[man] So we're doing the writers' commentary
for Pirates of the Caribbean... Dead Man's Chest.
- I'm Ted Elliott. - And over here this is Terry Rossio.
- Do you see the pirate ship back there? - I still have not seen the pirate ship.
[Elliott] It's right there when you first pan down.
There's a little ship sailing along that river.
[Rossio] I loved seeing this new logo opening at the premiere.
Right when the little Tinkerbell swirl went by,
there was a shooting star up in the sky beyond it.
I think that was actually a really good sign.
I took it as such.
[Elliott] Then there was the lightning strike
that shorted out the sound system. Not really. [laughs]
[Rossio] All right, here we go.
[Elliott] The world imitates the titles of the movie.
[Rossio] I love the subtle little, or actually not so subtle,
but deep and powerful heartbeat in the background on the soundtrack.
I think that was a great touch.
So many details in this movie you don't notice the first time through.
OK, here we go. Opening shot.
[Elliott] Actually, a different opening shot than we had originally planned.
Not just Terry and I, but Gore, we had started out with the idea of opening
with what's actually the second scene in the finished movie,
which is the Turkish prison and the introduction of Jack.
But I think, actually, what happened was
the way Gore decided to shoot and assemble this,
to come out of a very literal storytelling
into a much more impressionistic type of storytelling,
I think that was really jarring when we were looking at first assemblies.
[Rossio] I think Gore made an interesting choice here.
What you're seeing is kind of a montage style
or mosaic impressionistic style here.
[Elliott] I've gotta say something about this horse in the boat.
We only see the horse in the boat for a couple of seconds.
But I think Terry and I have tried
to get that into two or three different movies, horse in a longboat.
Guy on a horse in a longboat rowing to shore.
And we told that to Gore and he said, "Put it in. I'll do it."
And it was great actually watching them
train this horse for two or three days to ride in a boat.
[Rossio] I want the world to know that's a real horse.
They actually really did that. It was very cool.
You look beautiful.
It's bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding.
[Rossio] Now we've caught up into
outside of remembering different things happening
and into the real movement of the story.
[Elliott] Even that opening,
it's interesting in the way it parallels the opening of the first now,
starting with Elizabeth in almost sort of a dream aspect.
I just wanna say that Tom Hollander is not Jack Davenport.
Beckett is not Norrington. He actually asks where Norrington is.
I just had to make that clear. It's not the same guy.
[laughs]
Tom is so good in this.
[Rossio] Yeah. I love this moment.
Oh, is it? That's annoying. My mistake. Arrest her.
He played the "That's annoying. My mistake"
exactly correctly.
As if Norrington would be willing to step forward and say,
"Oh, yes, of course. I'm happy to be arrested as well."
[Elliott] I think Beckett has the lawyer's attitude.
Never ask a question you don't know the answer to already.
[Rossio] Yeah, he knows that he's not there.
[Elliott] Jonathan Pryce was very insistent that if he came back,
he had to have actually something to do in the movie. [laughs]
When we were dealing with the possibility of doing sequels,
or a sequel, we had basically a choice to make,
which was to do...
Obviously, the first movie was intended as a stand-alone,
because who knew?
But when they said, "We'd like sequels,"
we could either do the stand-alone type of story,
like in the James Bond series or the Indiana Jones series,
or try to kind of retroactively engineer
a much larger story to be told over the course of three movies.
And we went with the second choice.
I think it works, but we've been hit with a couple of criticisms
that the movie is not that accessible
to people who have not seen the first movie.
And we were really trying to avoid that,
as, basically, we make it clear.
They helped free a guy named Jack Sparrow from the gallows.
He's a pirate. They're gonna be hung.
[Rossio] Right. This was the original opening of the movie as designed.
And it would have created a parallel.
Each of the three films would have then opened with a song.
The pirate, the yo-ho song, in the first film
and then the Dead Man's Chest song here.
[Elliott] And then another one in the third, but that ship has sailed.
[Rossio] There's a technique that we're using here
that I think is really strong and really interesting.
And for me it harkens back
to the original Marc Davis vignettes
of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride,
and that is the willingness to see
just one small little detail, one small little moment,
and then be able to engineer an entire story out of that.
Whether it's the mayor being dunched
or whether it's the dog with the keys.
What you get is essentially a hint of the story,
and then you can imagine what went on beyond that.
And that's what's going on here.
We don't explain anything about the Turkish prison,
what Jack was doing there, how he got in there,
or what he had to go through to get the imprint of the keys.
[Elliott] OK, here was a happy accident.
That last kind of loudish splash
was actually a piece of the wood from the coffin,
but it reads like it's the bird's body.
It just cracks me up.
We had the huge challenge
that we had such a great introduction for Jack in the first movie
that... we were like, "OK, do we try to do something as good as that?
Or do we just throw it away and not bother and say we'll never do it again?"
We finally said, "We have to come up with something good.
There's no way it'll be as good as that,
but we have to make sure it doesn't suck relative to that."
And I think we pulled it off.
Complications arose, ensued, were overcome.
[Rossio] I have to point out, just 'cause I think it's cool,
that there is a bit of foreshadowing
to Jack arriving into the movie in a coffin.
Terry, you know in these big summer movies,
nobody actually uses literary devices and things like that.
Please. "Foreshadowing"?
[Rossio] Even the first words of, "Mind if we take a little side trip?"
could be interpreted...
And the hurricane.
[Elliott] So the hurricane was actually in the script
before we actually lived through a couple of hurricanes.
- But it just became... - The crew loved that line.
They thought it was a reference to what we had all been through.
That perhaps dear old Jack is not serving your best interests as captain?
[squawks] Walk the plank.
What did the bird say?
[Elliott] Jack's a little stir crazy at this point.
Well, he's been in prison, he's been in a coffin.
And he's got a thing with animals in this movie.
[Rossio] I gotta hand it to Johnny Depp,
who was willing to have himself nailed into a box
in the middle of the night in the middle of the Caribbean.
- [Elliott] That's true. - In the middle of the ocean.
And then also to the...
The stuntpeople willing to
have explosives wired in, as well.
I love the pronunciation of "drawing."
What do keys do?
Keys...
...unlock things?
[Elliott] We were kind of experimenting
with structure and storytelling in writing this.
We had done this on the first movie and wanted to do it even more on this movie,
wherein sort of trusting the audience
to pick up from what is said or done in the movie
and imagine the story that may have come before it, like with the monkey.
Early on Gibbs says the Isla de Muerta,
which was where the Aztec treasure was in the first movie,
was reclaimed by the sea, and the treasure with it,
and then you see the monkey, which we know from the first movie.
And basically the story goes, oh, they must have gone to Isla de Muerta.
It wasn't there, but the monkey's swimming around,
stowed away like a rat, so now they've got monkey infestation.
And, again, it's like, did we push it too far or...?
[Rossio] I think the audience enjoys...
It's a Pixar dictum where they say,
"Give the audiences two plus two and let them come up with four on their own.
- Just don't give them four." - That's a Billy Wilder dictum.
That's one of Billy Wilder's ten rules of filmmaking.
[Rossio] Pixar adopted it oh so well.
[Elliott] Jack is acting stranger even for Jack.
[Rossio] Back in the original structure, that throw line
would have been directly to Elizabeth, and you would have gotten the context
that perhaps Elizabeth is something to do...
- [Elliott] What's vexing Jack. - ...with, yeah, Jack being vexed.
The East India Trading Company has need of your services.
[Elliott] There was actually a much larger story to the map
that, again, we were just trying to tell,
but through the course of the scenes with Beckett,
the map becomes more and more finished.
[Rossio] The final shot of the movie,
which was changed but was actually shot,
was the map being completed,
map serving as metaphor.
By your efforts, Jack Sparrow was set free.
I would like you to go to him
and recover a certain property in his possession.
Interesting construct of this scene
is to say "certain property" but not say what it is,
but yet continue the negotiation,
continue all of the other details of the scene.
Will, at this moment, has already jumped to...
Well, the Black Pearl was such an important...
[Elliott] It's so important to Jack, it must be important to others.
[Rossio] Right, so it must be that they're talking about the Black Pearl.
Somehow I doubt Jack will consider employment the same as being free.
[Elliott] I think Will has a pretty good handle on Jack.
[Rossio] Orlando in this second movie
is so incredibly strong with his lines, his deliveries.
I actually love watching him in the course of this film.
Not unlike you, Mr. Turner.
You and your fiancée face the hangman's noose.
[Elliott] We were back where we shot the first movie.
This was actually the same harbor.
[Rossio] Wallilabou Bay.
[Elliott] What's interesting is when they built the...
It's out of frame now, but the dock, which, of course, in the first movie
was where Jack had to escape from Norrington and the marines,
they had left it there as a construct.
When we had scouted for the second movie it was still intact,
but between the time they scouted and the time we showed up,
half of it had actually been wiped out by a storm,
and so we said, "They've changed the design of the dock."
If you look, it's not quite the same dock as it was before.
[Rossio] Here we have another compass insert,
the second that the film has shown.
Why is the rum always gone?
[Elliott] That first opening line with the rum was one of those things where
if you haven't seen the first movie, then you don't know it's a callback.
But if you have seen the first movie, the idea is what does it call back to?
It calls back to the scene between Jack and Elizabeth.
Kind of the idea that...
Trying to put into the audience's mind
that Elizabeth is playing into Jack's thoughts in some degree.
[Rossio] Right, based on the first film.
[Elliott] Oh, no. He's got a problem.
Ah.
[man] Time's run out, Jack.
[Rossio] I love the little sand running out of that hourglass reference there.
Bootstrap.
Bill Turner.
There was a line that Johnny improv'd I actually wish was in here,
where he just looked at him and said, "Bouillabaisse."
[Elliott] It would have been right here. "Bouillabaisse."
[Rossio] In designing the second film,
we knew that there was a lot of interest in the story of Bootstrap Bill
and discussion as to what his fate might have been,
what Will's responsibilities were to his fate.
And so one of our choices was to say:
"OK, we're gonna put Bootstrap right up front.
You expect to see him, so we're gonna give him to you.
And therefore you won't know what's coming after that."
And then here you hear the story of what happened.
[Elliott] We lost one of my favorite little lines here,
which was after Bootstrap says, "William? He turned a pirate after all."
Jack's response was, "Given a liberal definition of the word 'pirate'."
So it's you, then.
[Rossio] There was another cut exchange in this scene,
just cut simply for length.
Bootstrap spoke about even the tiniest hope.
And with that tiniest hope
that he would accept Jones's offer, and then Jack's follow-up line was,
"That's the kind of thinking bound to catch his attention."
I thought that was really powerful, if you have a little bit of hope,
you draw Davy Jones to you, and he uses that against you.
[Elliott] If you're in despair with the slightest bit of hope,
just a willingness to do anything.
[Rossio] It spoke to the back story of Jack Sparrow.
It's funny what a man will do to forestall his final judgment.
As does that line right there.
There was a point in the past where Jack himself made a deal with Jones,
having lost the Black Pearl,
the Pearl being underwater.
We always imagined that Jack Sparrow was in a pretty black place
at that moment where he made that deal with Jones.
The Flying Dutchman already has a captain...
Then it's the locker for you!
Jones's terrible leviathan will find you
and drag the Pearl back to the depths and you along with it.
[Elliott] So it's very clear what we have going on here.
Will and Elizabeth are under a death sentence
unless Will goes out and finds Jack
and brings back the compass to Beckett.
Meanwhile, we're finding out
for some reason the compass isn't working for Jack,
and Jack is either going to end up serving on Jones's crew
or taken to Davy Jones's locker by the kraken.
It's a simple plot. [laughs]
[Rossio] The issues of the film are now in place.
Those are the issues that need to be resolved.
[Elliott] Kevin McNally, who plays Gibbs, he's just great.
He said that this scene set the record for the longest period
between the start of the scene he'd shot and the end of the scene.
And his original record was about three months
from shooting the setup to shooting the conclusion.
The below-deck stuff was shot
like the first or second week of shooting on the movie.
And then the finish, where he comes up on deck immediately afterwards,
was eight months later.
Run.
Back to your stations, the lot of you!
[Rossio] This line coming up here from Johnny,
I always imagined it as a bit more of a squeak,
when he says, "Nothing," and then...
Nothing.
It leads into the hat.
I'm not sure it plays as clearly as it was intended,
that when we're following the hat across here,
that we're going from night to day, and that it's now much later,
and therefore here, when the hat gets discovered,
it could be fairly faraway.
I think it plays, maybe.
[speaks Turkish]
[Elliott] Again, just in terms of the structure,
one of the things we were trying to do playing around with Gore
was kind of getting away from what's considered this very traditional
one character in a three-act paradigm,
that at the end of the first act there's a plot point,
at the end of the second act a plot point, and then you have the third act.
And we were doing... We refer to it as a mosaic structure,
but that's not really an accurate term.
But the idea was just playing with the fact that ultimately
a movie is a series of scenes in juxtaposition.
And the way you juxtapose the scenes, what happens in the scenes,
and the order that you show the scenes,
affects the audience's experience of the movie.
That's actually what the story is from the audience's point of view.
And, again, this was one where we talked for a long time about
going directly from Jack, coming aboard from the prison,
then to the Bootstrap scene, and then to that scene with the sinking,
and then throwing it all the way over to the wedding.
Actually getting that whole first part with Jack up front.
And we thought about that for a long time.
[Rossio] I like the technique.
I think what it does is it pushes the audience
into a position similar to how they experience life,
which is you get little glimpses, you get little bits of information,
you have your own limited point of view, and you have to interpret it.
You have to read what it is from what you're seeing,
what the overall picture of the story is.
And I think it's actually much more inclusive of the audience
and involving them into the story.
It's a little bit of a tip of the iceberg sort of thing.
Based on what we show you here
and what Ted said about juxtaposing scenes,
how do you feel, how are you reading these characters,
how are you reading their hearts, how are you reading the theme of the story?
A little callback there to...
[Elliott] Sort of establishing a very important aspect
of Elizabeth's character in this scene, which is...
She and Will have been together now for a year.
And as far as it seems with the movie,
the physicality of their relationship is sword-fight practice. [laughs]
[Rossio] And it's driving her a little nuts, I think.
That's what I heard. Drunk, with a smile on his face.
Sure as the tide...
There was one of these little vignettes that I always liked,
"Jack's in South America with a woman half his age and twice his height,"
something like that, but it was a little too strange, even in this movie.
[Elliott] Well, of course, that was Giselle and Scarlett.
It was Lauren and Vanessa?
- [Rossio] Yes. - Who were cast...
The actress who plays Giselle, Vanessa, was cast for a speaking role.
But, of course, in the first movie, Scarlett did not say anything.
Then we suddenly found that we wanted to actually give Scarlett lines
and we were really just incredibly pleased and delighted.
Lauren's a terrific actress.
That was like, "Oh, cool." We could really use her for stuff.
[Rossio] Another vignette that simply got cut for length
that I always thought was cool was somebody was going to say
that Jack Sparrow was tried, found guilty, ready to hang,
but fought off 100 soldiers at Port Royal
and then grabbed two parrots and flew off a cliff.
Of course, that would have been...
[Elliott] That would have been Jack's version of the escape.
[Rossio] The embellished version of the end of the...
[Elliott] This to me is so amazing, 'cause that ship is not there.
What's there on the beach is scaffolding
covered with blue canvas.
But the work ILM did in this movie is just extraordinary.
That ship looks like it's actually up there on that beach.
[Rossio] Originally, there was a bit more interaction
here with the, um... the parrot.
Will ended up insulting it, calling it a pigeon
and then apologizing.
Kind of a fun little scene.
[Elliott] Terry rehearsed this scene with Orlando. Terry played the parrot.
[Rossio] I think I made a good parrot.
Don't eat me. No. Don't eat me. [squawks]
In some theaters,
Gibbs' flask gets a laugh, which I love.
In other theaters, it doesn't.
[Elliott] I have no idea why it gets a laugh, but OK, we'll take it.
[Rossio] Yeah. It's just... something funny about betrayal.
[Elliott] This is just some bravado filmmaking coming up here.
In the background, the guy opens his eyes and the scare still works.
Just amazing.
Come on! Let's go!
Come on! Who wants it?
I can do this all day!
I think that was Orlando's improv, "I can do this all day."
It makes me laugh.
[Rossio] To undercut the bravado at moments with humor.
I love the reaction shots of the cannibals there.
[Elliott] Dominica, that was pretty spectacular.
This was just an amazingly beautiful island,
but very brutal conditions to work in.
But, wow, it was worth it when you see this movie.
[Rossio] Yeah, Dominica was where the production hit the wall, so to speak.
The heat, humidity.
[Elliott] We were there for about a month,
shooting this sequence and two very major action sequences.
It was very, very physical, brutal filmmaking, but...
[Rossio] Every location was difficult to reach,
so the first challenge was just getting there.
[Elliott] I always remember the Simpsons episode
where Bart Simpson did that so he could sleep in class. [laughs]
[Rossio] That must have been the inspiration.
I can honestly say I'm glad to see you.
Of course, you could almost argue the entire sequence was a tribute
to the improv line in the first film, "And then they made me their chief."
- [Elliott] Exactly. - Another tieback into the first film.
[Elliott] In fact, he was telling the truth when he told that story.
He went some place, he was made their chief.
That's how he knows the language. It's why they ended up at that island.
[Rossio] He tells the truth a lot. People are always surprised.
There's actually a lot of interesting stuff going on in terms of storytelling
in this cannibal-island sequence.
One of them is that, in a subtle way,
we wanted to show that Jack is not safe on land.
We've established that he can't be on the water, and we know why.
So you say, "He'll just stay on land." He does go to land.
His attempt to go to land lands him in even worse danger.
[Elliott] This, again, was us playing with how can you tell stories on film?
How does the audience get and absorb and assemble information
as they're watching a movie?
And first you see, OK, there's something out in the water
that can pull boats under that's after Jack,
or his hat, at least.
Now Jack's pulled the Black Pearl up on the shore.
He does not wanna be out on the water.
He's in a terrible circumstance on land in a completely uncivilized area.
I've arranged passage to England. The captain is a friend of mine.
No! Will's gone to find Jack!
We cannot count on William Turner.
Come!
He's better than you give him credit for.
This is no time for innocence. Beckett has offered one pardon only,
one, and that is promised to Jack Sparrow.
Even if Will succeeds,
do not ask me to endure the sight of my daughter walking to the gallows. Do not.
Perhaps I can ensure a fair trial for Will if he returns.
[Rossio] This is the single most beautiful shot of Keira
in a film full of beautiful shots of Keira.
For some reason that loose hair, carriage...
[Elliott] This was funny, as Gore came to us when we were shooting this
and he said, "We need a name for the captain."
We're like, "Why?" "Because he's a friend of Swann's."
And so we decided that this captain, his last name was Hawkins.
And our little back story on that is that this is what happened
to Jim Hawkins' father in the Robert Louis Stevenson book Treasure Island,
which starts with Jim Hawkins' father has somehow vanished at sea.
And, in fact, that was supposed to be Captain Hawkins.
But it didn't make it in the movie.
What are you doing?
[Rossio] The Mercer character there is just so strong.
Every scene that he is in, it's such force.
[Elliott] That little delivery on "It's from you."
[Rossio] Yeah. A little reprimand there.
[musical theme on harpsichord]
I thought Hans Zimmer did an amazing job with the subtle association
of different themes to the different characters.
Loyalty is no longer the currency of the realm, as your father believes.
Then what is?
I'm afraid currency is the currency of the realm.
I expect, then, we can come to some sort of understanding.
[Elliott] So does it seem unbelievable that Beckett figured out
that Elizabeth had shown up to take the letters of marque?
It works from a point of view of logic, that he could come to that conclusion,
but I'm just wondering, does that jump?
[Rossio] I always read it that it could only really be two people.
It's either Elizabeth or Swann. And what he says would play to either of them.
He'd say the same thing until he discovers who it is, either way.
Do explain.
I have been to the Isla de Muerta. I have seen the treasure myself.
[Elliott] Here's something that bothered me a little.
Did we write "the Isla de Muerta" or "Isla de Muerta"?
Did they start saying "the Isla de Muerta"?
[Rossio] Well, I happen to have the screenplay right here and so...
I will... look it up. Yeah, we did not write "the."
[Elliott] Yeah, I wonder if Keira said that and Tom picked up on it,
or vice versa or something.
[Rossio] Yeah, that's interesting.
[Elliott] And we just dispense with the first movie.
We're not seeing the sword-fighting skeletons this time. Sorry, folks.
[laughs]
Again, Elizabeth makes the point
similar to what she made in the jail cell.
She's bothered.
[Rossio] Some of the callbacks, to me, to the first movie
were really more just natural things that the characters would say.
Elizabeth would, of course, naturally think,
if you're going after the compass, you must be going after Isla de Muerta,
so that's what she would say.
She learns here that the compass doesn't necessarily...
[Elliott] Of course, there was the interesting thing in...
As we conceived of the compass in the first movie,
and actually had written and was shot,
the compass did, in fact, point only to Isla de Muerta.
But when the movie was released in its final cut,
that information didn't make it in, and it gave us the opportunity this time
to redefine the compass
based on the idea that people who may have seen the first movie
thought the compass pointed to Isla de Muerta.
So Elizabeth is making the same mistake that some of the audience was making
and, in fact, that we were making on the first movie.
[Rossio] Here it's kind of fun to use these characters
as a way to kind of weave in one of the themes of the movie,
which is the idea of making choices,
being responsible for those choices, how does that affect your soul?
That's a mark against...
[barking]
Look.
[Elliott] Lee and Mackenzie are so good together, man.
They play off each other so well.
I just had to say that. I just enjoy seeing scenes with them.
[Rossio] I love that the dog is smarter than they are.
The dog isn't just going to shore.
The dog realizes that there's some trouble ahead and they don't.
On set, this was the first time I ever actually called out
in the middle of a take, which you're not supposed to do.
[Elliott] This was Jack West and Marc Schaffer in that boat.
- [Rossio] Yeah. - [Elliott] Man.
[Rossio] You knew that they were supposed to crash the boat,
but when it happened it looked like some sort of tragedy.
[Elliott] What Terry called out was, "Agh!"
[Rossio] I did.
[Elliott] They did this, like, three times.
It was just the hairiest stunt I've ever seen.
I remember Jack and I afterwards, we were trying to figure out
what would be the single most expensive gag,
the highest-paying gag a stuntman could be in?
It was finally, like, set on fire in a boat
that goes over a waterfall of 100 feet or more.
[Rossio] There had to be alligators or something too.
Suppose we better save it as soon as we can.
[Elliott] I love characters who are able to justify their actions.
They just...
There's something funny about Pintel and Ragetti
having discussions about morality and what's right and what's wrong.
And yet they always end up getting to do what they want.
Thank you.
The toes. How odd is that?
So does Jack do what he does here because he's thinking,
"Should I get into the spirit of things?" or...?
It is just such an odd moment.
[Rossio] I know Gore felt strongly
that this was a scene that the kids would love.
[Elliott laughs]
[Rossio] Even if the adults were completely grossed out.
[Elliott] Which is a really interesting idea.
"We're gonna make you king,
but the second you stop doing what we want, we're getting rid of you."
It's actually similar to how pirate ships actually worked.
Somebody was captain but there was a democracy
that allowed them to actually vote him out,
and that would end up with him generally being marooned on an island.
[Rossio] The idea that Gibbs just brought up there,
the idea of a god in human form,
based on a real religion, actually, in Japan, is that correct?
[Elliott] I don't know. There was a tribe, a bear-worship tribe.
[Rossio] Yeah, and we were able to use double-duty there
to understand Jack's position, but also, I will actually reveal,
that is a subtle setup for something that goes on in Pirates 3.
[Elliott] What Terry was saying is, I think it was in Japan,
there was a tribe that worshipped bears as a god.
And their mythology was that the gods lived in another world
and they came to this world in the form of bears.
But they really didn't like being in this world.
So they would kill the bears,
and in doing so release the gods to go back to heaven.
And it's just such a great cosmology.
[Rossio] It helped solve the problem of how do you give yourself license
to kill something that you also worship?
[Elliott] There's similarities to some of the American Indian tribes
and the buffalo in that as well,
is respecting what you eat.
[Rossio] There's a little moment coming up here
that was very important to Gore
and plays into the trading spice for long pork
and plays into the East India Trading Company.
You know, the pirates are rock-and-rollers
and the corporation has arrived,
even to the point of in the far reaches here of this island.
You still have the influence of the East India Trading Company.
"Jack must find his place in the New World or perish" sort of idea.
- [Elliott] Those places are closing in. - Yeah.
Oh, bugger.
[Elliott] Basically, this first part of the story in terms of Jack
is Jack finding out that he's gotta go back and deal with Davy Jones somehow.
He's...
Right now, he can't be on the ocean.
The East India Trading Company is closing in on civilization
in the uncivilized areas, it's very dangerous for him.
It's basically pushing him further and further to the corner
where he has to do something
and deal with Davy Jones directly.
This is just fun. [laughs]
[Rossio] This sequence is so magnificent. It's so...
[waltz music]
Gore went to Hans and asked for a waltz
and Hans knew just the sort of waltz he wanted to do.
The music so adds to the fun of the sequence.
[Elliott] Jerry was really concerned about the waltz, though. Wasn't that it?
[Rossio] The failure is the best part of it, you know,
coming close and not quite getting there.
I was told a story about a kid watching the movie
didn't understand the first time through why the two of them were in competition,
went back and saw the film a second time.
And, again, it's one of those things that we don't point out overtly.
You let the audience figure it out
that they're each willing to betray each other.
The second time through when the kid saw it,
that moment of understanding was apparently just delightful.
[Elliott] It's sort of fun.
We're telling a story where our main characters
are not necessarily sterling, noble, upright people,
but you'd like hanging out with them,
like rock-and-rollers. [laughs]
Shh.
Leech was really an interesting character.
We needed to create a character
that, when he died, you felt like you lost a character.
It was one of those things where we didn't wanna just throw him away.
So we spent some time working on Leech in the early part of the movie.
And what was really interesting was Kevin McNally came to us and said,
"When I was reading Leech, I'm going, 'Are they phasing out Gibbs?"'
"Leech is getting all the stuff Gibbs should have." Then he got to this part.
He goes, "Oh. OK."
And he was very pleased that Gibbs was not phased out.
[speaks native language]
[Rossio] There's something else going on in this cannibal-island sequence
that's key and relevant to the overall story,
and that is for the story to work,
coming up, Jack has a betrayal to the Will character.
And that betrayal has to land with some significance.
So as Will goes about this rescue,
helping to rescue the crew, helping to rescue Jack, and actually succeeding,
it sets up Jack's betrayal for the audience to really feel that betrayal.
And then when Elizabeth learns of that betrayal,
it actually gives her a little bit more justification,
or at least puts her in an emotional state
where she can justify her actions toward Jack.
So, again, even though those events
are well into the second act and the third act,
there's still thought put into
how events at this point will be affecting those later events.
[Elliott] Again, this is Dominica.
We were staying in these little huts on the beach
and we were there when the Black Pearl
actually showed up from the shipyards in Alabama.
And one of the coolest moments in working on these movies
was actually taking a little skiff out and going around the Black Pearl.
Because on the first movie it was built on a barge. It was not a real hull.
But to actually see the Black Pearl, the bow of the Black Pearl,
the water line and then the bow continue beneath it
was actually kind of a very cool moment.
And then Johnny was staying on the yacht and we went out there for dinner.
And we're on Johnny's yacht,
and there's the Black Pearl moored right next to us.
It just...
Hey, they built a pirate ship, Terry. [laughs]
[Rossio] Yeah, I remember that. The stars are out, the moon is out.
You're on this little skiff.
You're zigzagging between these beautiful ships.
Yeah.
It's pretty awesome to be in the Caribbean shooting these films.
[Elliott] They should have got in at least one more CD
in that little restaurant.
- [Rossio] What was it, Kenny Rogers? - Kenny Rogers, 24-7.
[Rossio] 24 hours a day.
[Elliott] Not 24-7. The restaurant was only open three hours a day,
even though it was supposed to be open eight hours a day.
- What was the...? - [Rossio] Titou Gorge.
[Elliott] Man.
[Rossio] I gotta hand it to Marty in these scenes.
I'm pretty sure he did all of his own stunts.
I used to bug him. I used to say, "They're paying you twice, aren't they?"
[Elliott laughs]
[Rossio] He thought it was a good idea, but I don't know if he pulled it off.
[Elliott] And the Jack kebab stuff.
The actors actually had to swim into that location.
Stop it!
I really like that Gore finds these little moments
to kind of highlight these characters and these actors,
even where they're not doing anything story-specific.
They're always doing things that are character-specific, which I really like.
I like that little expression from Johnny.
You can see just at the moment, Jack thinks to himself,
"Wow, this is gonna make a great story someday."
Oh, Tony.
Johnny's stunt double in the first movie and a lot of this, Tony Angelotti.
[Rossio] I think it's Theo Kypri who was unraveling there.
It was Theo Kypri because Tony got injured in the rehearsal of that scene,
when they were actually just working it out in the studio.
But I guess he's recovered. I guess he's back.
He's got that run down, though.
[Rossio] Yeah, the Johnny...
[Elliott] A lot of times when you see Jack running from a distance, it's Tony,
and he just absolutely can do the Jack Sparrow lizard run.
The mooring line!
Thief! Little hairy thief! Give it back!
- Don't bite it! - [Pintel] Haul loose the mooring line!
He's got me eye. He won't give it back.
- How'd you get it back last time? - Excellent! Our work's half done.
We done it for you, knowing you'd be coming back.
- Make ready to sail, boys! - What about Jack?
I won't leave without him.
[Rossio] Another effect of the cannibal-island sequence
is simply to unite Pintel and Ragetti into the crew.
I love how it just happens so effortlessly.
It's kind of presumed that they will be along with them.
[Elliott] The cut here, when the first teaser trailer came out,
they played that moment where Will says, "I won't leave without Jack,"
sees Jack being chased by the cannibals, and then Will's line in the trailer was,
"Never mind. Let's go." What's funny is that was actually a blown take.
That was actually Orlando saying, "I screwed it up. Never mind. Let's go.
Let's get this finished."
[Rossio] Yeah, we argued to put the blown take in.
[Elliott] But it was not long enough.
This is the day you shall always remember as the day you almost...
Has Jack ever said that thing...?
Oh, no, the very first time when he escaped off the docks in the first movie
he actually got through that little speech all the way.
But at the end of the first movie and now,
I don't know if he's ever gonna be able to say it all the way through.
[Rossio] That line in that context was improv'd by Johnny and Gore on set.
There were other lines scripted for him
to call back to the Pelegostos,
but they went with that one.
Let's get away from this island and head out to open sea.
Yes to the first. Yes to the second, but only insofar as we keep to the shallows.
That seems a bit contradictory, captain.
I have faith in your reconciliatory navigational skills.
[Elliott] I like just how subtly they accept Pintel and Ragetti.
There was a longer version scripted and shot,
but when you're putting the movie together,
you see that one little moment.
Have you considered just locking her up somewhere?
She is locked up, bound to hang for helping you.
There comes a time when one must take responsibility for one's mistakes.
Suggesting that helping him was a mistake, which may be so.
I must trade it for her freedom.
- Mr. Gibbs. - Captain.
If there's one place where I think I'd like to go back in
and do a little bit of a rewrite and reshoot, it's here,
to make it absolutely clear
that Jack has now gone from the guy
who is just trying to run away
to the guy who now has a plan to deal with Davy Jones.
That Will becomes instrumental to...
The fact that Will is desperate and will do anything to save Elizabeth
gives Jack the opportunity that he's been looking for
to deal with Davy Jones.
That's the whole point of the whole cannibal island.
Can't go there, can't go there. Time to have a plan.
[Rossio] Yeah, that's true.
From this point on, Jack may be playing a lot of odds and a lot of angles,
but he does have an intent.
His intent is to create a way to avoid capture.
At the same time gather together the key and the chest
and trade that for his freedom.
[Elliott] He obviously doesn't wanna serve aboard the Dutchman.
He doesn't wanna go to Davy Jones' locker.
He's gotta find another way out.
And I just feel like the character change is there,
but I just feel like we needed to do something to really...
Even if it was like Marty saying, "Nice to see the captain back."
Just something that indicated that in a stronger way,
because there are some people who actually did get it from the scene,
but they were the exception.
It should have been the other way around.
[Rossio] Yeah.
One of the changes I might have made
would be to actually not have shown Port Royal.
Go ahead and cut aboard this other ship,
so you don't get that sense of going backwards in the movie.
- A sense of going back to a locale. - Oh, good point.
[Rossio] Let them have traveled forward a bit more.
This really delights me.
[Elliott] This guy just making this entire story up.
[Rossio] What delights me here is that these superstitious louts
are absolutely correct, as it turns out to be.
This dress could be read as a sign that...
I think we, at one point, had a line,
"We need to throw it overboard or this ship will taste the icy waters
in a fortnight, mark my words." It was actually very overt.
They predicted their own demise.
I want you to search the ship and find her.
Oh, and, er... she's probably naked.
[Elliott] The captain's a practical man.
[Rossio] The other thing that that scene does is,
you know, the actors are so good in it, they're so memorable.
The captain, for example, David Schofield, did such a great job.
Alex Norton who plays Bellamy there is somebody you care about,
so that the kraken is not just taking down some anonymous group of guys.
It's taking down some guys who have their own story.
Not something usually done in these big summer movies.
There's a beast does the bidding of Davy Jones.
[Elliott] Love giving Kevin stories.
...and drag an entire ship down to the crushing darkness.
The kraken.
[Elliott] I like the parrot flaps. Was that an accident?
Was that planned?
The parrot was listening in the front boat. [laughs]
[Rossio] Kevin never met an exposition scene that he couldn't just nail.
- [Elliott] No. Oh, yeah. - He's so good at it. Just...
[Elliott] What's really interesting is, you'll hear throughout this, I think,
Terry and I will pronounce "kraken" as "krayken"
because that's how I've always heard it said.
But Kevin was actually the first actor to say the word in a scene,
and he pronounced it "kracken," which I guess is the British pronunciation.
So we turned that into a scene later in the movie.
[Rossio] Hey, there's the fireflies from the ride,
which we vowed that we would get into the film this time around.
[Elliott] Yes, we're actually at the opening of the ride.
[Rossio] There was a bit of exposition there that was originally in that scene.
[Elliott] About Davy Jones.
[Rossio] About what fate might befall Jack,
going to Davy Jones' locker, which is not the same as dying.
Going to Davy Jones' locker was
suffering your worst fear for all eternity.
And it just didn't work.
We couldn't put information that detailed at that moment
before finding out about Davy Jones from Tia Dalma.
[Elliott] Well, what it was was Gibbs is telling him a little about Davy Jones,
which took away from Tia Dalma's strike on Davy Jones.
[Rossio] Yeah, and maybe we should have been able to predict that,
but it's something you learn when you put your first cut together.
You get to see the casting gods
looking upon us favorably yet again,
which has happened so consistently on these movies.
Denise Chamian did such an incredible job,
to be able to have this universe with the great actors that we had
and then add Naomie Harris.
There's four new characters introduced in the course of Dead Man's Chest
and the casting on all of them was just amazing.
It's something the screenwriter can't control,
but, boy, when that magic comes your way, you certainly do appreciate it.
[Elliott] Another one where the studio was worried about teeth.
They were worried about Johnny's teeth on the first movie
and they were worried about Naomie's on the second movie.
Have we had any teeth worries on the third movie yet?
[Rossio] Chow Yun-Fat, maybe, might be part of that.
But I don't know. We'll have to look.
I think you can tell how godlike a character is in these movies
by the condition of their teeth, right?
Look.
An undead monkey.
[Elliott] Jack shoots another animal. [laughs]
[Rossio] Yeah, we definitely went darker with pet abuse
in this... in this film.
[Elliott] The thing about this set that's so amazing, this is practical.
The shack they row up to from the outside, that's where this set is,
and it's the size of a phone booth when you were in there.
And to have all of these characters and this much movement
within the scene itself is just amazing direction.
- [Rossio] There have been... - And Rick Heinrichs again.
Our production designer, Rick Heinrichs, just...
[Rossio] Johnny's comment on the set was
that he wanted to rebuild it on his island.
[Elliott] He actually bought it, right?
[Rossio] There were rumors that he was gonna airlift it out to the Bahamas.
But I think that was just wild talk.
[Elliott] There was an important line about the compass there
where Tia Dalma says, "Jack Sparrow doesn't know what he wants,
or is it that he knows what he wants and is loath to claim it for his own?"
[Rossio] Yeah, some folk wanted Tia Dalma to have subtitles.
I think it varies according to the sound system of the theater.
We've been in theaters where it was very easy to understand what she said.
What indeed?
- The sea. - Sums.
The dichotomy of good and evil.
[Elliott] That was an interesting little argument about
should Pintel say "sums" or "spelling"?
And I'm glad we went with the more English joke right there.
I don't know why. I'm just happy about it.
Same story, different versions, and all are true.
See, it was a woman
as changing and harsh
and untamable as the sea.
It was interesting, I guess, in her audition,
Naomie played this scene a very specific way
that was what convinced Gore that she was absolutely right.
She was one of the few who actually sensed the relationship
between Tia Dalma and Davy Jones.
[Rossio] Another little bit of connective tissue
is that it is Jack Sparrow who says a woman is what vexes a man,
calling back to what might possibly be
his own issue with the compass at that moment.
[Elliott] Something's vexing Jack Sparrow.
...him carve out him heart,
lock it away in a chest and hide the chest from the world.
The key,
he keep with him at all times.
- You knew this. - I didn't know where the key was.
But now we do.
All that's left is to climb aboard the Flying Dutchman, grab the key,
you go back to Port Royal and save your bonnie lass, eh?
This was another thing where I guess there was some disappointment
with the fact that at the beginning of the movie we didn't say,
"Jack needs the dead man's chest to save his life."
I mean, that it starts off with the key, the chest, what's in the chest,
and that basically the information
is revealed as it's necessary through characters.
But at this point we know now that Jack needs a chest that has a heart in it.
[Elliott laughs]
My little beauty, where are you?
The locket.
- [Rossio] Yeah, and nice little... - The boots. [laughs]
[Rossio] This little insert shot
creating a lot of message-board Internet chatter
as to the possible meaning of those things,
and pretty much everything that is in here is to a purpose.
[Elliott] There was an intent.
We did it on the first movie and we did it even more here,
to create... Easter eggs, essentially,
things that if you pay attention, the more attention you pay to the movie,
the more you find in it.
I compare it...
Just trying to encourage the idea
of the movie... discussion of the movie
being a community experience
beyond watching the movie itself.
[Rossio] There are things even in plain sight revealed in Pirates 3
to be more important than what they might have seemed
as you've been watching Pirates 1 and 2.
It's a lot of fun to do that.
I think part of the appeal of these movies is that
you're visiting a world where everything is connected.
That's the Flying Dutchman?
[Elliott] Here's an interesting little production detail.
The way that we actually did these sequences
was the scene that comes later,
where the kraken attacks the Edinburgh Trader,
and breaks it in half,
we shot first.
Then we redressed the two halves of the Edinburgh Trader
as this ship here, and shot it second.
So, what you're actually seeing with this ship
is genuinely, literally, the aftermath of the kraken's attack.
[Rossio] Some people think Jack is particularly loathsome
for tricking Will onto this ship,
but he doesn't really trick him at all.
He's pretty up-front. He says, "You're gonna go onto the ship, get the key."
- [Elliott] Will seems aware of... - You are gonna run into...
Yeah, you're gonna run into some people that you may have to fight.
It's not entirely wrong in what he says.
I enjoy this here where you actually see the advantage of being the Black Pearl.
The advantage of being the Black Pearl is when all of the lamps go out,
the ship does completely fade into the darkness.
[Elliott] We're also playing a bit with the idea of freedom, liberty issues,
where, to some extent,
Will is not as gullible as he was in the first movie.
But he's in a circumstance where it's just not worth arguing with Jack.
He's going into this kind of knowing that Jack is setting it up,
that he's not getting the full information.
But he really doesn't have a choice. He's gotta do this to save Elizabeth.
Hoisting the jib. Bring up with a round turn.
There's no use. You've run aground.
[Rossio] If you recall in the Gibbs story,
when he was talking about the foul breath, the stench of the kraken,
he also mentioned that it had tentacles
that could suck a man's face clean off.
It's not something that the audience necessarily has to get,
make that connection, but, again, if you're paying close attention,
you would put the story and that shot there together.
[Elliott] That's what a man's face looks like when it's been sucked clean off.
The Dutchman.
[Rossio] The actual Flying Dutchman appears,
and here, if you're putting it together,
you start to see that Jack did not tell him the truth.
[Elliott] Our effects supervisor from ILM, John Knoll,
fought very hard
to get a one-quarter steel mockup
of the prow of the Dutchman built,
to make that shot look as real as possible.
[Rossio] Yeah, I think it was Charlie Gibson who got to shoot
just many, many shots of ships rising.
[Elliott] It took a while to get the one they needed, but they got it.
[Rossio] Breaking through the surface of the water.
What you want are those water elements trailing down the side,
have those be completely realistic.
[Elliott] There's little things we put in saying, "That's nice. We'll do that."
And, of course, if you recall in the first movie,
Will actually fights with a superheated sword at one point.
And here he's fighting again with a flaming sword.
[thumping]
[Rossio] Coming from underwater here.
[Elliott] The design of these creatures is just amazing.
[Rossio] Yeah. Well, that would have been...
[Elliott] Crash McCreery.
[Rossio] Just an amazing job, coming up with very distinctive personalities,
very distinctive looks.
[Elliott] And Bill Nighy, just...
[Rossio] Bill Nighy had some sort of instinctual knowledge
of how to perform ahead of the actual completed effects.
I don't know how he did it. It was astonishing to watch.
[Elliott] He was on set wearing eye makeup,
just a little bit of makeup around his eyes,
and what was basically gray pajamas
with motion-capture points on 'em.
And on set it just felt like, man, his performance is so big.
To actually calculate or anticipate what it needed to be
for the final Davy Jones
to actually be nuanced and subtle and real.
You forget that this is not a real person.
You come to buy that these are real people.
[Rossio] One of my favorite moments in the whole movie was that
"I'll take my chances," just that subtle little bit of heroism
being displayed, you know.
The character is on screen so briefly, and for me it's just so memorable.
I just truly enjoy that moment.
One hundred years before the mast.
[Elliott] There was one thing I wanna mention that really impressed me.
That first line of Davy Jones's,
where he says, "Do you fear death, the dark abyss?"
The way Bill delivered that was almost like... poetry.
I mean, he turned that into poetry.
And then Hans orchestrated it so that it's almost this...
It almost feels like a song. I mean, it's really amazing.
[Rossio] I thought Orlando did an amazing job here.
- Another moment where... - He knows he's screwed.
[Rossio] He knows that he shouldn't be saying this. He doesn't wanna say it.
[Elliott] But, again, he's in a position where his choices are severely limited.
[frightened gasps]
Oh.
[Elliott laughs]
[Rossio] Nobody's called us
on the ability of Davy Jones' crew
to move instantly from ship to ship,
which I thought we would get some complaints on.
What are the rules of their being able to move
and when and how are they used?
When and how is that ability used?
And they only do it at night, for the most part.
And they only do it when they want to get aboard another ship.
There are some battles coming up where they don't actually want to.
[Elliott] But it's actually difficult to do, as well. It's not all that easy.
Just how many souls do you think my soul is worth?
Jack is back wheeling and dealing.
This is a guy who comes in and says, "No bargains, no deals."
"Here's what it is. Here's the terms."
And Jack actually renegotiates on the fly.
I keep the boy. A good-faith payment.
That leaves you only 99 more to go. [laughs]
[Rossio] One of my favorite moments is coming up as well,
where Jack knows Davy Jones well enough
to know that if he has a weak point, if he has a sore spot,
it has to do on the topic of love.
And the performance here, just the look.
It's the teary-eyed look, coming in close here,
the actual pain of heartbreak
coming through the eyes in this situation.
It's just so incredibly well done.
[Elliott] Also, just in terms of the structure of the scene,
Jack says first, "OK, I can trade a soul for mine."
"As long as somebody ends up serving before the mast, that'll work."
Davy Jones concedes to that. Then he says, "How many?"
Davy Jones says 100, knowing it's an impossible task.
Jack says, "Send back Will." And Davy Jones goes, "Ah."
"It will be more cruel to Jack to keep Will than not."
So he says, "No, I'm not sending him back."
So then Jack immediately tries to say he's gotta be worth at least as many.
"I don't need to go out and get other people, right?"
And at every turn, Jack is just trying to drive the best bargain possible
against the devil.
- Er, Mr. Gibbs. - Aye.
I-I feel sullied and unusual.
And how do you intend to harvest these 99 souls in three days?
[Rossio] I think that there was a perception
that somehow now Jack's agenda has changed,
that now he's after these 99 souls.
It's not the case.
Jack understands at this point that he has bargained for time,
and having bargained for time, he's gonna see...
Jack never makes a decision that he doesn't have to make
until he has to make it.
And his plan is to always try to turn events to his advantage.
[Elliott] This scene here, I like that we were able to keep...
We had a lot of length issues in the editing,
but I like that they kept this,
because this is just another point to Jack's issue,
which is the East India Trading Company
controls every place but Tortuga at this point, it is everywhere.
Then add in with the stuff where they're actually involved
with the cannibal island as well, there's no place to run.
[Rossio] I always imagined this scene a little more creepy,
a little more...
- [Elliott] Real? - A little more dark.
And it might have actually worked
to never have shown Elizabeth up in the rigging.
- [Elliott] Until she comes down. - Yeah.
To actually let the audience wonder.
Because we are in a supernatural movie. Let them wonder whether...
I think the first shot of the dress going by the window
is kind of in that vein, kind of creepy enough.
[Elliott] I love Keira's reaction right there. [laughs]
[Rossio] Yeah.
It is cool that she's playing into the superstitions of these folk.
And again, though, it turns out they're superstitious for a reason.
This is a doomed crew at this point. They don't know it.
- Coming up, this shot... - This was interestingly...
That was another scene that, in terms of the length of movie,
there were other ways to have actually gotten her from Port Royal to Tortuga,
but it was really important to us to see at least one act of real piracy
in a movie about pirates,
and that's where Elizabeth actually hijacks a ship without firing a shot.
Who does that sound like?
[Rossio] That's true. That's the way the story would be told.
I don't give an ass rat's
if I live or die.
- Perfect. Next! - I know what I want.
Me have one arm and a bum leg.
[Elliott] This was one of those things where it was subject to debate.
Had this compass been pointing to Elizabeth, or at least to something,
this would have been the moment where it would have been revealed
that it was pointing to Elizabeth, that Jack is aware she's on her way.
But...
So it's playing that Jack's...
Jack's conflict is that he may want Elizabeth,
but he really does not want to want Elizabeth.
And that's causing the compass to not work.
[Rossio] There was some discussion of trying to do a shot...
[Elliott] This is Jack Davenport. Shh.
[Rossio] Oh, yeah. Davenport is amazing.
It was so fun to take the character
into a direction that we knew that the actor could just nail.
- [Elliott] Yeah. - He does such a good job.
[Elliott] He did such a great job on the first movie.
It was really one of those things where when we were talking to Gore
about what do we want to do in the second,
we all said we wanna bring Jack Davenport back
and we want him to play this other type of...
to be in this other very different position in his life.
Somewhere nice?!
[Rossio] It was actually Davenport's end to that line, to say, "Some place nice?"
I thought it was a great contribution.
[Elliott] There were actually just story decisions made
knowing what our actors were capable of doing.
That's the nice thing about doing a sequel.
Knowing Jack could do this and knowing what Keira was capable of
played a large part into this story.
[Rossio] One minor point that bugs me a little bit about this scene
is I'm not sure how often there are actually hurricanes off of Tripoli.
[Elliott] Hey, Terry, you wrote that line.
- [Rossio] Yeah. - [Elliott laughs]
[Rossio] I think the original intent was, "I nearly had you off Tripoli."
- And then... - A pause, yeah.
[Rossio] Later came, "Then I would have had you, except for the hurricane."
Somehow those two got put together.
It wasn't the intent.
[Elliott] On the first movie, Keira was very upset
in the choreography in the cave, it's not in the final movie,
but at one moment she actually did get a sword and immediately lost it.
And she was very upset about that, so that was her one demand,
was she got to have a sword. If there was a sequel, she got to have a sword.
Orlando's was, "I want actual boots.
I don't want stockings and little buckle shoes."
[Rossio] Here Jack, having lost his hat
and not gone back for it, continues his search for a hat.
[Elliott] You know, I've been trying to figure out where was the first time
you had the big barroom brawl with one character walking through it unharmed?
I remember it from The Great Race, of course.
[Rossio] Yeah.
Come on, then! Who wants some?
Form an orderly line and I'll have you all, one by one.
Come on, who's first?
A little bit of foreshadowing here.
[Elliott] What is Elizabeth willing to do to save somebody?
[Rossio] How does Elizabeth get out of situations where you're both in danger?
That ability to turn on one of your own.
[Elliott] I guess this was Jack Davenport's first shot on the movie,
face down in the pigsty.
[Rossio] After a long plane flight that day, if I recall.
His out line here got cut,
but it was shot,
and it was kind of this great moment where...
What has the world done to you?
He answers, "Nothing I didn't deserve."
Playing into his being upset about losing his crew
in the pursuit of Jack.
[Elliott] This is one of those things about filmmaking.
There was some concern about what happens towards the end with Norrington
where he makes this turn,
whether or not that would come out naturally from the character
or if we needed to actually let the audience know.
And so there was actually a brief little scene shot
that showed Norrington talking to Mercer.
You never heard what they said, but you saw that they knew each other.
I'm so glad that we didn't need that, that that's not in the movie,
that all of this comes out of Norrington's character
rather than some sort of plot manipulation.
[Rossio] This scene was the subject of a lot of debate,
the moment of Will and Bootstrap meeting.
I think it was a good solution to call out "Turner" and have them both go.
[Elliott] That is such a nice shot there.
[Rossio] Yeah. Of course they would both go because they're both Turner.
They haven't realized that they're each on board.
There was also a fair amount of discussion.
Bootstrap here does recognize Will, but Will...
[Elliott] Doesn't really recognize him yet.
[Rossio] There's a familiarity.
But I'm not sure that at that moment he actually recognizes his father.
Not... And, of course, here he's spun around.
It's not until the moment that Bootstrap...
There he's looking at him.
It's not until this moment coming up with Jones
that Will actually knows that that's his father.
[Elliott] What's actually happening on the set,
Stellan is the only one who is actually in prosthetic makeup.
Everybody else is wearing gray pajamas.
It's amazing between what it actually looked like on set
and how it ended up is just phenomenal.
[Rossio] I kept getting a little bit of a Santa Claus meets the Martians vibe,
just this weird juxtaposition of...
That's where Will knows who he is.
- And Davy Jones is a cruel guy. - A cruel, cruel bastard.
[Rossio] Having lost at love and deciding that the world is cruel,
the afterlife should be cruel, he does not miss an opportunity
to expand on the cruelty.
No. No, I won't!
The cat's out of the bag, Mr. Turner.
[Elliott] Which, by the way, is where the expression came from,
was aboard ship, they used a cat-o'-nine-tails
for disciplining pirates and sailors.
So the idea was if they took the cat out of the bag, it had to be used.
Something had gone wrong, a punishment had been meted out.
That's where the expression "the cat's out of the bag" comes from.
[Rossio] Right. It's a little bit of a double meaning going on there.
[Elliott] Basically, we know now that this is your son
but also the punishment must take place.
Nothing like a little pirate lore to fill in on the edges. [laughs]
[Rossio] I remember Orlando talking about what level of pain to show.
Should he call out? Should he endure, you know...
You don't wanna be too stoic, but I think he made a good choice there.
[Elliott] You know, it's interesting to me how when you watch a movie,
when you're not involved in the making of it and you watch a movie,
you don't realize that everything you're seeing
is the result of a conscious choice
or something that happened because of conscious choices made.
But ultimately when you're watching a movie,
what you're actually seeing, there was a specific decision made
to show that as opposed to something else.
Every single point.
[Rossio] That's true for lines of dialogue,
lighting, background.
Often the assistant director will be the person...
[Elliott] Now, this was something...
Rick Heinrichs, when he designed the ship,
the cannon ports were these mouths and faces.
And in looking at his designs,
and looking at Crash's designs on the characters,
we actually came up with a bit of a story point,
which is that the longer you're on the Dutchman,
the more a part of the ship you become,
that the ship is actually now made up
of these lives that Davy Jones has bartered for, and that's what Wyvern is.
[Rossio] I like to think of the ship as ever growing, ever becoming larger,
as it sails about, because it keeps collecting souls
and the souls keep embedding themselves into the ship itself.
[Elliott] And, of course, the important point here is that
these people make this deal 100 years.
Davy Jones is pretty safe in thinking
that by the time that 100 years has passed,
they will have fallen into Wyvern's state or worse.
Forget the deal, they'll never go on.
- Where is the key? - Hidden.
- Where is the chest? - Hidden.
[Elizabeth] Captain Sparrow!
[Rossio] This is such an interesting location.
This is actually quite dangerous for all of these actors.
And, actually, quite a challenge for Lee Orloff,
the location sound, because the dock was making so much noise.
[Elliott] It was built on pieces of a floating dock.
It wasn't a solid structure that was... with pilings driven.
[Rossio] And when you put those large ships up against this floating dock,
the danger is it's the middle of the night,
you don't know if the weather will change, the tide will change a bit,
and any one of those ships at any point
could just start to go sideways and sweep everything into the water.
A little scary.
...has been press-ganged into Davy Jones's crew.
Davy Jones?
[splutters]
Oh, please.
The captain of the Flying Dutchman?
[Elliott] The legend is known to people outside of... in the movie.
Jack!
All I want is to find Will.
Jack has just realized that he can game Elizabeth
into finding what he needs.
[Rossio] Which mirrors the scene with Will.
[Elliott] What's also interesting,
Beckett does the same thing Jack does.
He parcels that information
as a way of manipulating people into doing what he wants.
They're very similar in that.
A chest of unknown size and origin.
What contains the still-beating heart of Davy Jones.
[Rossio] It's fun working with Gore Verbinski.
Ted and I, we have this saying that is basically "and a goat."
[Elliott] Gore does the "goats in" version.
[Rossio] We can write a scene that has three characters speaking
and when it gets to production it turns out that you'll find
there'll be often, not quite so much in this scene,
but in others, there'll be background characters, there'll be boats.
- [Elliott] What it is... - There'll be fire. There'll be...
[Elliott] Now wait. This is an important...
How the compass works. The compass points to what you want most,
which is not necessarily your heart's desire.
I don't know where that ever came from.
[Rossio] That's true. It's what you want most.
[Elliott] And what you want most can be changeable, as is shown in this scene.
Obviously what she wants most is to find Will,
but Jack is actually able to plant in her mind
that what she wants most is to find the chest to save Will.
Every word, love.
And what you want most in this world
is to find the chest of Davy Jones, is it not?
- To save Will. - By finding the chest of Davy Jones.
Stay with my program, lady.
[Rossio] I love how he steps out of frame here.
[Elliott] I remember we were talking about this with Johnny,
the idea it's gotta look like a magic trick that he's doing.
Voilà. But it's also really important to establish
Jack doesn't touch it again after this moment,
that right now the compass is not dealing with anything Jack wants.
It's playing completely off of Elizabeth at this point.
- He actually lets her keep the compass. - Here's the "and a goat" effect.
[Elliott] And there's the goat.
[Rossio] The goat is there. The people, the fire...
[Elliott] The other one that was really tough in that scene,
we talked a long time with Keira
about how does she react to Pintel and Ragetti?
Because she has some pretty specific memories
of those clowns from the first movie.
She's got something else on her mind, but she has that little reaction
and Jack just takes her off of it again.
[Rossio] You may notice that the map in the background is more fully completed,
symbolizing more of the world
has become under the realm of the East India Trading Company.
[Elliott] This is actually one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
Tom and Jonathan just... I mean...
[Rossio] Enjoy the fact also that we're tracking the sword
that was made by Will, given to Norrington.
- [Elliott] In the first movie. - And tracking it into the second movie.
And we'll continue that into the third.
What do you want from me?
Your authority as governor, your influence in London,
and your loyalty to the East India Trading Company.
There's also a neat little reversal going on here.
Quite often scenes like this would end
in a character being shackled.
And the notion that it's actually the release of the shackle
that is the victory on the part of...
[Elliott] Well, also, it's freedom and liberty again.
- [Rossio] Exactly. - Again you have that concept.
He may now be physically free, but...
Even for what he hoped never to sell.
He has sold something he hoped never to sell.
[Rossio] Ah, the dice game.
I wager... ten years.
[Elliott] There's a much longer version of this game that makes the rules clear.
I don't even wanna talk about it. [laughs]
[Rossio] Yeah.
[Elliott] Although I will say one reason we wanted to do this dice game...
It's essentially a poker game.
Our theory is always try to come up with something
that, if you're doing a movie with effects,
that the effects artists are going to really wanna do,
something that gives them a challenge or something they haven't done before.
The idea here was to do very subtle personal...
It's the idea of the tells or the looks,
as opposed to the big jumping around stuff.
And I think that worked.
[Rossio] In the shortened version of the scene here,
the actual dice strategies do work, but...
[Elliott] As long as you're not playing an aces wild game.
[Rossio] That's right. Aces are not wild in this version of the game.
[Elliott] And the fun thing about this game is that
when we were working on the first movie,
Jack Davenport and his wife introduced a bunch of us to this game
and, nothing else to do in St. Vincent, we played a lot of Perudo.
And then when we were doing this, we said you gotta play chess with Death,
you gotta have the fiddle contest with the devil.
What do you do with Davy Jones? You play Perudo. Of course. [laughs]
[Rossio] Because the scene got shortened, there was a line
that I thought was fairly powerful where Jones says,
"I only bet what's dearest to a man's heart,
else there's no way to tell if he's bluffing.
What a man is willing to risk or not risk, that's a measure of his soul."
[Elliott] There's also, of course, in the longer version,
you see just a game between the crew
and then Jones and Will play two games, and Will wins the first game.
And what he's bet there is his father's freedom.
[Rossio] And then there was also the exchange, Davy Jones asks,
"You're a desperate man. The cause can only be a woman."
Which, of course, it is. Leading back into what vexes a man.
And then Will's response was, "A woman need not cause you to be desperate
if you choose the right woman."
Which was kind of a great retort, I think, for Will.
[Elliott] Like I say, it's not in this movie,
but there is a version of the story
where Will has just won Bootstrap's freedom,
and Bootstrap has just bet it again
out of the thought that he's gotta save his son.
[Rossio] I think in a scene like this, too, you don't necessarily need
to understand the rules of the game,
because you can actually read the ebb and flow
based upon the looks and based upon
even the sort of Greek chorus crowd reaction.
[Elliott] Four fives.
But he bets seven, total of his dice, Will's dice and Bootstrap's dice.
- How many fives are there? - So he has the correct bid.
Will can't do anything now other than make an incorrect bid.
[Elliott] No fives at all. Seven is the right number.
If Will bids over, Jones calls him a liar and he loses.
[Rossio] And he can't call him a liar, because it's true.
- [Elliott] But, of course, it's not... - There's the lost bid.
[Elliott] And Bootstrap... Davy Jones knows it.
[Rossio] Jones knows it.
[Elliott] It would be up to Bootstrap to call Will a liar at that point.
- [Rossio] That's Bootstrap's sacrifice. - He makes a ludicrous bid.
He gives his freedom back up just won by Will.
[Rossio] This moment bugs me here where
really Jones should call him a liar and then lift the dice.
He lifts the dice first and calls him a liar.
I guess what you read is that by lifting it up,
he's made the choice to call him a liar.
But a slight, um... variation from play.
[Elliott] House rules on the Dutchman says that...
...lifting the cup is an automatic liar call.
- [Rossio] Yeah, that makes sense. - How's that? [laughs]
We can wink with the best of 'em. Don't worry.
I couldn't let you lose.
It was never about winning or losing.
The key.
You just wanted to know where it was.
Again, Will playing a game not too dissimilar from something Jack might do.
Make people think the goal is one thing
and end up, no, it was about something else entirely.
[Rossio] There was some debate as to once you know the location of the key,
what should be the method of going in and getting it?
I think that sneaking up to the sleeping guy
and actually taking it out from under him,
you know, might be a bit simple or straightforward, but...
[Elliott] But you make it a great movie scene.
[Rossio] So much fun to deal with that beard.
That beard is such an awesome element
that I think if it was any other situation I might have agreed,
but it's so freaky to have to just even interact with it.
[Elliott] And, of course, here there aren't any tentacles.
Orlando's miming this whole thing,
and then the animation was done around his actions.
[Rossio] Yeah.
I sort of also enjoy that thing where you have to substitute,
and what is he gonna substitute in place of the key?
And he actually puts in the drawing of the key,
which is gonna allow Jones to know...
- [Elliott] The locket. [laughs] - Ah, the locket is back.
- There's a clue. - Jones has a locket,
very similar to the one that we saw in Tia Dalma's shack.
[Rossio] So later on... One of the things you work on
is just, in terms of flow, you know, OK, the key is gone.
Jones is gonna know exactly who took it and who to blame and who to go after
because the key's not there but the drawing of the key is.
[Elliott] Sort of a big "up yours" to Davy Jones
for Will to do that, in a way, if you think about it.
Sort of signing his work.
Here. Take this, too.
[Rossio] This knife is kinda cool in the design of it.
[Elliott] It's also the only thing Bootstrap really has to give him.
We wanted a hilt that was actually...
Had this black-white imagery.
Dark on one side, light on the other. Just one of those little touches.
It actually plays into the end scene to some extent.
But it would taste a lie to say it wasn't what I wanted.
[Rossio] I think Will's vow here
is well done on the part of Orlando.
It's a bit of nobility, a bit of heroism
in such an absurd circumstance.
But it's what, from this point forward, drives that character forward,
all the way through to the end of this film and into the third film.
I will not abandon you.
I promise.
[Elliott] I think there's some interesting characters in this movie.
What can I tell you? Here's a kid who was abandoned,
who finally found his father.
His father says, "Look, I could lie to you and say I had to go do this,
but the fact is I actually did want to do this.
This was an actual choice I made."
And the son says, "Well, look, I'm not gonna abandon you.
I'm not gonna do to you what you did to me."
- Only one reason for that. - Of course.
- He wants the chest. - He did say something about a chest.
If the company controls the chest, they controls the sea.
A truly discomfiting notion, love.
I wonder if we should have made that clear,
that if you control the chest, you can tell Davy Jones to do what you want,
and in that way you control the sea.
- What do you think? - Um...
I have heard people say...
It depends on what that end final scene would have been.
We would have had to have decided that.
[Elliott] Yeah.
[Rossio] Beckett's desire is to gain control of the chest,
of the Flying Dutchman, the most powerful ship in the waters.
- Jack, the letters, give them back. - No.
Persuade me.
You do know Will taught me how to handle a sword?
[Elliott] It's what they've been doing the last year, three hours a day.
As I said, persuade me.
[Rossio] One of the things that we're doing structurally is
creating a desire for various people, various characters, in the story,
all focused in and around the chest for different reasons.
So it's a pretty key moment there for Norrington to recognize
that Beckett is not after the compass,
or he's after the compass as a step toward actually getting the chest.
[Elliott] We originally said, "You never wondered how Will" was the line.
And Jack made it "latest fiancé,"
which I thought was a nice touch.
[Rossio] Yet another compass insert.
My feeling was that the compass should shift over to Jack,
or in the direction of Jack, I should say,
briefly, and then shift back.
Maybe it is shifting back as she looks down there.
[Elliott] I think she's very upset about what she just saw.
[Rossio] I think it should shift over. I would have made it a brief shift.
[Elliott] But, again, I guess it was some of the Disney publicity stuff
that said "Point it to your heart's desire,"
and it's like, no, it's what you want,
and lust happening.
[Rossio] What she wants could waver in that moment.
[Elliott] And this is actually a very important scene, but...
One, Will's smart. He knows this is Elizabeth's dress.
And he's just realized Elizabeth is clear of the death threat
that's represented by Beckett.
That she's gotten... She was the one who got the ship to go to Tortuga.
And she's safe from Beckett.
And that's actually a really important story moment.
Because it does allow Will to focus to something else.
[Rossio] And the thing he can focus on now is his vow,
and there's the source of it.
[Elliott] But it's also, he kind of has the sense
Elizabeth is capable of taking care of herself
once she was clear of that situation.
[Rossio] This was a battle.
The process of signaling the kraken was something that the studio wanted to cut.
It's actually more expensive than you might think,
because it is a CGI sequence.
Gore really held his ground on it and kept it in the movie.
[Elliott] It's kind of important to show how Davy Jones...
But, of course, the true stories behind the movies.
Probably nobody remembers
the old Flipper television show, and I'm talking the really old one,
where they put the little hand-crank horn in the water to summon Flipper,
and that was actually the origin, the seed, for Davy Jones quoting Job,
as they use the entire hull of the ship as a sounding bell.
[Rossio] I've heard some critiques say
that there are too many kraken sequences.
There are only three, and the first one is just a single shot, essentially,
which leaves only two.
I think it felt about right.
- This sequence is really crucial... - Ow.
...to the ending of the film, because without this sequence...
Or what this sequence establishes is this kraken, if it's after you,
it takes the ships down.
It creates a sense of inevitability.
When the kraken shows up, you're not gonna stop it.
See? There's the dress, the cause of all the troubles.
[Elliott] But this also allows Will to see how the kraken actually attacks,
or "kracken," which plays into the final...
[Rossio] Since Will is here to witness the method
by which the kraken takes any ship down,
it gives them much more of a fighting chance the second time around.
[Elliott] The Douglas Fairbanks Black Pirate tribute,
the sliding down the sail with the knife.
[Rossio] I think that was Zach Hudson.
- [Elliott] Orlando's stunt double. - Orlando's stunt double.
But Orlando was up there too, I think, at some point.
[Elliott] Although the sail stuff was actually shot on land. Remember that?
[Rossio] I thought it was shot at sea with the real kraken attacking,
but maybe I just got that from the movie.
[both] We broke a ship in half.
- [Rossio] That was quite a day. - Actually, Dick Crook came out.
How often do you actually get to see people break a full-size ship in half?
[Rossio] Yeah. There was a couple of...
[Elliott] That's likely something nobody will ever do again
in the history of filmmaking, is break a ship in half.
[Rossio] A couple of giant tubes filled with cement
representing the dual kraken arms there.
They said, "We're gonna break the ship, drop 30 tons of cement on it."
[Elliott] That's our only full shot you see of the kraken.
[Rossio] Yeah.
[Elliott] What's interesting here is just something very small and subtle.
- But this is now the third time... - It's our Titanic tribute there.
...that Will has survived a ship
being completely decimated.
[Rossio] Yeah, the guy has a touch of destiny.
[Elliott] I'd say so.
[Rossio] There's something sort of Moses about him floating around all the time.
The interesting interpretation
of the dress moment here,
which, of course, Jones, with his broken heart, would respond to,
is that I like the idea of Elizabeth,
with the dress sinking down, Elizabeth is no longer...
It's like the corset in the first film.
Bootstrap, having witnessed this, there's actually an eruption.
You actually see him physically change into another state,
closer to the Wyvern state.
[Rossio] Yeah.
In retrospect, it might have been cool to have Davy Jones say,
"Dead men tell no tales," at that moment, but that just did not occur.
Of course, in our film dead men do tell tales, but, still,
it would have been a nice wry tribute.
So Elizabeth is now free of the dress,
free of whatever constraints might have come from the dress.
Like the corset in the first film, it's all about what is Elizabeth wearing?
[Elliott] That's the key to the movies.
Who told him of the key?
Jack Sparrow.
[Rossio] Now, Will, at this moment, is riding along on the Dutchman.
From this point to Isla Cruces, I don't think the Dutchman goes underwater.
I think it sails, which is faster.
It's actually shown to go underwater later.
- Here was a cut line... - And she is, in fact, troubled.
[Rossio] Yeah, that marriage is coming back.
One of the cut lines was at that point Jack said:
"I love marriage. It's like a wager to see who will fall out of love first."
You know...
[clears throat]
And then followed up with a proposal of sorts,
but I don't think Jack is proposing actual marriage.
I think he's proposing something quite different.
..."marr-i-age" right here.
Right on this deck.
Right... now.
[Elliott] So Elizabeth's a little bothered by the fact
that there's at least some sort of physical attraction to Jack,
even though she loves Will,
and now Jack is just being...
He's basically just making her feel bad.
I always go back to on the island, of course. He knows she played him,
and so he's kind of gaming her the same way.
He's just kind of getting back at her.
[Rossio] Well, also he's justifying
the issue of the compass, let's say.
He finds himself...
How could he possibly be attracted to Elizabeth?
She's not his type.
But here he's actually fishing and making a claim
that deep down she is his type, else why would he be attracted to her?
[Elliott] Justification?
And then she turns it around and says, "If you're gonna be playing these games,
"I'm gonna play 'em back,"
and it becomes a little bit too much for both of 'em.
[Rossio] Well, yeah, just justifying her interest in him.
And there's a great moment
of challenge here,
where she sets it up to where Jack can't win.
She sets it up to where the only way that you can prove...
The only way that you can gain the rewards of someone like her...
[Elliott laughs]
...is to not compromise someone like her,
and therefore Jack can never have what he wants.
- [Elliott] The fun is, they're both... - [Rossio] Who's gonna break first?
They're saying they want the other one, but they don't want the other one,
and so they're challenging each other, saying,
"This is the only possibility I would ever want you."
[Rossio] It's terms. "I want you but on my terms, not your terms."
"Well, I want you but on my terms and not yours."
And so whose terms are gonna be met?
[Elliott] How do you think she would have responded to a kiss right then?
[Rossio] She wouldn't have allowed it to happen.
I think she wanted to push him as far as he could be pushed.
If he'd tried, she'd have said, "See?"
[Elliott] There's a part of her that would have liked to have been kissed.
[Rossio] That's true. I think she would have held out.
I don't think she would have kissed him.
We don't want the kraken to catch us.
I'm saving me strength for when it comes.
[Elliott] I think it's important to point out
that Jack essentially had to bring Elizabeth to find the chest
and he drafted the three members of the crew
who he thinks are the most expendable in the case the kraken attacks.
[Elliott laughs]
"Krayken."
He's not risking Gibbs or Marty or Cotton or anybody else.
He's risking Pintel, Ragetti and Norrington's lives
to cross water with the kraken after 'em.
[Rossio] The payoff of that exchange was
"If it's so mythical, then why are you pulling so fast?"
[Elliott] That whole exchange came out of the fact that...
How do you pronounce... Is it "krayken"? Is it "kracken"?
[Rossio] Here's a key moment on the compass.
You don't see it, but she's turned around and headed back the other way.
- The needle spun. - And she's done it again.
That's the third time.
[Rossio] Basically, the needle's just going back and forth.
Of course, the reason is she's passed over the very spot,
but she reads it merely as frustration.
[Elliott] This was one of those things where the blocking was so important.
And now she's actually sat... down back
and Jack actually figures out where the chest is by triangulation.
He's seen two points, the third point...
[Rossio] My interpretation is she was the last one to touch the compass
and now it's actually swinging back, pointing to the spot she's sitting on.
[Elliott] Well, no. It was always pointing to the chest.
[Rossio] Yeah.
[Elliott] She walks to one point, walks back,
walks back to the first point, sits down,
throws the compass off to one side.
- Like I said, triangulation. - Yeah.
[Elliott] But, of course, Elizabeth thinks
for some reason she was betraying Will.
That's what she thinks, that for some reason it was actually pointing to Jack.
And Jack, interestingly, knows the truth,
that it was always pointing to the chest.
[Rossio] I love this shot.
This is the equivalent of the "walking underwater" shot of the first movie.
But I wish it had been held just long enough to actually see
a little bit more underwater there.
[Elliott] I think the reaction was appropriate.
[Rossio] It's such a wonderful location and it's such a sort of...
[Elliott] The Exumas.
[Rossio] N.C. Wyeth and was it Pyle?
[Elliott] Howard Pyle, the illustrators.
[Rossio] Howard Pyle type of look, where you get the windswept beach,
you get the white sand, you get the men standing over a chest.
[Elliott] This is something I think people have missed.
Elizabeth has the compass. She wants to find the chest to save Will.
They find the chest.
[Rossio] The letters, by the way, just an odd little detail.
She's looking at it and there's no insert, but there is something written.
- Just for trivia folk... - [Elliott] Kris Peck, right?
- Kris Peck translated the words... - [Elliott] The prop master.
- ...translated the words to... - [Elliott] Angie.
...the Rolling Stones song Angie.
And they could be seen at the El Capitan.
[Elliott] They're in Dutch, but...
[Rossio] A little rock-and-roll tribute there.
You're all right! Thank God! I came to find you!
Jack Davenport has the greatest reaction shot here, as does Jack.
[Elliott] Jack's just trying to figure out, "How'd he get here?"
[Rossio] Now, to me, this is like the big reveal scene,
in a way, in terms of revealing the story to the audience.
I think what we have done
is artfully bring
these three stories together, if I may claim.
[Elliott] There was some level of artistry at least to it.
- [Rossio] Some level, yeah. - [Elliott laughs]
[Rossio] What gets revealed here
with each drawn sword
is each segment of the story.
The Will story wasn't just a father-son story.
It was Will's motivation for the chest.
Jack's drawn sword is, "Well, I've gotta get away from the beast."
[Elliott] The reason the beast came back is because Will escaped from Davy Jones.
[Rossio] And then at the moment of Norrington's drawn sword,
he represents Beckett,
represents the machinations of Beckett that reached all the way to him,
even though he and Beckett never actually met.
[Elliott] I have to say something here about Sharron, our script supervisor.
Will had to lose his sword back on the Edinburgh,
in order to not have a sword in this scene, so he could take Elizabeth's,
so Elizabeth could not have one later.
It was very complicated to keep track.
And I love this moment
because it's something I've been thinking about for, like, ten years,
the idea of a three-way cutthroat sword fight.
To actually get to see it done so well.
This is George and Tom, just did an amazing...
- Guard the chest! - No!
This is barbaric! This is no way for grown men to...
Oh, fine! Let's just haul out our swords and start banging away at each other.
That will solve everything! I've had it!
I've had it with wobbly-legged, rum-soaked pirates!
And I just like actually having...
How many times do you get to see a female character
having like a total meltdown?
[Rossio] It was so fun. Everything was very relaxed until her outburst,
and then everybody was just shocked at the fierceness of it,
and it actually got applause on the set.
[Elliott] Yeah. Although she was really worried about throwing rocks.
She said, "I throw like a girl." She threw pretty well.
- [Rossio] "You are a girl." - Yeah.
If we was any kind of decent,
we'd remove temptation from their path.
[Rossio] Pintel and Ragetti justify what they want as a benevolent act
so that their souls will be not in danger.
[Elliott] Will not be in danger.
Oh. Oh!
[Rossio] "Well, it worked in the end of the first movie, so I'll try it again."
- But not happening. - Nothing. Not happening this time.
Sorry, Elizabeth.
Bugger!
I just like watching this stuff. The choreography and work is so good.
- [Rossio] Again, for me, the story... - Look at the background in this, too.
[Rossio] The audience thinks, "I'm watching a father-son story."
We hide the fact that we're creating motivation for Will in this sword fight.
You think that it's about the letters of marque and freedom
but we're really creating motivation for Norrington to want the chest.
Then, of course, Jack has wanted the chest all along.
- It's about three guys who... - Want the same thing.
Who all end up wanting the same thing
and actually come together at the same point.
[Elliott] This was an incredible set.
This was not there on that island and they built it. It's just...
[Rossio] One of the cut scenes had a little bit of information
about Isla Cruces,
and, for me, it made sense in a way.
Where would Davy Jones put his heart, you know?
He's buried it on land, of course,
a place where he cannot go and he cannot send the kraken.
So that makes sense. He's never gonna be able to go there.
But also to pick a church, and to pick a church where everyone died...
[Elliott] The island was actually a plague island.
[Rossio] Which was another reason for people to avoid it and never go there.
[Elliott] But it also plays into one of the stories about the Flying Dutchman.
It's actually a plague ship,
that it's cursed, it's carrying the plague and cannot land ashore,
cannot come ashore.
- This was a fun bit of choreography. - This was such a difficult shoot.
[Elliott] And so hot. These guys are wearing these heavy frock coats.
Orlando says, "You know, the leather looked really cool,
but I think I just learned something really important about costuming."
[Rossio] Here there was another line that didn't make it into the final cut
but I always thought was cool.
It was also in the trailer, where he says,
"I was nothing more than an almost innocent bystander."
So if you were looking for that line, this was where it had been.
Enough!
[Elliott] I really like the fact that there's Jack
against two guys, who at that point had been united,
he's unarmed,
and he is actually able to get out of it
by manipulating the other two into fighting each other.
More foreshadowing, maybe? [laughs]
[Rossio] It's so subtle, though, just falling into a grave.
[Elliott] Coming out of a coffin? No, nothing bad's gonna happen to Jack.
[Rossio] No. It's barely there to be seen.
I love how Gore was able to do foreground-background,
uh... elements. You know, that...
[Elliott] Of course, doing the bone cages and then this,
there was a lot of question about whether or not,
"Gore, did you get your kids a hamster recently?"
We got a hamster ball. We got a hamster wheel.
[Rossio] There was some question as to
why he gets his head hit on the first go around.
I guess he learned to duck.
- [Elliott] He took that bar out. - Think he took it out?
[Elliott] I know. That actually bothers me. Where did it go?
[Rossio] There are several bars in there, actually.
- Now the sword is gone. - She's missing her sword.
Will has her sword because Will lost his back on the Edinburgh.
- [Rossio] So as a complement... - Lee's signature line.
[Elliott] There you go, lady.
As a complement to the three-way sword fight going on over there,
we're gonna have our own three-way sword fight,
but a three-way sword fight with only two swords.
They have to share them, having been down a sword.
[shouting]
[Elliott laughs]
[Rossio] This was the location of the deadly falling coconuts?
[Elliott] This is, yeah. That's one of my favorite little things,
Elizabeth screams like that.
"Yes, you do that. You don't get to be cool all the time. I'm sorry." [laughs]
[Rossio] I think this location, the trees were so tall...
[Elliott] This and the location where the Black Pearl was on the beach,
there were coconuts falling all the time,
so people were wearing hard hats and pith helmets.
- [Rossio] They're potentially deadly. - Yeah.
[Rossio] I always wanted this turning shot to just go completely upside down.
It comes really close right there, but...
[Elliott] Those guys are actually strapped in there.
- [Rossio] Why not do one complete...? - It wasn't just doubles.
- It was them at points. - Yeah.
[Elliott] This was, again, really fun choreography.
Three people, two swords, throwing them back and forth to each other.
[Rossio] That's Reggie, right?
- One of his dual roles. - That's Reggie Lee.
[Rossio] One of our actors had...
[Elliott] His other role's in 3.
- [Rossio] His other role's coming up. - In the third movie.
[Rossio] This always gets one of the biggest laughs in theaters.
- [Elliott] 'Cause it's so well shot. - Well, the absurdity of...
I think it's funny that it's such a good throw, you know.
[Elliott] That's true.
[Rossio] He just takes one wild, random shot and it pays off.
[Elliott] Who knew Jack had an arm like that, had a cannon for an arm?
[Rossio] I always crack up at the notion of yelling out, "Follow my voice," to...
- [Elliott] There's no ears. - ...a character that has no ears.
[Elliott] The design of this lock, where it's a heart closed and a crab open.
There's some people doing a lot of thought about this movie.
[Rossio] Was that Gore working with Crash?
I think Kris said it was a Gore idea that it looks like a heart and a crab.
[Elliott] Yeah. And, of course, the heart actually has the correct "ew!"...
- [Rossio] It has barnacles on it. - ...factor.
[Rossio] Trailer moment.
[Elliott] It turns out Keira could have been a stunt person
if her career had gone different.
- Very, very good. - There was a fair amount...
[Elliott] They were working so hard on that that Lee started to lose weight.
[Rossio] Too much.
[Elliott] And Gore said either stop learning how to do it or eat more.
[Rossio] Yeah. There's a fair amount of complexity going on here
in terms of who has the heart, who gets it, where is it?
Is the chest empty? Who knows whether the chest is empty or not?
[Elliott] This is such an amazing location,
but that chunk behind them there isn't actually on that location.
That's actually a matte painting.
[Rossio] The water on the beach there goes in and out with the tide.
So that used to be sand and now has water on it.
[Elliott] The difficulty, too, of working in that lagoon area.
The sand, it's sugar sand, it's basically round pellets.
- [Rossio] Your feet just sink down. - It sucks at your feet. You grab it.
So this was actually very hard work for the actors and the stunt people.
[Rossio] Yeah. I think Jack Davenport was losing weight as well,
just from the difficulty and the exertion, yeah.
[Elliott] I just...
"Let's take our characters and make 'em really dizzy." "OK, yeah.
That's a good thing."
[Rossio] All right. Norrington has been united with the letters of marque.
I had the opportunity to be at the recording studio
- where the scoring was being done. - When they were scoring this.
[Rossio] It was just so amazing to hear this music played for the first time
and played in the context of the film.
[Elliott] And they don't have swords because Elizabeth has both of theirs.
Instead of Dead Man's Chest,
we could have subtitled it Not Enough Swords.
[Rossio] That's a pretty good hit.
[Elliott] Payback from the first movie
where Orlando did the same thing to Johnny, so...
I always liked that line.
I thought it was a funnier line than I think everybody else does.
"Leave him be unless you're gonna use him to hit something with."
[Rossio] So at this point, Norrington knows that the chest is empty.
- Jack knows the chest is empty. - [Elliott] And they all go for it.
[Rossio] Jack thinks he has the heart. Norrington is the only one...
[Elliott] Who has any idea where the heart is at this point.
Your bravery is wasted.
I shall pry the chest away from your cold, dead hands.
- Here you go! - Oof!
[laughing]
[speaks gibberish]
[Rossio] It's an interesting time cut coming up
- where we leave the chest here... - Ew! [Elliott laughs]
...and we leave Davy Jones' crew heading back to Davy Jones.
Cutting back to Will now waking up,
there's an indeterminate amount of time having passed.
It's actually a fair amount because it's not too soon...
Uh, it's not... it's fairly soon after this
that the Dutchman is going to appear.
[Elliott] Pulling the boat ashore. There's the reference to the code.
Fall behind, leave behind. That's it.
...you're back, and made it off free and clear.
Maybe a little too blatant there, the juxtaposition.
"Made it off. You're safe. Oh, I guess not."
[Rossio] But if you look now, you'll be able to see
the Hadrus character.
Down there. He's got his head back. So a fair amount of time has passed.
They actually were able to bring the chest back aboard.
It's actually not an error, just a time compression.
[Elliott] Well, our people were able to get back to the ship.
[Rossio] Indeed.
Come to negotiate, eh, have you, you slimy git?
Look what I got.
♪ I got ajar of dirt
[Elliott laughs]
[Rossio] That's pretty much real reactions from the actors there.
[Elliott] They didn't know what Johnny was gonna be doing there.
[Rossio] Or why.
- Hard to starboard. - Hard to starboard!
Brace up the foreyard!
Now, according to...
...actual ship-to-ship battle techniques,
you would never actually make this move.
By turning perpendicular,
the cannonballs actually do more damage.
[Elliott] They go long ways as opposed to sideways through the ship.
- [Rossio] But... - But you get that shot. Come on.
[Rossio] You get that great shot, and we abandoned the actual battle strategies
in favor of ripping open the back of the Pearl
so that the kraken could show up through there later.
And this is just cool, so you can have a really cool Dutchman toy, you know,
- that has triple cannons on it. - [Elliott laughs]
[Rossio] Now, kind of a key point.
Jack knows that with the wind, the Pearl is faster than the Dutchman.
[Elliott] He believes the Pearl is the fastest ship on the seas
and it turns out he's right.
[Rossio] This is kind of a key point from Will's point of view.
Will, from the moment that he knows that Elizabeth is actually safe,
has a desire to keep his promise to his father.
So if the Pearl actually has the advantage,
then the Pearl is valuable to him to keep his promise.
We're out of range!
Break off pursuit, run her light and douse canvas!
We're giving up, sir?
It's nice that there's no line there at all,
just a smile.
[Elliott] I guess on that music Hans actually ran the orchestra
through a Marshall amp,
is what gives it that really distinct kind of fuzzy sound.
We can take her. We should turn and fight.
Why fight when you can negotiate?
All one needs is the proper leverage.
Oh!
Uh-oh.
Where is it?
[Rossio] Funny little bit here was in the pre-vis,
which was computer pre-vis on the sequence,
the Jack Sparrow character kind of moves out of scene...
- [Elliott] Like he's pulled on skates. - Like he's sort of pulled along.
I don't know if Johnny ever saw it
or if just by chance it turns out he leaves scene the exact same way.
[Elliott] He pops up.
[Rossio] Pops up and decides... "I'm outta here."
[Elliott laughs]
Now, there's something really kind of...
Again, it's like, "Man, are we being too subtle?"
It's...
But coming up, the conversation between... Oh, wait. It's not yet.
But it's just the way Will and Elizabeth interact through this entire scene
is, to some extent, supposed to demonstrate
something about their relationship, but I guess it doesn't read.
[Rossio] The idea that they understand each other?
[Elliott] Yeah, particularly in the next bit.
Hold. Hold.
I think we've held fire long enough.
- Will! - Fire!
Oh!
- [Rossio] A key thing there. - The boats all get smashed.
[Rossio] The boats are gone,
or the remaining boats are destroyed.
Moment of victory. Seeming victory.
- We have to get off the ship. - There's no boats.
- [Elliott] Uh-oh. - But there is gunpowder.
Pull the grates. Get all the gunpowder onto the net in the cargo hold!
- Whatever you do, don't miss. - As soon as you're clear.
[Elliott] She knows exactly what the plan is.
It's like, you know, you do that for a reason and...
[Rossio] The thing about Will is throughout,
whether it was Cannibal Island
or into a sequence like this,
he's much more assertive, much more taking command.
He's the one giving commands, making decisions.
There's only half a dozen kegs of powder!
Then load the rum.
I love Kevin's moment of acting
after the delivery here of the line.
- [Elliott] The casting... - [Rossio] He says the line.
[Elliott] The actors we have...
[Rossio] Just that little bit of pain.
[Elliott] But it's just a great cast.
It really was. Finding out what they can do, you just say,
"Man, is there nothing they can't pull off?"
[Rossio] Kind of key here that, again, just the blocking of it
is that the land that Johnny,
or that the Jack character is opposite on the far end of the boat,
so the kraken is headed in his direction.
[Elliott] I always wonder if the boat reads
further away on screen
than it actually was when we were shooting it.
It looks like he's been rowing for 15 minutes,
whereas he's only been out there for...
I think that it was about 15 seconds, 20 seconds away from the boat.
It's just the current took him out so quickly away.
And I like the contrast between
how you get the Dutchman crew to turn the capstan
and how you get the Pearl crew to do it.
It's a very important difference between where you wanna be in your life.
[Rossio] The shot coming up...
- [Elliott] Ew! - ...of Jack Sparrow in the rowboat.
A lot of discussion as to where the compass should point.
Many versions were tried.
It was finally determined that you could not show any insert of the compass
that wouldn't have the potential to be played incorrect.
[Elliott] We trusted Johnny to play it.
[Rossio] There is something nice about the ambiguity there.
[Elliott] Interestingly, I think that compass is pointing towards land.
[Rossio] I think it never changes for Johnny, for Jack Sparrow.
I think the whole movie it's pointed directly... Well, I won't say.
[Elliott] Well, see, I actually think at this point...
Well, it's true. I mean, there's a lot of ways to go.
Here! Come on! Come and get me.
[Rossio] I like that the plan here
is sort of Jaws-inspired, in kind of an odd way.
You're not entirely clear what they're trying to do, but there is a sense...
[Elliott] I think he is trying to feed this to the kraken,
because he knows the next part that comes is the kraken's mouth.
[Rossio] Feed it to him and then you're gonna blow it up.
It's never really stated, but you can read it that way.
[Elliott] Will's aware he doesn't want these things coming through the boat,
'cause that's the end of it.
He's trying to blow these things off before...
Which is why he's yelling, "Shoot it now, even if I'm here."
"We can't let the boat get destroyed."
And Ragetti actually saves Elizabeth. Hm.
[Rossio] Coming up one of the great lens flares of all time.
[Elliott laughs]
It's a very Frazetta-inspired moment.
- [Rossio] Is it Frank Frazetta? - Frank Frazetta, yeah.
[Rossio] There it is.
The grabbing of the leg
is a very sort of rock-star, heroic pose,
very Frazetta.
And now we're headed up toward
sizzling, frying kraken bits all over the ship.
[Elliott] We wanted to sell those in theaters
when they were showing the movie.
I don't know why they didn't. It could have been as popular as nachos, I think.
Sizzling, crackling kraken bits.
[Rossio] This next scene was actually, I think, written in the morning.
- Or revised, I should say. - [Elliott] There was a version...
[Rossio] Because of an insight.
[Elliott] It was just we didn't give Jack time to say goodbye to the Pearl.
That was really what it came down to. And we realized we needed to do that.
And it worked into the blocking as it had been rehearsed.
It was just him having some response to this idea of "abandon ship."
Abandon ship. Into the longboat.
Jack. The Pearl.
- [Rossio] The performance here is... - That's so... "It's only a ship, mate."
It's so important. In the first movie he talks about what a ship needs,
hull and keel and deck and sails, the material,
versus what a ship is, which is immaterial, the idea of freedom.
And here he says it's just a ship, it's not freedom anymore.
[Rossio] At this point, Jack knows the handwriting is on the wall.
They can't escape via boat, and there's no way to save the ship.
I love the fact that he turns around.
The question is, is he at this moment
contemplating going down with the ship or not?
What would he have done?
[Elliott] I'd argue Jack would not have voluntarily gone down with the ship.
- But there's a reason he's OK. - Is he contemplating it?
[Elliott] Yeah, I think absolutely.
I always knew you were a good man.
[Rossio] The kiss. Louise Bagshawe, the novelist,
had a great description of that that she wrote to us.
It was, "With the kiss-of-death scene Elizabeth gets to both slake her lust
and literally drown her guilt."
[Elliott] For feeling lust for somebody other than Will.
[Rossio] Would she have been so severe on Jack had she not been tempted by him?
When he's dead, he's no longer a temptation.
It's after you, not the ship.
It's not us.
And she has to admit that she did feel something,
that she does have this desire as well.
But then she holds back.
[Elliott] I just wanna point out another thing I really like.
The chain. The first time they met, it was about him being shackled
and using her to escape from that.
And here it then comes back again.
[Rossio] Interesting point here...
[Elliott] Orlando is... This is such a tough thing for any actor to play.
I mean, because the whole thing is he's just gotta be...
It was like he was hit in the face with a shovel...
- [Rossio] Again. - ...and has no idea what's going on.
He doesn't wanna react incorrectly, but...
[Rossio] Something that doesn't get debated on that,
on that betrayal to Will, so to speak,
is how much did Elizabeth weigh the fact
that the only way to save Will was to kiss Jack?
[Elliott] I think that was everything about it.
[Rossio] Of course she wants to save everybody, all the people she can,
but of all of them, that kiss may have been done
out of a desire to save him more than anybody.
[Elliott] Like Louise said, slake her lust, drown her guilt
and save the man she loves.
[laughs] It's a threefer.
But this really was one of those things.
We actually came up with the basic of this ending,
the idea of Elizabeth
sending Jack to his death to save Will,
back when we were working on the first movie.
The first time somebody talked about sequels,
we said that would be a really good ending to go for.
[Rossio] If you know that there's this chemistry between the two characters,
you ask yourself the question, "What is the one situation
"where you could get a kiss between them and it would be legitimate,
true to all of the characters?"
And that was the solution.
[Elliott] We also knew that it was a very tough thing to do.
I mean, name a movie where one of the heroes kills the other,
kills another one, to save somebody else.
It's not something that happens a lot, but we knew the greater...
[Rossio] You don't find that in Star Wars.
[Elliott laughs] Yeah, Leia wasn't the one who encased Han in quartermite.
I don't think so. Or carbonite or whatever that stuff was.
But it really was about knowing we had Keira,
that she could do this, and...
...make the character real in all those responses.
It's what really gave us the confidence to do it.
[Rossio] You still feel sympathy for her.
- Credit to the studio for going for... - [Elliott laughs]
...a seemingly wildly daring and risky proposition,
with the characters, with the story.
Credit to Nina Jacobson and Bruckheimer,
Chad Oman, Mike Stenson.
They had a lot of faith in going with the very nontraditional story line
and very risky choices throughout.
[Elliott] When I was talking to Mike and Jon Turteltaub,
director of National Treasure and stuff, after the premiere,
they were basically going, "This thing defies movie physics.
You shouldn't be able to have Cannibal Island
and that ending in the same movie."
And, of course, the idea that not even Jack could beat the devil,
but it doesn't look like the devil feels like he won, either.
Damn you, Jack Sparrow!
So maybe if you can play the devil to a draw
or at least make him think you have, maybe that's good enough.
The one edited... Ah. This...
[Rossio] A little bit was lost out of this scene,
having tracked the sword...
Norrington's sword through...
It's in the room there.
Part of Norrington getting his life back,
and even improving his life.
[Elliott] After he delivers the heart,
there was the moment where he says, "Is this good enough for a privateer?"
And Beckett says, "I think we can do better than that"
and he gives him his sword back.
Jack just plays it so... We always talked about the line from Sweeney Todd
where he says, "At last my hand is complete."
- [Rossio] The sword back in his hand. - He's got his life back.
- But then what's the cost? - Yeah.
And I guess just length issues, we had to leave the scene.
[Elliott] Yeah, it really was just needing to sustain from Jack's death.
Jack the character, not Jack the actor. [laughs]
[Rossio] It's an odd and interesting question as to whether Tia Dalma
let everybody know of Jack's demise,
because she read it in the tea leaves or something
or if she actually knew that it was doomed to happen.
[Elliott] We'll find out a little bit more about Tia Dalma
and realize that she had a real stake in keeping Jack alive
and so would have been keeping track if she had.
[Rossio] There's the light and dark.
[Elliott] It didn't really play, but it was a good thought,
and it made the knife distinctive, and that's...
[Rossio] This was one of the most moving...
[Elliott] Aren't these the two most beautiful women you've ever seen?
I apologize. Usually I don't say that type of thing on the commentaries.
[Rossio] It was one of the most moving days to be on set,
because all of the actors were affected by the scene that they play.
...you could have captured the devil and set free your father's soul.
Doesn't matter now.
The Pearl is gone, along with its captain.
[Elliott] There's Will's priority.
[Rossio] Along with the possibility he had to actually recover his father.
He fooled us all right till the end,
but I guess that honest streak finally won out.
I love the candles.
[Elliott] Her guilty look about his honest streak.
[Rossio] She does raise her glass here. She does it very briefly.
- But she is willing. - But she can't drink.
[Rossio] She raises it but she cannot drink.
Will does the most heroic thing here, willing to get past everything
and turn to her and offer her sympathy,
help, an olive branch.
Ultimately, her suffering is the priority, not his own feelings.
If there was anything could be done to bring him back...
[Elliott] I don't know that Will expected to be taken up on that.
[Rossio] No, he presumes there is no way.
[Elliott] Little does he realize.
What would any of you be willing to do, hm?
Would you sail to the ends of the Earth and beyond
to fetch back witty Jack and him precious Pearl?
[Rossio] Music was such a key aspect to make this scene,
right there where it shifts.
Aye.
Something funny about a guy with one eye saying "aye," along with the parrot.
Yes.
[Elliott] Will waits for what she says before he makes his decision.
Aye.
All right.
But if you go and brave the weird
and haunted shores at world's end...
[Rossio] She says "at world's end."
...you will need a captain who knows those waters.
[Elliott] This was an ending we knew,
whether we were doing one or two sequels,
this was how it was gonna end.
So tell me, what's become of my ship?
[Rossio] That was always the final line from the very first time we wrote...
[Elliott] Geoffrey was just so pleased to be back for the third one,
and we were going, "No, you don't get it.
You're the guy who's gonna make everybody walk out of the movie
having really enjoyed themselves."
We always said that Geoffrey's appearance at the end
was the kick that people would have coming out of the theater.
- [Rossio] Without him, you could not... - I feel like going, "I know him."
- I know him. Dariusz, beautiful job. - Oh, man, there's a talented guy.
[Elliott] Rick. What can you say?
[Rossio] You could not have lost Jack Sparrow, had Elizabeth's betrayal,
unless you actually had Geoffrey Rush to come back at the end.
- [Elliott] Yeah. - It was so key.
[Elliott] Well, we've talked enough.
Enjoy the credits. There's a little thing at the end. [laughs]
[Rossio] Yeah, and thanks for watching and thanks for listening.
And right now the subtitle of Pirates 3
is Pirates of the Caribbean... At World's End,
and we hope to see you all there.
- [Elliott laughs] - OK. That's it. Goodbye.
[drumming]