Title: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Publication: Entertainment Weekly
Issue: January 2011
DOES ANYONE LOVE the egomaniacal pirate Capt. Jack Sparrow much as, well, the egomaniacal pirate Capt. Jack Sparrow? Maybe not. But on person he comes close is Johnny Depp, who’s now played that seafaring scalawag in four Pirates of the Caribbean movies, including On Stranger Tides (out May 20). “I’m never tired of the character,” he says. “I don’t look forward to the day when I have to say good bye to him.”
Captain Jack’s latest adventure was born during the back-to-back productions of the franchise’s second and third films, 2006’s Dead Man’s Chest and 2007’s At World’s End. Writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio persuaded series superproducer Jerry Bruckheimer to option Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides, a 1987 novel that featured both the dreaded pirate Blackbeard and the fountain of youth. Once the rights were secured, Elliott and Rossio set the stage for the new installment by writing a concluding scene for At World’s End in which Sparrow is seen heading off in search of the fountain in question.
Given the combined $2 billion worldwide gross of Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End, Disney was happy to bankroll a fourth excursion. On Sept. 11, 2009, Depp appeared on stage dressed as Captain Jack at a Disney fan event in Anaheim to hype the announcement. He also embraced Disney’s then chairman, Dick Cook, who’d famously backed Depp’s idiosyncratic decision to base his character on Keith Richards. But just one week after the Anaheim event, Cook abruptly departed Disney—and plans for Pirates 4 seemed to founder: Depp told a reporter at the time that he felt “a fissure, a crack in my enthusiasm at the moment” for another Pirates movie. “Things became a little creaky after Dick Cook left” the actor admits now. “He had been very supportive of me on the first movie when a lot of people at Disney were concerned? However Depp also says he had issues with the nascent Pirates 4 script. “Things got very mathematical, very subplotty on the last movie because there were a lot of things that needed to be resolved with the characters,” he says. “I wanted to make a film that was more like the first one, that was more character driven.”
To help whip the yarn into shape, Depp attended a series of meetings in L.A. with the core Pirates team, including director Rob Marshall, who stepped in after Gore Verbinski left the series. “Johnny was instrumental in the design of the story” says Rossio. “l think an arbitration committee might give him a ‘story by’ credit if he was willing to submit it.”
Depp’s wish for a sleeker Pirates 4 dovetailed with the desire for a cheaper one on the part of Disney’s new regime, led by Chairman Rich Ross. Bruckheimer says On Stranger Tides’ budget is “a little bit smaller” than that of At Worlds End—which reportedly cost $300 million, thanks in part to its 165-minute running time. “The most important thing for the studio and for us [was] to have a script that wasn’t too long,” he says. “That’s where the money comes.” Film makers also saved a few doubloons with the departures of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley whose story lines were resolved in At Worlds End.
On Stranger Tides introduces a slew of fresh characters, including Blackbeard (lan McShane); his feisty daughter, Angelica (Penelope Cruz); and a young missionary played by newcomer Sam Claflin. Angelica, it seems, is no stranger to Captain Jack. “You get the sense that there‘s most definitely something from the past, something that they’ve been through together,” Depp says cagily. “It’s a hate—love relationship.”
With all the elements in place, production began last spring in Hawaii—where the elements themselves became an obstacle. On the first day of principal photography the cast and crew had to take a precarious journey from a boat to an island via Jet Skis. “It was a rough sea and there was no dock,” recalls Bruckheimer: “It was pretty challenging.” A potentially more worrisome issue: the expanding shape of Cruz, who’s expecting her first child with husband Javier Bardem. Even so, Depp says, the actress was entirely gung ho: “It was funny to see a pregnant woman f—ing sword—fighting.”
The Pirates crew is betting that new characters and a zippier plot will help the fourth adventure combat the franchise fatigue that has hurt other series. Another attraction? It’s in 3-D. “When I wanted to do Sorcerer’s Apprentice in 3D, [Disney] said no,” says Bruckheimer. “Prnice of Persia, they said no. Alice in Wonderland and Avatar changed everybody’s mind. But we’ll be the first picture of this size out that is shot in 3-D on location. Avatar was on a sound studio.”
Now that Pirates 4 is in the can, Depp admits he would be happy to buckle some more swash. ‘As long as we can put all the puzzle pieces together; I would most definitely consider it,” he says. “I always feel that with Captain Jack, you can chuck him into any situation and have a ball with it.”
