is Art Repola. Please welcome him.
The two men who originally wrote the script have worked together on many occasions. They wrote "Aladdin," "Treasure Planet," "Godzilla," "Mask of Zorro," "Shrek," "Shrek 2," and they’re also working on the next two Pirates of the Caribbean films. So if you can keep them apart, I’ll introduce them one at a time. First: Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio.
And we wanted to get one of the hunks from the cast. So we figured out that we’ve got one of the greats. He’s been in over 40 feature films including "Dungeons and Dragons," the amazing "I Woke up Early the Day I Die, "(if you’ve never seen it, you’ve got to see it), the great comedy called "Tapeheads." He’s been in a ga-zillion TV shows, if I’ve counted correctly: “Scrubs”, “Charmed”, “CSI”, on and on and on. If you’ve seen the film you’ll be delighted to notice when he comes out that his skin and teeth have cleared up very much. Welcome Lee Arenberg.
A shout from the audience: We like mayonnaise!
Lee Arenberg: The eyes were still yellow there.
Frank: Well this movie was I would say a fairly complicated thing to make. Let’s talk about Special Effects first and then we’ll move onto locations and then stories about it. Let’s talk about some of the Special Effects. I was particularly taken with all the pirates who are human beings one minute and rotting corpses the next, because I feel like that so often. Give us a little bit about how that magic was made.
Art Repola: Well the good news on having to make the pirates for the movie and the skeletons was that we had great actors that we modeled the skeleton pirates after. So we would shoot a scene with the real actors in there performing what they did. They’d come out, we’d shoot it empty and that would give us the guide to put in the CG generated skeletons.
Frank: So give us a little bit of background on how that’s done. We don’t want to ruin the effect of it totally…
Art: Some of the challenges were just the look of the pirates in different environments: the underwater look, the “in the moonlight” look, exteriors, interiors. And again the scenes were basically shot, lit on the ships with the real actors. And that was used as a guide to the animators to create and animate the skeletons. Typically if you animating a creature or something like that you don’t really have anything to follow. But the actors did such a great job of laying the blueprint for us that we had something to follow and make the magic that you just saw.
Well the good news on having to make the pirates for the movie and the skeletons was that we had great actors that we modeled the skeleton pirates after
Frank: Ted and Terry you guys wrote the script to begin with. It obviously was based on the ride, slightly. But the ride doesn’t have that much of a story, does it? So what kind of guidance did you have originally and what kind of experience was it to do a pirate movie when nobody’s done one for all this time?
Ted Elliott: Actually the interesting background on this movie is that we first pitched doing a movie based on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, with the supernatural angle, including the skeleton pirates in ’92, just after we finished working on Aladdin. And at that point Disney, different management (looking at Bruce), said: “no…no.” So 10 years later they finally caught up to our thinking. So we’d been thinking about this movie for a decade before we actually got a chance finally to write it.<!--page-->
Terry Rossio: Actually there were a number of times where…I mean it was really fun to integrate elements of the ride and there were a number of times where we’d be stuck [on] a story point, and be looking for some solution and we would go to the ride and…
Ted: Literally by the way.
Terry: You know go “Woo!” down the… And credit definitely has to go to Mark Davis for creating really a series of scenarios that we could draw from.
Ted: But I do object. There is actually is a story to the ride.
Frank: Well there is. But it’s not exactly the story of the movie.
Ted: It’s not exactly the story of the movie. But in fact there is the mutiny, there is the cursed treasure, (“you’ve seen the cursed treasure”) all of that. And all of that went into the thinking. What I think Terry and I brought actually to the project was the idea of: “well let’s not ignore the ride, let’s embrace it.”
Terry: I think the experience of seeing the movie is similar to the experience you have on the ride when you’re a kid for the first time. We couldn’t fit in that guy with the magnifying glass in bed, though. I’m upset about that. We couldn’t find a place for that.
Frank: And what about the dunking mayor, too?
Terry: They shot that. They shot the dunking mayor. Yeah, it just didn’t make the final cut.
Ted: Is it on the extras disc? Do they have that long shot of the square? [Answers of yes from the audience.] So there you go. There was a whole bunch of stuff there.
Bruce Hendricks: We had a bunch of Country Bears left over too but they didn’t want to use those either for some reason.
Frank: Some day the director’s cut of "Country Bears" is going to come out and you’ll be vindicated.
Terry: Well you know, "Country Bears" paved the way for…
Bruce: Actually it was "Rollercoaster the Movie" (1977) that kind of set the whole tempo for these.
Lee: That was a good movie.
Ted: Sensurrond Dude.
Lee: The Bomber.
Ted: Ok, we’re gonna stop having our conversation now. Geek alert!
Frank: Now what point of the process did the cast start coming together? Were you writing any of the script with specific people in mind?
Terry: The phrase I love is that “Johnny Depp is circling the project.”
Ted: “Shark like.”
Terry: So you’re writing it and your trying to go “Oh my god, if Johnny likes it he’ll do it.” But I just love that he’s “circling the project.”
Johnny Depp was wanted by all, from the start
Ted:
Terry: At the same time actually Lee Arenberg was circling as well.
Lee: I’m still circling.
Frank: Bruce, tell us a little about second unit. It was shot here in California as well as in the Caribbean. That must have cause a problem or two.
Bruce: Well there was matching issues. We cheated a little bit. Some of the water work was actually Long Beach Harbor. You never thought the water looked so clear. But between that and the movie magic we were able to blend St Vincent’s in the Grenadines, which is the southern portion of the Caribbean pretty successfully.
Frank: Do you remember any real problems? I mean shooting on water must be a nightmare in general.
Ted: Weren’t you just complaining about Gore and the ships, just back stage Bruce?
Bruce: At the end of every water movie you say “that will to be my last water movie.”
Terry: That started with Pearl Harbor?
Bruce: Yeah, we’d had wrecks and you know the boats would start taking on water. I remember one afternoon, very late, in fact it was nighttime we get a call that Kiera’s boat just crashed on a reef. I was able to get in touch with the captain and I think they were all falling over themselves to carry her ashore. It ended up ok because they had hit the reef in like about a foot of water. But that would go on all the time.
Terry: I will always remember fondly the Porta-potties at the back of the “Black Pearl?” I hate to destroy the magic.
Bruce: We gave them out as crew gifts at the end of the movie. The end of the ship…we didn’t have enough money, so we decided: “Well we’ll only build ¾’s of a ship,” and we left blue porta-potties at the end of the ship.
Ted: That spoiled the illusion.<!--page-->
Frank: Boy those would go for a fortune on EBay, wouldn’t they? Lee this was kind of a throw back role to the days when Hollywood had those great character parts. So you got to be Walter Brennan for this.
Lee: I say this, any time an actor looks good, and this is not to schmooze it up, it comes down to good writing.
Ted: Lee, you’re in the next movie.
Lee: Really, I think that was half the battle for us. The writer’s intention was that the supporting players are going to carry the ball, carry some of the storyline. I know it’s exciting in any movie when you do get to do any scenes. But in Pirates they would come to us with new scenes for Pintel and Ragetti. “We need some exposition and you guys are perfect.”
Ted: “Hey we need some exposition. Johnny won’t do it…” “We’ll do it!”
Lee: We’ll do everything.
Ted: “So, are we on camera?’ “Oh yeah.”
Lee: We definitely had a great experience in terms of all the production values that were put in the movie. You definitely felt [it] when you saw the warehouse were everything was being put together when you saw carriages and hundreds of cannons. You get, as an actor to build your character.
They’ll have hundreds of costume pieces. They sort look at you physically and they sort of match what you look like. It’s just fun to create a character that way. I think it’s very inspirational for an actor, especially when you’re a character man to be really treated like you’re important to the story. When you get that kind of encouragement you’ll do anything for the team.
Ted: What we tried to do when writing the screenplay we were looking and say “ok, what is missing from modern movies?” One of the things that’s missing is the studio system where you’d have all of these really great character actors under contract and they’d be there. One of the ways they’d use them is if they had a scene that was kind of just laying there like a log, they’d say “hey we’ve got this great guy who does bizarre pirate characters. We’ll throw him in and let him carry some of the scene.”
That’s why those movies were so entertaining. So when we were working on the movie we’d imagine to ourselves that we had all these character actors under contract to use. Like Murtogg and Mullroy, in our minds this was like a second string vaudeville, or a sort of Ritz Brother basement version of Laurel and Hardy that happened to be under contract.
The little thing they do about the Black Pearl we imagined was just a variation of the one famous comedy routine they had. It made it a lot easier to write and then when they went on to cast it they got these incredibly great actors who filled those roles and who just ran with them.
Lee: I always say I was really lucky they couldn’t find short, bald and crazy eyed in London.
Terry: All the other pirates were skinny and gaunt.
Lee: I had a license to eat.
Frank: Lee talk about your make up because you really looked disgusting in that movie. I mean the teeth are just green and dripping, the eyes are yellow…
Lee: It was two hours in the make-up chair. It would start with latex around the eyes. That led to a lot of painting and then they would glue the hair on and glue the beard on. And I’ll tell you something it was a great preparation time for me, every day, to sit in that chair and have this artwork kinda happen on my body. When you’re done, they throw the contacts in, pop the teeth in and “Hello popette!”
It took a lot of work to make those pirates look so ugly!
Frank: And you were saying to me earlier about your relationship with Mackenzie, that you sort of came up with a back story.
Ted: Gay!
Lee: Well the one that works for us…(looking pointedly at Ted). My thing was that pirates they tend to work as a team but for the most part they’re solo players and they’re always looking out for themselves. Here are these two characters that are very much in a symbiotic relationship. So I figured maybe I was his uncle or something.
Ted: Gay!
Lee: He’s the young nephew and his mom is my sister. Whatever works…<!--page-->
Frank: Let’s get some dirt on some of the other actors. Since Johnny is not here tonight… Somebody tell me about working with him. He looks like he was a real pain.
No response, laughter from the audience.
Frank: You thought I was joking didn’t you?
Ted: It’s get a little dicey on location from any time. Actually he’s great. It was absolutely a terrific experience.
Bruce: No, he was fantastic. One interesting thing, an unnamed person from the studio called me the first day of dailies and said:”Are you guys drinking at lunch?” They just had not seen any of the screen test. And the first time out it was: “wow, this is going to be a fun ride!”
Ted: It really was one of those moments where they hire Johnny Depp and they say: “Hey, he’s got the cheek bones, he’s a great actor, he’ll be a terrific pirate.” And then he shows up. He helps build and create that make-up and that character. There was some concern but it only lasted a week until they some pieces actually cut together. And from that point forth, the studio completely supported the performance. So there was that icky period where they were going “what is this?” But once they saw how it actually worked and Johnny basically said “look this is what you hired me to do, you either trust me or you don’t” they trusted him. Well done.
Frank: Now most people know who he based the character partially on…
Ted: Bruce!
Frank: Most people don’t know that.
Bruce: Me and Keith Richards. No I think it was Keith Richard and Pepé Le Pew.
Frank: Now is there any truth to the rumors that Keith Richards is going to be the next film?
Bruce: None.
Frank: What about Pepé Le Pew?
Bruce: Would people like to see Keith Richards in the movie?
Audience cheers.
Terry: Now you haven’t asked about the third movie, though. But anyway…
Ted: Oh and just so everybody knows the subtitle for the second movie is Dead Man’s Chest not Treasure of the Lost Abyss . All right, tell your friends.
Terry: Now we have to kill them all.
Frank: You’re doing something that might be considered slightly risky and that’s shooting both sequels at the same time or at least all in one foul swoop. This can’t cause you any problems, can it?
Bruce: Oh no. No, because two water movies back to back…no.
Terry: But the fanbase is so strong and supportive of these films that there’s no risk what-so-ever.
Frank: We’re not talking commercial risk, but the risk of going insane actually making this.
Terry: You bring up a good point because one of the things that Ted described was one of the advantages of the first movie was…go ahead it’s your line.
Ted: Basically low expectations and the element of surprise. It worked in our favor in a big way.
Terry: And of course now expectations couldn’t be higher and that makes us all…
Ted: That’s a Charlie Brown line: There’s no greater burden than potential.
Terry: So that’s made us all work very, very hard in a very frightened manner.
Frank: Your watch words should just be “how bad can it be?”
Filming for "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest" is slated to begin in February, 2005.
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