Most people forget, the massive worldwide success of 2003's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was not expected. When the film was in pre-production, Disney executives tried to shut the movie down. During production, the studio was extremely concerned about Johnny Depp's portrayal of Jack Sparrow and the unique choices Depp was making for the character, let alone the fact that he wasn't Disney's first choice to lead a potential franchise. As if that wasn't enough, Cutthroat Island, the last pirate-themed movie released before The Curse of the Black Pearl, was a very public failure at the box office. So when Pirates of the Caribbean went on to become the fourth highest-grossing film of 2003 and was nominated for and won numerous awards thanks to Gore Verbinski's ambitious direction, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio's swashbuckling script, and Depp's iconic performance, Disney breathed a sigh of relief. And immediately wanted more.

In fact, because Pirates was such a huge success, the studio wanted two sequels and they wanted them immediately. Which was a problem given that there was no story or script in place.

Recently, I was able to conduct an extended, exlusive interview with director Gore Verbinski for the 10th Anniversary of his brilliant animated film Rango. While I’ve got some great stuff to share about how he made that film and the unusual way the movie came to life, for now I wanted to share our conversation about his Pirates trilogy.

For those unaware, Verbinski directed Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man's Chest, and At World's End. And the way he describes it, the 2nd and 3rd Pirates movies — which were shot back-to-back as part of a massive production — were challenging to say the least. Not only were the films chasing release dates before a frame of footage had been shot, but so many things went wrong making At World's End that Verbinski only had ten weeks for post-production on his final Pirates film. For context, some movies spend over a year in post-production, especially when they have a lot of VFX shots.

But the crazy part about all this is… all three movies are really good. Sure the third movie is a bit long, but all of Verbinski’s Pirates movies are fun, are shot well, and have some incredible VFX that still holds up today. And I haven’t even mentioned the action set pieces, which are all staged to maximize visual storytelling.

Pirates of the Caribbean Gore Verbinski johnny depp

Anyway, if you’re a fan of Gore Verbinski’s Pirates movies and want to hear some fascinating behind-the-scenes stories about how the sequels were made, you’re in the right place. He talks about what it was like trying to finish the last movie with not enough time, why they shot the two sequels back-to-back, why they shot the ending of the trilogy on the first few days of filming even though they didn’t have a script for Pirates 3 yet, how they figured out the storylines, all the challenges they ran into making At World's End, why the visual effects still look good today, what it was like working with the studio, and more.

Check out what he had to say below and look for more with Verbinski soon.

COLLIDER: Do you have longer cuts of the three Pirates movies that you'd be happy for people to see?

GORE VERBINSKI: No, I'm feeling I pretty much got the director's cut. Any fight we had over anything was very nominal. I'm very happy with the cut of those movies. I would say that Pirates 1 had an energy to it, which was essentially, ‘you're crazy’. I remember pitching it to [Hans] Zimmer and he said, ‘You're mad! You're making a pirate movie? Nobody's going to see a pirate movie.’ It was resoundingly, ‘that's the worst idea ever.’ And there was something exciting about that. It was so doomed to fail. You’re setting out to go make a genre that literally doesn't work, or there's so much historical proof that it will not work.

So, you're making everybody nervous. The studio’s nervous. Everybody's nervous about Johnny Depp's performance. Everybody's nervous about the story. It's convoluted — they’re returning the treasure, wait they've taken the treasure back, they're cursed? Everything about that had a spirit of madness to it. Then, after it was successful, Pirates 2 and 3 start to fall into the ‘release date-driven experience’. There’s a calendar and dates and “we need two more of these babies. How soon can you do it?” So you don't have scripts and you're making a movie to a release date. That creates an energy, but the hardest part was now they're not nervous.

Other than make the date, nobody's nervous about what you're doing. So, I would have these conversations that would be, “we need to get back to not knowing”. This whole sense of, ‘Oh yeah, well, the audience liked that. Let's give them more of that. And they liked this and do that again. You need another big action set piece here.’ And then, it’s almost creating your own tropes to follow. I’m not criticizing any executive... It's just a practical force. That comes at you from the preceding success.

So, when you asked me if there's a different cut, I think just pulling it off, while trying to maintain that original madness, was enough. I'm definitely proud of the second one. I feel like that one has a little bit more… it's got a similar spirit. And it's shy of being bloated, and maybe the third one got a little bit, okay, wow. Now where do you go? You have to go even bigger.

I think, trying to wrap up that many fractal narratives and give everybody a conclusion, Norrington's going to have to have his due, etc.. the thing just grows. That's what they do. They just go, ‘Well, the audiences love this guy, got to pay that guy off, and these guys have to return, and those guys have to show.’ Then you just start going, ‘Oh my God, I can't sustain this, I need to blow it up. I need to go blow it all up. To really end it. ’ So, I tried to make the third one saying, ‘There shouldn't be any more.’… I was like, okay, no more, done, three and out.

Pirates of the Caribbean Gore Verbinski johnny depp

I've watched your three Pirate movies in the past few days and the first one's my favorite, second one is way better than people give it credit for, third one's a little long. The third one is not as tight as the first two.

VERBINSKI: Totally agree. The fundamental forces of the last one left us at the buzzer. We only had 10 weeks to post it.

I heard a story about you in post-production on that movie where you were basically just a shell of yourself.

VERBINSKI: Oh yeah, no, I was 30 pounds overweight. Literally, there's no sleep. Zero. I remember Dick Cook going, ‘Are we going to make the date? Can you make the date? Can you make the date?’ And it was mixing and color timing and editing and visual effects flying, the usual, but you've come crashing into an impossible post schedule exhausted because you have been approving visual effects and spending nights cutting all while you were still shooting. We got hit by a hurricane, half the set got wiped out. Our tank didn't work. We had to pull stuff back to LA. It was pure survival mode by the time we got to the third one.

You shot the second and third ones back-to-back. How much did you regret doing that? Was it something you just had to do because of the release dates?

VERBINSKI: It’s release date filmmaking. So, they wanted two more as soon as possible. There's a hypothetical amortization in that process. While you're here in this location, shoot that scene from Pirates 3 before you strike the set. It's just in reality,.. , this is story telling not construction. And we were still making blueprints ya know? We shot the end of Pirates 3 five days into shooting Pirates 2, because we were leaving that location. We're never going back to Port Royale. We're moving onto a different Island. We had to go up to the Exuma, shoot our tank. We had to go to Dominica. We weren't going back to St. Vincent. So, we came to St. Vincent, just shot a few days. And there's one scene that had to be shot for the very end of Pirates 3 five days into 2, not knowing what the script of Pirates 3 was yet. But look, people are making those movies. What are they doing right now? They're doing two Mission: Impossible movies right now. It’s a different beast. You just embrace the chaos and figure it out.

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I think that a lot of people that are not in the industry or don't understand how movie making works, don't really understand how much of a marathon it is to make one movie on that scale. Let alone every director I talked to says at the end of the shoot, they collapse for a week, like they can't move.

VERBINSKI: Oh, yeah. That definitely put years on my life and it is... I don't want to say it's its own genre. Basically, it was a studio saying we need these things for fourth quarter earnings or for whatever, all this board of directors pressure that was never there before. “What do we have for 2006, 2007?”. We're going to make two more of these. That's what happens somewhere upstairs because you have a success. It’s inevitable. I mean they start redesigning the theme park ride.

Prior to that we're coming to you with a script, we've worked on this for four years, it's perfect. Write us a check, we want to make this movie, right? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, maybe a yes. Good, you go make that movie. If it's a success, we need two more. It's like why bands' first records are so good and their second and third record... They had to write all the songs while on tour for their first success, and then it's a time factor. And as fan you're thinking, ‘Oh, and now they put those songs on the second record that maybe weren't good enough for the first.’ But they had 10 years as a local band to write the first record, and they got one year to make the second and one year to make the third.

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Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

So with the second and third movies, how much was changing on the fly on set with the scripts? How much had you figured out?

VERBINSKI: So on Pirates 2 and Pirates 3, knowing what we were in for, Ted [Elliott] and Terry [Rossio] had offices next to mine at Disney, and then I needed two other offices that were just what I would call ‘story rooms’ because we were scouting... People were putting together budgets and there was no script, so we would do cards. I would sort of string band-aids, cards, location photos, drawings, artwork, kind of a much more rushed stage of... I do this process on any movie, frankly, but you usually do it prior to getting the greenlight. We were greenlit and then hammers and nails are flying, people are on payroll, they're building stuff.

So Pirates 2 was a room, I could walk it and talk it and walk the entire shape of the movie. And Pirates 3 was a room and I could walk and describe what theoretically will happen: who is betraying who... When do we meet Davy Jones, at the end of this movie, the Kraken takes Jack... Now, next movie, they're trying to get here. We go to the underworld, how do they go back to Jack? They go off the edge of the world. Third act's going to be the whirlpool sequence. What are we doing with Norrington? Where are we getting Jack back into the narrative? How are we weaving the story? Can we get out of the Caribbean? Can we go east? We got the East India Trading Company. Can we go to Asia? Can we have an Asian influence? Let's start to look at Chow Yun-fat, he would be great. Can we start to pay off the leftover scraps from Pirates 1 that were unexplained, the P tattoo burned on Jacks his hand, Who did that? and who is Bootstrap Bill?’ We begin moving forward while reverse engineering a trilogy.

Immediately we go, ‘Well, Bootstrap Bill, we never met him in Pirates 1. [That’s an] opportunity.’ So it would just be this card on the wall, ‘Bootstrap Bill, where are we putting him?’ It floats around the room on a pin for a while, ‘What do we do with Bootstrap Bill? So, Will's father, Jack knew him, okay, we've got the father story with the pirate in it – denial. Themes begin to accrue. And you just start walk that room every day and you ask dramaturgical questions, and then you get hit with a thousand questions. The line producers come in and ask, ‘Well, how many days do you think you're going to need on Island Four?’ And then with Ted and Terry I'm like, ‘When we write this scene, it feels like two and a half pages, three,’ and they're like, ‘Yeah, maybe three,’ and I was like, ‘Okay, so I need a day and a half for the dialogue because we are on water.’ Let’ s combine that with this scene and call it two days. Then it's always the one-eighth page that kills you, right? ( Rome burns) I mean they literally left me with, in the script, ‘The greatest three-way sword fight ever filmed,’ that was what it said.

It was nine days of shooting for one-eighth page because.. that had to be a where all things converge. So I just start to board that and then we'll put the boards on the wall.. and eventually parts that require dialogue make it back into the script. So all of that stuff is literally string band-aids and post-it notes, and it's a room and you open the door, you go to the left and you say, ‘Opening scene in the rain, the wedding that didn't happen. Then you go dot to dot to dot, and you start making your way and go to find Jack, Cannibal Island.’ I could walk the basics of both stories so we knew, ‘Okay, this is the fundamental three-act structure of both stories, none of the details in. Now we start putting detail in it as we're in production.’

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Image via Disney

You step on set for Pirates 2 on day one, how much of the script of 2 and 3 had actually been figured out? And how much is it each night, Ted and Terry and you are looking at the next day and being like, "What the hell are they going to say?"

VERBINSKI: You can usually prep maximum 60 to 80 days of a movie. We were in pretty good shape on Pirates 2 script-wise. We had it 80% there, But Pirates 3 was just cards that became an outline..and no pages, zero pages. So we actually had to write night after night after night, we're leaving this location, we have to write the final scene. I was mentioning we had to shoot Jack's last scene in Pirates 3 on the third or fourth day of filming 2 without a script for Pirates 3. That scene [with Jack’s compass pointing towards the Fountain of Youth] was shot Day Four while we're shooting Pirates 2 because we're never coming back to that location.

So just to be clear, you go to set day one shooting Dead Man’s Chest but you're shooting back to back. So Pirates 2, you're basically there, Pirates 3, everything you're filming during the production of Pirates 2, nothing is basically written, you're writing it on the fly?

VERBINSKI: Knowing you can't afford to come back to this location. So it’s, "We're leaving this location, is there anything from Pirates 3 we're going to need?" And so you go to the outline of the movie and, ‘Yes, the outline we've been working on says we're probably going to want this scene between these two people here,’ and then you'd go, ‘Okay, well fuck, we better write it.’ And so those were the ones that were written the night before, two nights before. And then there's the production aspect of things. You talk to any director who shoots a hundred days, right? You're really prepping the first 60 and then you're prepping as you're shooting the remaining 40. Otherwise you'll never start shooting. You're just prepping forever. It's an equation. It's a fiscal reality equation. You can only prep about 60 days of a movie or you've spent so much money on prep, you can't afford to make the movie. There's a conflict there. When you get into movies that are 100 days of shooting, the last 40 are prepped while you're shooting. So then when you get into 300 days of shooting, which is two movies back-to-back, you just start to gallop. The crew is like, ‘What are we doing today? We're going out to sea again, pack your fucking lunches. Wet sandwiches, people are puking, we're taking the boat out, we're shooting four pages out to sea on the Pearl.’ That Crew was simply the best in the business.

How many hiatuses did you take during those 300 days?

VERBINSKI: We weren't supposed to have a hiatus. We had delays on a tank that wasn't built in The Exumas. It simply wasn't ready. When we showed up on time on schedule to film in the tank, the tank was still under construction. So that was a big problem. We had to adjust there and take a short hiatus which we said, ‘Fine, we have very little editing. I can start cutting,’ so I went back to cut and we came back, the tank still didn't work, wasn't finished. So we said, ‘Okay, well, we're just going to go out. We're going to just anchor. We're just going to do it without a tank.’ So we just put our boats out at the end of piers and we just created an anchor array in the Caribbean and we just shot without the tank.

We had to change the entire shooting methodology, and then that delay pushed us into hurricane season. Then we got hit with an actual hurricane, we lost a lot of sets. So that created a second hiatus, which is why the third film only had 10 weeks left to edit to still make the date. So the entire post-production on the third film was 10 weeks.

Pirates of the Caribbean behind the scenes filming

At what point in the post-production of the third movie, did you ever say to the studio, we really might not make this date?

VERBINSKI: It was not an option.

Basically the studio was going to spend whatever money they had to spend to make that date?

VERBINSKI: The date was that most important thing. Also, the longer it goes, the more you're spending. At some point, the date also said, "You guys are done."

One of the things that I took away from rewatching the three Pirates movies that you did is how much the VFX have held up even with modern VFX. The Davy Jones stuff is fantastic. The underwater shot when all the pirates are walking to the ship in the first movie, with the moon, that shot is great. There's some really great VFX on these movies, even though you were so rushed on that third one, it still looks great. Can you talk about pulling it off?

VERBINSKI; Well, in truth, all visual effects have a sort of expiration date. They begin to wilt from the day of creation because.. the technology is always getting better. But thank you. I think photographic reference is important. Never leaving a set without something being photographed that you can use. A lot of it is, (skipping the performance for a second), a lot of it is trying to frame a shot where the things you're... You're not giving the computer too many options. In other words, you have to match, right? So if I'm going to make this bottle of water dance on the table and it's going to be CG water, I'm going to take a bottle of water and put it on the table and I'm going to shoot it. And I'm going to say it doesn't look right until it matches this. Look at the highlight, look at the kick, look at the subsurface scattering, look at these caustics created by the water hitting the cap. And so I have something where I can study it. So we had a Davy Jones head that we would bring in, walk into every frame. Also we would be out at sea, we'd have real backgrounds, we'd have real sun, right?

Don't try to replicate the sun on stage. There's things you learn, like to bake in something true and photographic and then you can rely on ILM, they're so good at matching. That attention to detail goes back to the first Star Wars and they're the best at matching live-action photography. That was one of the big challenges on Rango, we had no actual photography, right? So you're matching what we remember as photography,.. what we feel from doing this before...that's why it was very important to have the same team on Rango that was on Davy Jones.

I mean they're just endless conversations about every detail, in particular Davy Jones, how the light penetrates his skin. When you look at some of the daylight shots of him and that little valve, that exhaust valve that's on the side of his head and as it expands, and where the smoke comes out of it. In the sunlight, it's like the back of your ear when it gets hit by sun, it turns red, right? It's actually taking light through it, right? I geek out on that stuff endlessly.

Pirates of the Caribbean davy jones vfx

What was one of the reasons the Kraken ends up dead on the island besides it being a good story point?

VERBINSKI: It was always about the monsters are dying. This world is ending. Progress has come and myths are no longer relevant in this new world order. That was its fundamental narrative function at that point. It's a sad time for Barbossa and Jack to stop and look at that thing and realize that's who they are right now. They're dinosaurs in this world.

Did you ever watch the other Pirates movies that you didn't direct?

VERBINSKI: I haven't gotten around to it, to be honest with you. I have not felt any drive. I suppose if they were on TV and I saw one, I would watch it, but I'm very busy working on what's in front of me… I’m sure I will at some point.

Look for more with Gore Verbinski soon.

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