www.stuff.co.nz recently interviewed the director, Gore Verbinski, of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest Fame, about the second instalment of his pirates adventure trilogy. Here’s a short excerpt…
Does Johnny Depp stay in character on set?
GORE: 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’.
