PAUL: Any grey hairs?

Oh, they are coming.  They are on my ass.

PAUL: You had a reasonably hard time on this epic?

It was exhausting, but I wouldn’t say it was…I think it’s a bit more of a duration issue. It’s a bit mad to take on two movies at once.

PAUL: Why do it? 

Why do it?  Because there are still a lot of stories to be told with these characters.  I didn’t feel that way with ‘The Ring.’  I didn’t know where to go with it when they talked to me about doing that.  And ‘Pirates,’ there was no plan on making a 2nd or 3rd movie when we filmed the first one and then the studio said, ‘Could you do two more?’  And that was sort of challenging to construct a trilogy in reverse so to speak.  That was exciting.

PAUL: You wouldn’t have been able to get away with a 2 1/2 hour ‘Ring.’ do you think kids might be put off by the length?

I think there is a lot of story.  I think films end up at the length that they end up at.  There is a whole lot of story in this movie.  I think 13 year-old kids, based on the first movie this is only six minutes longer than the first one.  There is a lot that they come back for.  There is a lot of density that they appreciate and come back.  And that was really helpful in looking at a blank page and saying, ‘How do we make three movies?’ All that, you know when you construct a character you want to feel like you can open a door and there is a whole movie behind that character or this character.  Even though they are incidental characters, you can’t afford to tell their story in a particular movie.  Those loose ends became assets.  Bootstrap Bill, East End trading company and how was Johnny branded and all those things that you are looking at your loose ends of the first movie, they become, ‘Why was this boy floating on a raft?’  Well at the end of the trilogy I want to understand that. That’s the fun part.  The rest is just work?

PAUL: Is it any harder to do the third one?  Do you feel like you’re in the home stretch here?

Starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  But, you know, my wife said, ‘You’re no longer the architect you’re the contractor.’ And I think that sort of how you feel when you show up everyday – 200 days of shooting.  You really are in the salt mines.  You get up, you get on a bus, you drive, you go, you shoot, you gaff (?), you go home and you remain inspired because of the people that you’ve surrounded yourself with. 

PAUL: How do you make sure that doesn’t affect the film when you’re so tired?

Jumping jacks.  Jumping jacks.  No, everyone just gets up on…it would be more of a if you weren’t in Dominica, and then in St. Vincent, and today we’re doing bone cages and tomorrow we are doing a four page dialogue scene and then we are back on the wheel.  We are in storms.  There is a lot of real low-tech filmmaking going on even though we have Davey Jones and you have these visual effects.  There is a lot of this movie where you take a boat out to sea and if it’s raining everyone huddles under an umbrella and they clean off the lenses and it’s hand held with a bounce board.  It’s not clinical, y’know?  There is like salt that you have to clean out all the cameras with q-tips. It’s like a tactile…it’s a bit of a rush every day.  It would be a nightmare if it was all on stage and you drove to Burbank every day.  It’s kind of invigorating and the Ocean in particular, kind of sprang in your face in the morning or taking a boat to a location.  You wake up.

PAUL: What was the toughest of the big set pieces?

I think if you ask the actors, the wheels because it was sort of a torture chamber.  The bone cages were fun.  I can’t pick one thing.  The bone cages, the wheel.  Technically Davey Jones.  Orchestrating the ships is always a problem.

PAUL: What was the weather situation like?

We just waited it out.  When we were in the Bahamas we were in this area called White’s Key which is just this bit of sand that fluttered every day.  Half of the day it was underwater by about a foot and half the day it wasn’t.  And we just went there with handheld cameras and we had to shoot where they find the chest and the sword fight on the beach. Beautiful location, but it would rain and here comes the rain.  You’d see it like four miles away.  It was a grey thing that would come and everyone would huddle up and jus wait it out.

PAUL: Any worse than normal?

Just standard Caribbean shooting.

PAUL: Are you going back in August or before?

We are actually not going back. We have shooting that is going to be off the coast of California. A little bit of water, but a lot of stage work left.

PAUL: How much more do you have to shoot?

About 70 days.

PAUL: Was it helpful doing the two films together?  Did you actually save money?

Absolutely, you get to amortize your ships.  On the first movie I think everything was sort of thrown in a dumpster.  Movies are incredibly wasteful in terms of wood and lumber. When you are on an island you give it away and everyone uses it to make houses.  When you’re in Los Angeles, I think it’s recycled I suppose.  They get to keep everything.  They get to keep a lot of sets. The Black Pearl is now built as a real seagoing vessel.  In the first movie it was towed around on a barge.  So, you can certainly amortize sets, you amortize…the biggest thing to take advantage of is you’re never going to get this cast and the writers and everybody back together again. Once you have had to negotiate everyone’s deal and get everybody to commit, it’s much better to make two.  If we’d just made the second movie and then three years down the road tried to get everyone back together I think it would have been a different thing.

PAUL: How do you feel about having your ride as part of a revived attraction at Disneyland?  Is that something you find sort of cool?

I’m kind of a purist, I like the ride just the way it was.  I just make the movie. 

PAUL: Would you do another ‘Weather Man’ type film after this?

Certainly.

PAUL: What’s going to be on the DVD?

What’s going to be on the DVD?  Probably the movie I would hope. (Laughs.)  What ended up on the editing room floor? 

PAUL: Extra scenes?

I haven’t even gotten into it.  We just, just finished the film and we’re already prepping for the next shoot.  So, I suppose I have to go back and try and come up with some stuff for the DVD.  There aren’t really whole scenes that were omitted, but there is a lot of pieces of scenes and more information about characters.

PAUL: Do you expect to have a preview of the next “Pirates” on the DVD?

I don’t know if we’re going to have enough shot or the visual effects completed.  These DVD’s come out so fast now, I dunno.

PAUL: How nerve wracking was it doing all those performances and not knowing whether the CGI would work or not?

The biggest challenge was how we were going to loose Bill Nighy’s performance, his character, his acting.  Because, really, you put actors together and you shoot a scene and you don’t want to drift away from that and get lost with the clay or the CG clay, so to speak, as you put all that stuff on him. And there were a lot of challenges with Bill’s performance, because he has so much with his chin and there is no jaw line when you put those tentacles on. And his profile is so strong and there really is no nose on Jones. So you have to do a lot of, ‘what is he doing there? And how does that translate into his tentacles and everything else?’  So, we did a lot of split screen – the guys at ILM, Hal Hickel and John Knoll, they were fantastic in preserving Bill and they were inspired by his performance.  A lot of animation you are going to work from 12 basic facial impressions and you modify them to achieve your performance.  They couldn’t do that with Bill because he never repeated anything and he was so completely unique and original.  And all of that stuff sort of translated.  I showed him pictures and he knew what he was.  He showed up on set with dots on his face and a grey suit. Everyone else was dressed like pirates and he feels like he was a member of Devo or something and yet he completely commits to it. (Laughs.) He would look at Stellan Sarsgaard who had four or five hours in a chair and he wished that he was Stellan, because at least he kind of knows what he’s getting.  If you film Stellan in a scene, that’s it, he’s done.  I think now Stellan wishes he was Bill, because they can see the end result.  They did a fantastic job in retaining Bill Nighy’s character.

PAUL: He has very distinctive eyes.

Yeah, they are computer generated.  I originally intended to keep his eyes.  I don’t want to not have something going on behind the eyes and that’s the thing that computer’s can’t do very well.  Little compressions in the eyes.  His pauses and drifting off and how the pupils kind of spread when someone is thinking about something of having a memory.  Really difficult stuff to do, but we didn’t use any of Bill’s real eyes.  We ended up using completely CGI, because it just became too cumbersome to use his real eyes.  And also, when we started to look at what we could achieve, we are sort of crossing over a threshold with the work ILM has done with Davey Jones.  And that was really reassuring.  A lot of it is just done by hand.  You’re just constantly, you script the image and you’ve got Bill and dots on his face and what you’ve shot and you’ve got the animated version of Davey Jones.  You step through it frame by frame, and you move and you go, ‘Look at what he’s doing here with his lower lip.  And look what he’s doing here.  And that pupil is compressing.’  And you kind of really steal his performance. But, it’s not like you put it through a computer and turn a knob and it comes back at you. It’s a lot of talented animators working a lot of hours to retain his performance.

PAUL: Can you talk about how the three man actors may have changed since the first one?

Elizabeth and Will, their love was sort of infantile in the first movie.  It was very cute and pure and they are growing up.  In looking at where we are going to end up in the third movie, I think the second movie is where they have to deal with real issues of love.  I think in the first movie it was more storybook love.  It was sort of, ‘Oh, isn’t that cute.’ It hits all the traditional buttons, but it doesn’t take you anywhere, because it’s not that complicated.  In the second movie, we are dealing with real life.  You deal with jealousy; you deal with how they are going to end up.  For them to survive, it’s an interesting parallel which gets more elaborated in the third film which is the love story of Davey Jones and why did he pull out his heart?  And how that relates to the love story of Elizabeth and Will.  I mean, are they same path and are they going to pull out of that nosedive and what’s going to happen.  It’s just important that the love story became more complicated.  A marriage has to survive.  It doesn’t exist in that storybook world.

PAUL: Can you talk about any changes in Johnny Depp’s character?

Johnny’s character?  Well, it’s a really tricky one with Captain Jack, because I don’t think he’s the kind of character that you want to give a tremendous arc too.  He succeeds.  He’s such a piece of garlic in the soup that you need seven straight men against him. He can’t just rub against one.  He needs to rub against a series of archetypes and a series of plot constructs. You have to somewhat make the movie without him and then put him in.  Because if you just made the Johnny Depp movie it’s just too much of one flavour, it’s such a (unintelligible) performance that you need some kind of broth to put it into. 

PAUL: Do you tell him if he’s too over the top?

Well, we have lots of discussions about when is too much, too much.  We go for it and then in the edit room, we kind of go, “O.K., that’s one too -- we’re getting ridiculous here.” We like to go back to ridiculous, but we like to keep it absurd and always have a little bit of tension.  The thing about Jack’s character is that there is an honest streak.  And I think that’s what we always keep coming back to.  Jack thinks he’s a bad boy, but he would love to not be as kind of good as he really is.  So, the myth is out in front of him, but the truth is he’s a pretty honest guy.  He just hates that about himself?

PAUL: What do you think about the expectations of these movies by the fans?

I think they are just impossible to manage.  I think we have a lot of fun on this film and I think we are going to approach it as a fantastic ride and the characters are evolving and the story is evolving.  I think hyped films always get blown way bigger, so at some point expectations are always going to be hard to deal with. I’m just think I’m not going to try to live up to those expectations, I’m going to try to live up to mine as I make the movie.  And these are the films that I would like and these are the films I enjoy and these are the films that surprise me, because expectations are expectations.  I don’t think audiences want what they want; I think they want what they haven’t imagined yet. I don’t make shoes; I’m not trying to make something comfortable.  I’m trying to make something that takes you to a different place, that isn’t what you’d expect.

PAUL: And if people are disappointed?

I don’t think people will be disappointed. (Laughs.)

Paul Fischer is originally from Australia. Now he is an interviewer and film critic living in Hollywood.

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