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Depp Blue Sea

The 19th most powerful man in movies is, naturally, making a call. “I’ll be with you now, Nick”, says Jerry Bruckheimer, polite enough – or player enough – to have noted and deployed my name within a minute of our meeting. “I just need to see how the film did last night …”.

He plucks a mobile from his pocket, taps a number and smiles as he waits for the connection. “Chuck, this is Jerry. How did we do?” The room prickles. There is the palpable electric hum of Hollywood. “Fantastic … Jesus … Fabulous.” Bruckheimer resumes eye contact, holding my gaze as he listens to the voice in America. He has the unmistakable delight of a man with a taste for zeroes. I do my best to bond with him, but I seem to have mislaid my inner film mogul. I’m not even sure I have my taxi fare.

“Good news,” he says, completing the call. “Seven and a half million!”

Somewhere, in some unfathomable ocean depth, an ancient curse is lifted. No wonder Bruckheimer is smiling. Best known for producing such hi-octane, crowd pleasing fare as Pearl Harbor, Armageddon and Con Air, he has just sailed into stranger waters with this summer’s POTC. It’s a movie haunted by the barnacled ghosts of Cutthroat Island, Yellowbeard and Roman Polanski’s Pirates, extravagant shipwrecks whose box office failure enshrined an unwritten Hollywood law – pirate movies are Death. Beware pirates.

“We took a different approach,” says Bruckheimer, with no fear of the skull and crossbones. “We took a humorous, supernatural approach, which really took the curse off it. I knew that I wanted to do something different. I love taking pictures that are genre pictures and turning them on their head. And that’s what we do with the pirate movie.

Disney gave my a script that they’d developed, and it was a good script, but I just wouldn’t go and see the movie. Then we brought in Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who wrote The Mask Of Zorro, and they came up with the idea of pirates turning into skeletons in the moonlight. Then I got excited. Then I thought, ‘This I’d go see’.”

Defying the curse was only one of Bruckheimer’s battles. POTC has the cultural stigma of adapting not a novel or a memoir or even a comic book, but a theme park ride. For over 35 years, this enduring Disneyland icon has flung tourists into a world of animatronic buccaneers and family-friendly rape and pillage. This was a Bruckheimer film? The sight of Nic Cage, Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck riding Fantasyland’s Flying Teacups would be no less bizarre.

Bruckheimer entrusted the project to Gore Verbinski, the man who recently remade Eastern horror classic The Ring for Stateside audiences.

“He’s a really gifted director,” enthuses Bruckheimer. “He can scare you, with The Ring, and then he can make you laugh, like Mousehunt. And he’s a great visual stylist. He’s perfect for this picture.”

Verbinski is also in London to promote POTC. Softly spoken, he seems a quieter personality than the affable but ever “on” Bruckheimer. He doesn’t make a call. Once a guitarist in a punk band The Daredevils, Verbinski originally carved a name for himself in advertising as the creator of the Budweiser frogs. Now he’s at the command of an estimated $125m summer blockbuster. Daunting.

“It’s hard enough to have the physical obligation of directing a summer movie,” says Verbinski, “but then to also have an obligation to try and resurrect a dead genre is a lot on your shoulders. You just try to make it all go away. You have to ignore it and focus on the story you’re telling.”

“Gore became a real student of pirate movies,” says Bruckheimer. “He watched every one of them – Cutthroat Island, Captain Blood, Treasure Island, you name it. He had a sense of what he could do and what he wanted to do and what he wanted to stay away from.”

“I’m just a fan of all those movies,” says Verbinski. “The old ones are so great. The other ones are good – I don’t know what when wrong. There are bad movies that are huge hits all the time, and great movies that nobody ever sees. I couldn’t look at the more contemporary pirate movies and get any great lesson. It wasn’t a case of, ‘Oh, they were just missing these three ingredients! If we put those in, we’re good to go!’ It didn’t work that way.”

Verbinski had his own reservations when first approached. “I heard a lot of people say, ‘Oh, POTC, based on a ride, doesn’t have a story, they’re just using the title … ‘. I think it made a lot of people cringe, including myself, because you do worry that you’re making a two hour advertisement for a theme park. At some point you have to do, ‘What do we have? How do we ensure that we don’t fail?’ And the supernatural element, obviously, is a kicker, a fuel injection for the Bruckheimer brand and all of those expectations.”

The film-makers knew that the Disney stamp itself could play against them in the fiercely-contested summer screen war. If Mickey Mouse gave them no cool kudos, perhaps the most brilliantly unpredictable actor of his generation could. “That’s why I hired Johnny Depp,” admits Bruckheimer. “That says, ‘Wait a second, this is not for your three year old brother or sister’. Johnny Depp doesn’t do movies like that. He does movies like Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow.”

“At the end of the day, you can blow up a thousand ships and have a million skeletons waving cutlasses,” says Verbinski, “but the real pleasure is to see an audience respond to Johnny, in a scene that I could shoot with the lights I could carry in the back of a station wagon. You can have a huge scale, but it’s meaningless if you don’t have characters you want to watch.”

And Depp is hypnotic. As mincing, Kohl-smeared brigand Captain Jack Sparrow, he confesses to blending raddled rock libertine Keith Richards with amorous toon skunk Pepe Le Pew. It’s a performance that sways on a knife-edge between brilliance and burlesque, showmanship and sheer, hands-over-eyes embarrassment.

“Yes, and that’s exactly where you want to be!” laughs Verbinski. “If you’re going to fail, fail big, that’s my theory.”

“You know,” says Bruckheimer, “initially some of the executives at Disney had heart attacks when they saw what he was doing. But what I liked about it was that it never broke the reality of the picture. If everybody acted like that then I would have said, ‘Oh, we’ve got a problem,’ but the fact is that everyone else was straight and just played off him. Johnny was the foil. You never knew what he was going to come up with, which I liked. I had faith in Gore. And I had faith in Johnny as an artist. So I felt that the combination was going to work. I knew that Gore was smart enough to take that performance and tone it down or amp it up where it needed to be.”

“The truth is,” says Verbinski, “the movie can support his performance, because Orlando Bloom is doing the Errol Flynn thing. Johnny isn’t burdened with the leading man love story. He gets to meander through this movie and affect the lives of everyone around him, and what’s great about his character is that at any moment you can stop and say, ‘What does the character want?’ He just wants his ship back. And as absurd as that performance is, whenever the Black Pearl is an issue, he plays it pretty straight. That’s what lets you ride on the razor’s edge. The character is not winking at this movie. The film is not winking at itself.”

As heroic blacksmith Will Turner, Lord of the Rings lust-elf Orlando Bloom acts as straight man to Depp’s fabulous freakishness. “I kept having to remind Orland that he wasn’t cool yet,” laughs Verbinski. “His character hadn’t completed his arc yet; he hadn’t found out who his father was. So I had to say to him, ‘Listen, you’re still a dork!’ And he’d go ….” Verbinski gives a priceless impression of a fiercely focused Bloom – “ ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah! Right! I’m still a dork! Got it!’ But then Johnny’s around and he wants to be cool like Johnny! That’s actually part of Will’s story, becoming a pirate, but for most of this movie he’s not a pirate, he’s a blacksmith. So I really wanted him to be rigid, to really contrast with Johnny when the two of them are together.”

As Verbinski revelas, the presence of Depp acted as a thesp magnet. “As soon as Johnny came on, everyone looked at it a little differently. Johnny brings a credibility, and other actors started to go ‘Well, wait a minute, maybe I will read the script and take this offer seriously’.”

The Depp Effect found Oscar-winning Geoffrey Rush onboard as Sparrow’s Inca-cursed nemesis, the villainous Captain Barbossa. “I sent him a letter trying to convince him to do the movie, and I told him he was my third choice,” smiles Verbinski. “I said, ‘My first choice is Alec Guinness and my second choice is Peter Sellers, but sadly they’re unavailable – would you please do this movie?’ There are so few actors who can celebrate villainy. Most actors, big name actors, would take that part as a paycheque and not take it seriously, or not know how to have fun with it. It’s a Wicked Witch of the North kind of role. Geoffrey is able to be completely over the top and yet he’s suffering, because he has this curse. He can’t eat or enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. And he plays that really well, but he’s really the only other actor I allowed to go that far in terms of performance. He has to compete with Johnny, ultimately. They’re opposing forces. They have to hold the stage.”

While Rush consciously echoes Long John Silver, Verbinski knows that there’s a fine line between archetype and cliché. “We’re so steeped in the language of pirate movies. You have to be able to celebrate the cliché a little bit. One day I found myself shooting the walking the plank scene, and I just thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m shooting a walking the plank scene. What the Hell am I doing?’ I think that there’s a difference between employing a stereotype and thinking that you’re doing something unique versus employing it and knowing it’s a cliché – but you’re doing it anyway, and somehow you’re going to have fun.

It’s like when I was making The Ring, I was like, ‘We’re doing the shot of the doorknob turning! I can’t believe it! Couldn’t you think of something a little more original?’ I felt embarrassed because it’s in a thousand other people’s movies. You just have to approach it tonally. It’s like using a vowel, and you’re constructing a sentence. They’re there, and you can use them depending on what plays around them, and how you juxtapose them.”

“This is a ghost story!” declares one of the characters in POTC, but it’s a very different ghost story from The Ring, the film that found Verbinski conducting what he calls an ‘experiment’ on his audience. It’s an interesting seque from intense, psychological scare tactics to Satuday matinee chills.

“Every movie’s different,” he says. “I really enjoyed the original version of The Ring, so it was really just an opportunity to study the effects of sound, to learn how to manipulate an audience, how to prey upon them. But this is just entertainment, pure and simple. The subtext of this movie is non-existent. I don’t see this film as high art; I just see it as the kind of film I would have loved to have seen when I was nine years old and imagined myself as a pirate.

The Ring was all about a very small cast and a very small crew. No one knew we were making the movie, and you could afford to think about what you were putting on the screen. There was time. This was just mayhem.”

And pricey, high stakes mayhem. Verbinski not only had to deliver a summer hit from an extinct genre, but also had to marshall a film-making source of over 400 on location in the blue waters of the Caribbean. The sets were spread over some 36 miles of open sea. “I remember coming around a corner and seeing helicopters dropping in the catering truck,” he laughs. “It was only daunting because nothing went well! It looks like, ‘Oh, it’s a big budget movie, the logistics must be great’ – but no, the crew haven’t had lunch, it’s four hours late and the sandwiches are soggy! How come it can’t get done right? We have helicopters! It was just insane. And shooting on the water is exactly what they say it is: difficult. Nothing stays where you put it. It’s frustrating, but there’s an odd energy in that, and you just have to go with it. It’s a kick.

The real obligation is the brand, the Jerry Bruckheimer brand and all those audience expectations. I know that I have to deliver the goods. I have to have the action and the ships blowing up and all of that wow and pizzazz. That’s what the audience is going to expect, and if I don’t deliver that then they’re going to hate me. I’m not going to survive.”

The Bruckheimer brand. It’s one of the most defined cinematic signatures in Hollywood. “I’m about big entertainment,” agrees Bruckheimer. “I have no burning ambition to do Waiting for Godot with two guys and a white set.”

POTC may fly a stranger flag than his usual fare, but at heart it’s pure Bruckheimer. And it’s not about the zeroes. Not really. He may smile at the thought of the box office plunder, but the bigger smile comes as he remembers last night’s British premiere.

“We had kids screaming, jumping out of their seats,” says the 19th most powerful man in movies. “What more can you ask for than that?”

The interview with Johnny:

You’re stilling wearing JS’s teeth …

I didn’t have the chance to take them out.

What are they made of?

They’re gold and platinum.

We take it you had a hell of a lot of input into Jack’s character.

I’m a sucker to my own brain. It’s like it reaches a point where you can’t help yourself, you know? Regardless of what other people are saying around you, or whispering around you. Maybe they’re not so happy with your work, or the character. Maybe they feel it’s a little too much. But I couldn’t help myself. I had a very strong feeling about the guy, about the character, and yeah, I couldn’t control it. It had to come out.

Any resistance from the suits?

Yeah. Early on. For quite a while.

How did you fight back?

Originally I had two more gold teeth, and there were a few that wanted them gone – in fact, they wanted them all gone, and they wanted the braids and the trinkets and the beard gone. I said ‘Look, I respect you guys. I’ll compromise to some degree, which means I’ll take two teeth out. Cool. But anything beyond that I feel is compromising the integrity of the character. I’m not willing to do that. You’ve got to trust me. You’ve got to let me do what you hired me to do, and if you’re not happy with doing that then you’ll have to replace me’.

Sparrows walk is … unique. How on earth did that evolve?

It was a couple of things. To me, it was like this is a guy who’s spent a very, very long time on the ocean, battling the elements. It’s a guy who’s spent way too much time in the sun, so maybe his brain is literally cooked a bit. And he’s way more comfortable on the deck of a ship, in terms of the rhythm of the ocean, than he is on dry land. He would also be a guy who would understand that, who would take that and use it to his own advantage, as if to hypnotise someone. When he goes back and forth it’s kind of like a cobra, you know? Moving target. So that’s where it comes from. He would hate being on land.

It looks like you really enjoyed riffing on the comedy in this movie?

Again, I’m a real sucker, whenever I find an opportunity to throw in humour, on any level, even when it doesn’t apply. I even did it in scenes in Blow and other things where it probably shouldn’t have been there, but it just seemed to work. So I always try to throw as much humour into a part as I can. With Jack Sparrow, I knew this guy so well, I felt so comfortable playing him that, once again, it was like I couldn’t help it.

You’ve lived in France for five years. How has that changed your relationship with Hollywood?

It’s done wonders for my relationship with Hollywood. I’m so removed from it that I don’t know anything. I don’t know who anybody is. I don’t know who’s famous, I don’t know who’s not famous. I don’t know who’s rich, who’s poor, who’s successful, who’s a drag. I don’t know what made money, what didn’t make money. And it’s great. I come in, completely ignorant of it all, and it feels really good. I don’t have to think about anything but my work, and I don’t have to worry about what anybody else is doing.

Not a typical celebrity status then?

A typical celebrity status sounds like a really weird disease.

Does your daughter understand what you do for a living?

Not just yet. It hasn’t really registered that daddy’s an actor. There was a woman in some restaurant who asked her what her parents did, and Lily Rose said ‘Well, my mommy’s a singer.’ And the woman said ‘Oh yeah? What does your daddy do?’ And she said ‘My daddy’s a pirate’.

And is he really a pirate at heart?

It’s funny. When Lee Marvin was asked how he prepared for his role as a drunken gunfighter in Cat Ballou, he said ‘I’ve been preparing for this role for 40 years’ and I feel the same way.

What code do you live your life by?

Don’t ever take any @#%$ off of anybody. That’s probably the best advice I’ve ever been given.

And who told you that?

My mom.