I'm Jay Wolpert, and I was one of the writers on the film.
Good day. My name is Stuart Beattie. I was the second writer.
This is Ted Elliott, and the next voice you hear will be...
This is Terry Rossio.
We wrote the screenplay
and cowrote the screen story for the film.
[Stuart] My stuff is mainly in the first half of the film.
The latter half of the film is more Ted and Terry's work.
This opening scene
originally came from the first writer's draft, Jay Wolpert.
This was a great way to open a film.
Especially a pirate film.
You're probably expecting a big sea battle,
but we open up in fog and it's quiet and eerie.
To me that gave a great eerie tone.
[Jay] I did what was called a cake, which is, an approach to the movie.
I wrote my draft, by the way, in the Andaman Sea, on a tall ship.
I did research as I was writing. It was a great way to write this movie.
[Sturat] Ted and Terry came in,
Academy Award-nominated writers of Shrek.
They were ready to listen to the idea of undead pirates.
Or the pirate skeletons, which were so much a part of the ride.
[Ted] I wanna give Terry credit for one of the smartest decisions.
We wanted, obviously, to work the elements of the ride into the movie.
And one we were stuck on was the song.
We wanted the song in, but we could not find a way to justify
a bunch of pirates singing that song.
[Terry] It would undercut some of
the intensity and villainy of the pirates.
It occurred to me that one way to bring it in
would be through the young Elizabeth character,
almost as if it is a children's song that she was taught back in England.
[Terry] I love this parasol. I don't know why Gore put it in, but it works.
Again, that weirdness of what is going to happen.
Preparing the audience for something perhaps a bit different.
[Stuart] Norrington was, in my draft, in league with the bad guys.
He wanted power, he wanted to rule the Caribbean.
He was first gonna do that by trying to marry the governor's daughter
and gaining power through marriage.
When she turns him down in the first act,
he goes into league with the bad pirate captain,
whose plan, in my draft, was to take over control of the Caribbean,
much like Henry Morgan did in the late 1600s.
[Jay] The biggest challenge in writing a swashbuckling pirate picture
is the balance between character and action and comedy.
That is really the challenge.
- Pirates. - There's no proof of that!
It was probably an accident.
[Terry] There's a moment coming up
that is so key to the whole romantic relationship
between Will and Elizabeth.
Since there are only two kids that you see here,
you immediately start to...
...associate them together as a pair,
as somehow appropriate.
The moment that I think is very telling
is when she reaches down and moves his hair aside.
From that point on, you know those two will end up together.
[Stuart] First acts set up characters.
What people want, why they can't get it.
We had to set up that Elizabeth is the governor's daughter,
and she's secretly in love with Will.
But she can't marry Will, because he's a blacksmith.
Great love stories always have
one central conflict keeping the two apart.
As long as you focus on that one thing in every scene that they're in,
then I think you're on the right track.
[Terry] The fun little moment here is because she took this pirate medallion,
she actually starts the film as a pirate, as a thief.
She goes to the end of the ship to look at it.
That explains how she's the only one who sees the Black Pearl out there.
But then, as she wakes up, you immediately start to question it.
Was that a dream? A memory? Was it partly real?
[Ted] How much really happened?
How much of what we saw is what she believes happened?
[Terry] So then we see that certainly the medallion is real.
[Ted] For people who are interested,
Elizabeth is the protagonist of this story.
It's Elizabeth's actions throughout
that propel all the other characters into action.
[Terry] And also just from an almost technical screenwriting point of view,
she's the access character into the story.
It's told from her point of view.
So she has to be in a scene for us to see what's going on.
Or a character that she introduces us to does, or one related to her story.
Such characters also become our point of view characters in the story.
I have a gift for you.
[Ted] It was nice that Governor Swann let his wig go gray gracefully.
[Terry] Back to character introductions.
The first thing we see Elizabeth do is steal a medallion.
I love the way that Swann comes in
and even on something that minor, he's still concerned with propriety
and what she should be doing.
[Ted] I love the warmth Jonathan Pryce brought to the part.
We wanted the immediate impression to be "Here is the uptight, stuffy governor"
in the same way we wanted the impression of Norrington to be,
"Here's the wig-wearing, tea-sipping,
pompous British aristocrat."
I'm told it's the latest fashion in London.
Well, women in London must've learned not to breathe!
My Lord, you have a visitor.
- [Terry] This is the first big laugh. - [Ted] Listen to the sound effect here.
[Terry] But the first thing we see Will Turner do as he comes in is...
[Ted] Something stupid.
[Terry] He's clearly not comfortable in this strata of society.
[Ted] I wanna say just one thing.
Orlando Bloom signed to the movie
the day before he showed up to shoot this.
He came right in and just got the character.
He had about ten minutes to work on the stuff with the sword.
The flip and everything.
There are a couple of outtakes
of that sword becoming dangerously unguided.
But how well he plays this scene is amazing.
Everything you need to know about the character comes across here.
[Jay] I've said this before, I never met a sword I didn't like.
I have loved...
...swashbuckling movies since I was a child.
[Terry] I love when Keira comes down and sees Orlando.
Her hand goes to the corset where you know that the medallion is.
That's just a little callback to say yeah, it's still there.
[Stuart] You really get a sense, especially when he says here
that he won't call her by her first name, he'll call her by her title...
That's a clear indication that he knows his place
and the great divide that exists between them.
We really must be going.
Come on.
Good day, Mr. Turner.
Come along!
Good day...
...Elizabeth.
[Ted] Something to keep in mind is how Johnny is introduced as Jack Sparrow.
It's a great character introduction and there's a lot of reversals in it.
Of course, you believe he's on top of a stately ship, but he's not.
[Stuart] One of the greatest entrances I've ever seen for a character.
The audience gets a huge kick out of it
and they're right into him right from the beginning.
They know all they need to know about Jack Sparrow.
That is very clever writing. That's really well done.
[Terry] Johnny gets four introductions. He gets the joke of coming off the mast.
- [Ted] That reversal. - [Terry] He gets the hanging pirates.
I love the fact that there's one noose that's empty.
[Ted] Now here's something of interest.
Everything Johnny's doing in this scene, he's doing backwards.
The mast actually didn't sink.
They were raising the water level and somebody was pushing the dock in.
It was a bit of the magic of movie making.
I thought it was very peculiar.
[Terry] His third introduction is this grand shot
of stepping aboard the dock.
It's a shilling to tie up your boat to the dock.
And I shall need to know your name.
What do you say to three shillings,
and we forget the name?
Welcome to Port Royal, Mr. Smith.
[Terry] This is his fourth introduction,
his duping of the dock master here.
Giving him money and getting it back.
It all plays into Johnny's character.
He's a guy who, no matter how bad things go,
feels that somehow the universe will come around to his point of view
if he can just hang on long enough.
Confident enough to throw dust in everyone's eyes,
create havoc and figure that he can then turn it to his own advantage.
[Ted] He's up to something sneaky.
The characterization, the personality of Jack, was what we wrote.
The expression of that personality is pure Johnny Depp.
It was... How did you put it?
"Exactly what we described, but nothing like we anticipated."
[Jay] Johnny Depp. An actor even more than he's a movie star.
He's really good. He's a great actor and a very brave actor.
I wish we could con him into doing this
all over again cause he's so terrific.
This dock is offlimits to civilians.
Terribly sorry, I didn't know.
If I see one, I shall inform you immediately.
[Ted] This scene here,
the conversation between Murtogg and Mullroy and Jack,
is exactly as we wrote it in our first draft, pretty much word for word.
I think Johnny threw in a couple of words.
One original line was "There's some sort of fancy to-do." He added, "high-toned".
"How did you merit an invitation?" He made it, "How did two fine,
upstanding gents like yourselves not merit an invitation?"
He just kept adding more and more words, making his part larger and larger.
[Terry] One of the things about Johnny's performance...
[Ted] Wait. I want to point out that there is
a cinematic predecessor to Jack Sparrow,
as evidenced in this scene, and it's Bugs Bunny.
Bizarrely enough.
Jack Sparrow is a classic trickster type of character,
which is a character archetype that I really love.
You don't see many of them in Hollywood movies,
but it always works.
Characters like Groucho Marx or Bugs Bunny
are the predecessors to Jack Sparrow.
[Terry] The way that character works,
which a lot of the critics certainly have missed,
is that that character needs to work in a reality world where he can work.
So Murtogg and Mullroy here have to play a certain level of absurdism
in order to justify Johnny's actions.
Here comes the Bugs Bunny moment. "How did he get over there?"
[Ted] Right there is one of my favorite shots.
Just that one shot of Johnny with the hand on the wheel.
I just love that shot. His expression and the attitude.
And here he goes again. Jack Sparrow is the type of guy,
if he didn't feel that the reward for his arrest was large enough,
he would saw Florida off the USA and send it down to Cuba.
That is the kind of guy Jack Sparrow is.
[Terry] Johnny also keyed into another Warner Brothers character, Pepe LePew,
a guy who believed the world was different than how it actually is.
I thought that was really interesting.
[Stuart] Here's the same scene I had with Norrington and Elizabeth.
He's saying, "I want to get married to you and live happily ever after."
In my draft she went as far as turning him down.
Which triggered him into his plan B, working with the bad pirates.
This is when the curse plot starts to kick in with Ted and Terry.
[Ted] I like this scene,
because it could have been played wrong so many ways.
Now you start to find out there's a bit more to Norrington than you'd expect.
[Terry] One of the big discoveries for us,
was that Keira is a comic actress, she's just amazing.
Her physical humor, her comic timing is as good as anything I've seen.
[Ted] This moment here was so important.
The way we imagined it was she had to just vanish.
So quickly that you couldn't comprehend that she was falling off a cliff
until you saw her fall off the cliff.
[Terry] Trivia buffs, when Johnny down there says,
"And then they made me their chief",
he's telling yet another version of how he got off the island.
[Ted] The Robinson Crusoe version, where he befriends the cannibals.
[Terry] Exactly.
[Ted] The other thing, in terms of production trivia...
Keira fell off the fort,
which was actually just south of Los Angeles.
This was in the Caribbean.
Johnny dives off the ship in the Caribbean
and then rescues her in a tank in Long Beach.
So basically there's what,
4,000 miles between those three shots.
8,000 miles total, back and forth.
[Terry] I love it when
characters take quick action that gets us into the next scene.
Like that dive, where he immediately says, "OK, I'm going in."
There isn't a lot of lead time or preparation.
Just bam, we're on to the next thing.
[Ted] One of the things that I really thought was very funny was the fact that
because of the production schedule,
Keira had not actually been in the water in any of these outfits
when she was shooting this scene.
So, when she was finally rehearsing,
like in the water and she's wearing the shift,
or when she was training to do the tearing off the dress -
she said to me, "When I first read the script,
I thought the tearing the dress off thing was gratuitous."
[Terry] Which it was.
[Ted] But then she said, "But it weighs so much, nobody could swim in it."
I said "Right, at the beginning it's not gratuitous."
"The strip on the plank, that was gratuitous."
[Terry] We love that this is a film about a corset.
If the corset had not been too tight...
It's fun to get away with such an obvious symbol.
[Ted] Societal constraint, propriety.
[Terry] It's extremely blatant, but it works.
[Ted] Trivia, The East Indian Trading Company
did brand pirates with a "P."
But they did it on their foreheads, not on their arms.
But the decision was made.
We could have had it on his forehead. you rarely would have seen it,
but it would have lurked in people's minds
that Jack Sparrow has this huge P branded on his forehead.
So we went with the historically inaccurate brand on the arm.
Well, I don't see your ship...
[Ted] In a lot of the dialogue, we actually wove in
important elements of the plot and characters.
One of them is the introduction of Jack's compass.
It's introduced as a joke. It doesn't work.
But of course, later on you find out, "Wait a second."
"That compass leads to Isla de Muerta."
Then you understand, "Oh. Jack has always known where Isla de Muerta is."
Commodore, I really must protest.
[Stuart] There's nothing like seeing your words come alive.
That's what you do it for. The screenplay is the blueprint.
So to see the actors say your lines, to see the sets,
to see the story come alive, and then to see an audience respond,
that's what it's all about and that's what happened here.
And my hat.
Commodore.
- It is Elizabeth, isn't it? - It's Miss Swann.
[Stuart] One highlight of Johnny's performance,
as drunk as he seems most of the time,
every now and then we see he's really dangerous
and he's one step ahead of everyone else.
That was always the idea for Jack Sparrow.
I was in an animal phase when I wrote this.
Elizabeth Swann cause she's graceful.
Sparrow because he needs to be free and fly like a bird.
I stopped short of naming Will, Will Bear or something.
After two characters named after animals, it starts to get a bit obvious.
Jack Sparrow just has a great ring to it.
Great pirate name.
Poor Royal Navy soldiers. It doesn't pay to be one of them.
You just get beat up
and hit upon and killed by undead pirates.
Now, will you shoot him?
Open fire!
[Stuart] It was clever to cast Johnny in a big action movie
because he doesn't do big action movies.
He brings that air of originality to it that is just so fantastic.
You couldn't ask for better than this.
Pirates works because it's all our childhood dreams
to grow up and be pirates and sail the seas and be free.
That's really what Jack Sparrow represents. And it's just fun.
Audiences are dying for something fun and original.
Look lively, men!
[Terry] Here's the first meeting between Jack and Will.
It's one thing to do a sword fight
and make it interesting, inventive, exciting.
But the accomplishment is to actually do a sword fight
and have character interaction.
I particularly like how different lines are interwoven.
The sword fight is not only conflict between the two characters.
Each character illustrates their position, their beliefs.
It's more than just simply trading insults during the sequence.
[Stuart] There are two ways to write a good sword fight.
One is to say, "Will and Jack face off and the battle ensues"
and leave it to the choreographers.
The other way is to go through it and write it in a way that is exciting.
You don't use passive verbs.
There's no, "He is standing." It's, "He stands."
That creates the more immediate action, the immediate tension.
And you write it crisply and sharp
and you figure out what the room is and you figure out what the elements are.
You create that emotion on the page
that you want the audience to be feeling.
If you want it to be a funny sword fight,
like in The Princess Bride...
That was all written out by William Goldman
because it was informing character.
The best action beats inform character. And you'll see it in this.
When you have action separate from character,
it'll end up being boring.
The best action scenes speak to character.
This makes you laugh at and with Johnny and gets you, again, more on his side.
[Ted] The key to action scenes, this is how Terry and I do them,
is they've gotta be story scenes. They've gotta carry plot and character
and the action itself has to demonstrate plot and character.
We provided the outline for the fight choreographer
and specific actions to say,
here's Will's strategy and here's Jack's
and here's the goals they both have.
Jack just wants to not fight with this guy
and get the hell out of there
and Will wants to basically kill himself a pirate.
Particularly a pirate who threatened Elizabeth.
[Terry] Will will always... it's very subtle,
but he'll always let Jack have time to recover.
He'll always engage him in a classic, fair way.
Whereas Jack, as it will be revealed, is perfectly willing to cheat.
[Terry] People might think Will throwing the sword and pinning Jack in the room
is a setup for later.
But that was written before there was going to be a need for it at the end.
We looked back at it and then used it.
[Ted] Really it was a case of, "Will has this ability. Let's use that."
Not "Let's set up Will's ability for later, here."
[Terry] It was a discovery made in the course of writing the story.
[Ted] We did not write a donkey. This was something that was added in.
I'm not sure exactly who it came from,
but it created this movement in the scene
in opposition to the movement of the two men fighting.
It's really a great addition. It really works well.
I do.
And I practice with them.
[Terry] One of the discoveries we made in writing this scene,
which we made fairly late, was, "The Will character makes swords."
"We have a roomful of swords. We can grab swords from anywhere."
"We can lose them, we can pick them back up."
You're not a eunuch, are you?
I practice three hours a day so that when I meet a pirate,
I can kill him!
[Stuart] Good films have at least one central relationship.
You hear the term buddy movie,
but it all comes from
the relationship between two people and their tensions.
The characters are what you remember. Plots come and go.
And that's one of the great things about this story, this film, these characters.
You remember them and they're funny and you like them
and they grow and they learn, which makes the film that much more enjoyable.
If you didn't care about them
you'd be watching a ten-minute fight scene and you wouldn't care.
You'd eating your popcorn, checking messages on your phone.
But because you're invested in them, and because of how it's choreographed,
where it's very, very specific to their characters,
you're totally involved in it.
[Ted] More trivia. The soot used here is chocolate powder.
So you've got some chocolate covered Bloom there.
Just thought I'd mention that.
Jack had to be a very morally ambiguous character.
The audience should never be sure about him.
Is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy? What is he exactly up to?
When we wrote this scene and he had the gun on Will,
he actually raised the gun before he said "This shot's not meant for you."
Johnny played it so that he held the gun on Will the entire time.
And the line is almost a plea,
saying "Don't make me shoot you."
It increased that moral ambiguity of the character
in a really terrific way.
You've assisted in the capture of a dangerous fugitive.
Just doing my civic duty, sir.
I trust you will always remember that this is the day
Captain Jack Sparrow almost escaped.
Take him away.
[Stuart] This is a funny scene, an homage to the ride,
It reminds you that this is inspired by the ride in its most general sense.
The ride doesn't have its own story, just vignettes.
So we weren't looking to make a movie out of the story of the ride.
We were looking to make a story that stood on its own,
that had little vignettes from the ride that you could wink at
and give the audience a laugh.
[Terry] This scene with the maid here
was suggested by Jerry Bruckheimer
to get more understanding of Elizabeth's character.
And it works very well.
But... the Commodore proposed!
Fancy that!
Now that's a smart match, miss, if it's not too bold to say.
It is a smart match.
He's a fine man.
He's what any woman should dream of marrying.
Well, that Will Turner,
[Jay] I love writing strong women
because they don't have the weapons to be strong that men do.
You do a John Wayne scene
where he beats the heck out of Ward Bond in some bar
and we know "Oh, boy, don't mess with him."
But women don't have that easy way out.
So their strength has to come in more subtle and more complex ways
and it's always a challenge.
[Terry] Black Pearl came out of a character, oddly enough.
We needed a name for the ship that would be appropriate
for Barbossa to be in,
also something appropriate for someone you end up liking, Jack,
and so Black Pearl kind of gives you both.
[Stuart] The attack on Port Royal was always central to get the story going.
Just to explain how it morphed into this...
In Jay's draft it was Elizabeth on a boat returning to London
to go marry a gentleman of proper stature
and the bad pirate captain hijacking the boat and kidnapping her.
In my draft, it became more of a stealthy attack,
with the pirates kidnapping Elizabeth.
It was pirates sneaking in, killing the guy at the door and kidnapping her.
Will being the only one who knows what's going on,
chasing them, trying to rescue her and failing.
And the pirates taking Elizabeth to their pirate captain.
In this draft, it's the full scale assault,
where they're really pillaging the town.
It's a good example of how things change from draft to draft.
[Ted] This was amazing, being on location for this.
This was so complicated. All of this was shot at once.
This was all a single take. Well, this was Universal Studios.
The stuff on the beach and on the docks was shot in the Caribbean.
This approach to the boat, the gunfire, the pirates coming off,
this was by shot multiple cameras in a single take.
And what was extraordinary was that they got it in one.
They did two takes, they always do one in case something goes wrong,
but the first take on this...
I have to say, the stunt coordinator and the stunt guys were extraordinary.
They did an amazing job.
[Stuart] There were pirate conventions we had to follow.
In reality, pirates were murderers, rapists and cutthroats
not the kind of people you want to hang on to.
But they've been romanced over hundreds of years
into this great swashbuckling Errol Flynn image.
Pirates never walked the plank, pirates never buried treasure. They spent it.
When you talk about pirate conventions, they're really untruths.
But you still have to acknowledge them, because that's what we know.
And you're not making a documentary.
So that's why you want walking the plank and the buried treasure.
And then you wanna play with argh and avast and matey and be's.
"I be this and I be that."
That helps describe the world that we know of as the pirate world.
So right from the start, all my dialogue was much like that.
And we had all those ideas,
the buried treasures, the planks and so on.
[Terry] There's a key moment coming up here that probably wouldn't be noticed,
in fact, shouldn't be noticed. But the maid here very overtly states
that they're here to kidnap you, you're the governor's daughter.
And that's laying in information for a very difficult scene to write,
which was all the way forward on Barbossa's ship.
The notion was to put it in Elizabeth's head, and in the audience's head,
- so that she doesn't give her name. - [Ted] This is the moment right there.
This shot of Keira looking at Mackenzie
is where I fell in love with Keira.
Where I knew this was the right actress in the right role.
[Terry] Again, she's this amazing physical actress.
[Ted] She commits to the character completely, and plays it fully.
There's so much that she does with the eyes and the expression, it's wonderful.
[Terry] It reminds me of some of Lucille Ball.
- [Ted] Carole Lombard. - [Terry] The great physical actresses.
[Ted] The moment with the maid...
That moment causes the audience to accept
when she gives the wrong name to Barbossa.
[Jay] There are basically three categories, in my view,
of a swashbuckling movie.
There is the one I call "dark at the bottom of the dungeon,"
which is a serious swashbuckling movie.
For example, The Count Of Monte Cristo,
in which there's a dark crime, or a dark menace.
Then there's the stylish adventure.
This has more "fun" fun in it.
You may not be quite as involved with the characters
and you may not be living or dying with them, but you are involved.
A good example is The Mask Of Zorro.
Scaramouche is the quintessential example of that.
The 1948 The Three Musketeers is a very good example of that.
There's a third category.
Pirates Of The Caribbean belongs to almost its own category.
It's what I would call the rollicking high adventure.
You still care about the characters. You don't care desperately about them.
Whether they live or die you kind of care about,
but practically anything else can happen.
Because you are so involved with the good time you're having
with the special effects
and the running and jumping, that it's OK.
So you begin with a tremendous involvement in character
when you are dealing with the dark kind.
Then as you move to the other categories
there's more emphasis on action and comedy and less on character.
Say goodbye!
[Terry] So far there really hasn't been a lot of supernatural stuff going on.
It was fun to actually do the slow reveal,
but the idea was, this is the guy that had an axe thrown into his back.
You'd think he'd be dead, and here he is again.
Will looks at him like, "How could you still be alive?"
But that is supposed to play as a hint
that these pirates are supernatural and more or less unkillable.
My sympathies, friend. You've no manner of luck at all.
[Ted] I just wanna point out, Jack is the worst escaper of all time.
He does not escape...
There's a hidden Mickey. There you go, Disney fans.
He does not escape from anything on his own.
But again, as Johnny put it,
that run-between-the-raindrops attitude of Jack.
He's always trying to get out,
and turns the world to his advantage so he gets out,
but he actually is incapable of escaping from anything on his own.
[Terry] Again, Johnny's performance is amazing,
but it is framed by all the other characters.
It's sustained by the situations that he gets put in.
Everything goes into a performance like that, cinematography, editing,
but particularly the other characters,
who have to create the environment for him.
[Ted] Here's another moment to pay attention to the information.
You get that these guys know each other,
but it's actually establishing a timeline,
that Jack was on the Black Pearl
prior to them going to Isla de Muerta and becoming cursed.
That he knew about the curse, but didn't actually believe it.
So that's important information,
but it is hidden, or woven in with,
the forward movement of the story.
That's where Jack realizes that if they're cursed,
all the stories he's heard about them wanting gold
and needing Bootstrap Bill's blood to get the curse undone are also true.
He's seeing a way for him to get the Black Pearl back.
[Terry] I like that well into this movie, it's the first truly overt...
[Ted] Supernatural moment.
[Terry] A cue to the audience that says yes,
there are ghosts in this movie, there are walking skeletons.
[Ted] This introduction of Barbossa actually matches the one of Jack.
Jack is in the light, Barbossa's in the dark,
but they're both standing above everything else.
One of those odd things...
that came out of conversations between Terry and Gore and I
is Terry and I are big fans of Sergio Leone westerns.
They take western conventions and add this air of mythology.
Some of the characters
in the Leone westerns are basically gods.
They are more than just mere mortals.
They get involved in mortals' lives,
but mostly the issues of the gods belong to the gods.
That idea is actually played out with Jack and Barbossa.
They are the light and dark of the same trickster archetype.
Again, here is basically Barbossa...
The thing with the vocabulary and not understanding,
you could see that being something Jack would do.
The deal he makes, the loopholes he finds...
They are paired in that way.
One is the light side of this trickster
and the other is the dark side of the trickster.
I saw it eight years ago on the crossing from England!
Did you now?
[Stuart] There's a thousand things you can do to make a story better.
You can't use them all at once, but you find what works for the story.
But one that is a constant in action movies, at least,
is ensuring your villain is the biggest, baddest villain you can come up with.
That makes it harder for your hero. It's all about obstacles.
If it was easy you'd have no drama, no conflict, and it'd be boring.
You have to pitch your heroes against impossible odds.
Then you've got something good.
Once they overcome them, you involve the audience.
If you can get them to ask how they are ever going to succeed
and then they do succeed,
you're hooking your audience in and that's great storytelling.
David and Goliath. The same ideas go back to the Bible.
Storytelling from thousands of years ago.
The bigger the enemy, the more triumphant the win,
the more you're involving your audience.
Our bargain?
[Terry] This scene was actually set up with that little maid scene.
It's a very tough scene and it only works
in conjunction with the following scene in the jail cell,
where the audience is cued that the name Turner is important.
She only picks the name Turner
to avoid revealing that she's actually the daughter of the governor.
[Ted] One of the things that just came down to...
Having seen young girls and teenage girls that I know
when they liked a guy, trying out the name.
You could see if Elizabeth had a peachy or a keeper catcher,
she would have written on it "Mrs. Elizabeth Turner."
Mr. Murtogg, remove this man.
We have to hunt them down! We must save her!
[Terry] This is a favorite moment because it's such a linchpin scene,
but it's so well hidden in conflict between Will and Norrington.
We've got Murtogg and Mullroy and they mention Jack Sparrow.
The whole movie would not have happened
if it wasn't for these background, comic characters
piping up about Jack.
But why did they bring up Jack?
Because Jack did mention the Black Pearl.
- Why did Jack mention it? - [Ted] He wants his ship back.
[Terry] It's Jack Sparrow throwing out whatever he can throw out,
this information about the Pearl.
Had he not done that, Will wouldn't have heard it here
and the whole movie wouldn't have happened.
Do not make the mistake of thinking you are the only man here
who cares for Elizabeth.
[Stuart] Three things to becoming a pirate.
One, steal a ship. Two, make a black flag.
Three, declare war against the world.
That was the idea with Will, to take him through that.
First he steals the ship with Johnny.
Then, in my draft at least, they made a black flag.
Then the end battle was declaring war against the world.
It's a great journey for a character.
First he reviles pirates and then he has to become one
to rescue the love of his life.
It's an island that cannot be found.
[Ted] Orlando's performance here
just says everything about this character.
He doesn't wanna tell him what the real reason is.
The amount of anger in this guy
and this character comes through so well.
[Terry] Part of what's fun about Jack Sparrow is
he is aware of the notion of storytelling while he's in the story.
And right there, he does a little bit of mocking
the story that Will is in.
Will is trying to be the hero of his own tale
and go off and rescue this fair maiden.
Johnny's very aware of not only what's happening,
but how they will play in legend.
[Ted] He understands clichés. He plays off them very well.
There's also, just in terms of what it's like working on a script...
We had done a couple of drafts
and then we realized that it was very important for a later scene
that Will knew that the name of the captain of the Black Pearl was Barbossa.
Then we realized there was no point in the story prior to him knowing it
that we established any way he could have known it.
So we rewrote Johnny's dialogue there.
Initially, when Will says, "Where does it make berth?"
He says, "Haven't you heard? It sails from an island no one can find."
And we changed it to,
"Haven't you heard? Captain Barbossa and his crew of miscreants," etc.
Johnny got the new pages and he goes,
"I can't believe you're giving me exposition."
The guy is canny. He knew exactly what was going on.
We said, "Yeah, OK, it is exposition."
"But we gave you the word 'miscreants'." And he goes, "OK."
So he did it in that singsong, light delivery that made it work so well.
Nautical term.
One question about your business, boy,
or there's no use going.
[Stuart] This stealing the big ship to get the small ship
is one of the things that I'm most proud of.
Cause more than anything,
this whole sequence was from my draft.
It's action, but it's action informing character.
I knew they needed to steal a ship,
which again was part of Will slowly becoming a pirate.
How do they steal a ship? OK, who are they?
Jack Sparrow's not just gonna steal any ship. He wants the fast ship.
Pirate ships were small and fast, used to get away in, to hit and run.
That was the pirates' specialty.
This whole sequence was trying to say, "The small, fast ship can't be taken."
"Let's take the big ship, which has very few guards."
"Then they'll come out and chase us,
and we'll take their ship when they board our ship."
Again, that helps define these characters, it defines Jack.
Half the fun is that Will has no idea what Jack's doing
and thinks, "This is insane. We're gonna die."
But Jack's one step ahead of everyone.
Aye! Avast!
This ship cannot be crewed by two men.
You'll never make it out of the bay.
Son...
I'm Captain Jack Sparrow.
[Stuart] "I'm three steps ahead of you and you don't even know it."
And that's what we come to realize.
It's what's great about Norrington thinking he's a joke.
He's just the opposite, cause he does the unexpected.
Rash, Turner.
Too rash.
He is, without doubt, the worst pirate I have ever seen.
Here they come.
[Stuart] This always gets a good laugh when people realize what he's doing.
See, he knows what he's doing.
That's why you end up trusting him, and... loving him.
Because he's got it all figured out,
as much of a buffoon as he pretends to be, he's really very sharp.
And he's getting everything he wants.
Sailors, back to the Interceptor! Now!
[Stuart] That was cleverly cut together, the way it was directed and edited.
It gets it going to the point and you get everything you need.
Again, that's where you see he's ten steps ahead of everyone else.
That's the kind of thing that gets you totally invested in the hero,
which is paramount in these movies.
You've gotta care about the leads, about whose story this is.
The second you lose that, you lose the audience
and it just becomes another loud, boring action film.
One of the things that succeeds so well in this story and in this movie
is these characters are so great and they stay in character.
That's got to be the best pirate I've ever seen.
So it would seem.
[Terry] In this scene, Will has noticed
Jack only started to agree with him once he found something out.
The audience noticed it.
The rule is, if you have to cue it to the audience,
then let your lead character clue into it too.
Because that way he's at least as smart as the audience members.
You knew my father.
I knew him.
Probably one of the few who knew him as William Turner.
[Stuart] I researched this when I wrote Quest Of The Caribbean 12 years ago.
I watched all the old stories.
Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, all of them.
They were the ones that I was trying to emulate.
That tongue in cheek tone,
but still with the real jeopardy, real stakes going on.
And I looked at less successful ones,
Cutthroat Island and The Pirates Of The World,
to make sure that I avoided those pitfalls that those stories made.
That was very much a part
of making sure we got it right.
You always wanna know who your predecessors were,
what shoulders you're standing on.
So studying all those old films is important.
For instance,
you can accept that your father was a pirate and a good man,
or you can't.
Pirate is in your blood, you'll have to square with that someday.
[Jay] The wonderful thing about a ship is it has wonderful stuff.
You've got great props to use.
One of the happiest moments for me
when I wrote my drafts
was the utilization of how on a ship...
A pirate ship is a collection of props.
You can go on forever, throwing stuff around.
So it's great fun, it really is.
[Stuart] This is the famous Tortuga scene from the ride
that we had to have in there somewhere.
[Terry] Ride references coming up here.
[Ted] There was a guy chasing a woman back there.
There's the guy on the barrels.
[Terry] The drinking out of the barrels with the shots in them.
[Ted] And this is the redhead. "We wants the redhead" from the bride auction.
If you look really closely, there's a banner that says, "Buy a bride."
And of course, back in the background you can see others.
[Terry] This is the kind of place where the pirates spent their money.
Why there was never any buried treasure. They spent it in these places.
Cursed y'are for breathing, you slack-jawed idiot!
Mother's love!
[Ted] We see Gibbs as a member of the Royal Navy in the prologue.
You don't ever expect to see that guy again.
Here he shows up, and he's now a pirate. The guy who hated pirates is a pirate.
We're just expecting the audience to fill in this guy's story.
[Terry] That's what's great. We give no hint as to how that happened.
It's interesting that it did.
[Ted] He's drinking, and not a good sailor at the beginning.
He has problems with Norrington and with authority.
And that's the only hints we give to how he ends up.
People chasing in the background,
but one thing you can't see is the goat on the bar.
Now... what's the nature of this venture of you'rn?
I'm going after the Black Pearl.
I know where it's going to be, and I'm gonna take it.
Jack, it's a fool's errand!
[Ted] Again, this scene has a lot of
tip of the iceberg information woven in.
There's been stories told.
It goes back to the jail cell, where the guy has heard stories.
And Murtogg has heard stories
and dismisses them as being not true.
Here we feel Jack knows a lot more
about the Black Pearl and that situation.
- [Terry] We also start to set up... - [Ted] The leverage.
[Terry] ...another key scene that's coming up.
Which is that, at some point,
Will has to understand that he can't trust Jack.
And that Jack doesn't have his best interests at heart.
There's also another reference to the importance of the Turner name.
All of which we're holding back, but all of which is...
[Ted] Being set up in this moment here.
The toast they do here came from the crew of the Lady Washington.
When they're pulling into a dock,
"Take what you can, give nothing back" means pull in as much slack as you can
and don't let it go.
So it's an actual nautical reference that was a perfect pirate toast.
You'll be dining with the captain, and he requests you wear this.
Tell the captain I'm disinclined to acquiesce to his request.
[Ted] This was a lot of fun.
[Terry] Our desire to get Keira
in as many great outfits as possible takes over again.
And here she gets to be the pirate maiden.
[Stuart] Women in pirate movies have always been great.
And fun. It's fun to write Elizabeth.
She's feisty, she knows what she's doing.
She's independent, she's strong-willed,
and doesn't care about how she looks when she eats.
It's a lot of fun to write.
To put a woman into this mix of cutthroats and scalawags
and not have her just be standing on the sidelines batting her eyelids.
We wanted her much more involved than that.
We wanted her in the action, doing stuff and very much a part of the plot.
She is key. It's her being kidnapped that triggers the story.
Then it's Will's love for her that gets the story going after that.
People ask if this is an adventure or a love story.
I think it's a love story at heart.
Because there wouldn't have been a story if Will didn't love Elizabeth.
It would have been Elizabeth being kidnapped, full stop.
But because he loves her he goes to all these lengths.
That's what drives him, and the story.
At the end of the day it's a love story between these two people.
Separated by class, then the worst thing in the world happens,
and it ends up being the one thing they needed to get them together.
That's good storytelling.
[Ted] When Terry and I were working on the technical aspects of this scene,
one thing we knew was that we wanted to have moments where people told stories.
Stories about their lives or about other characters.
And this was one of the major ones, the revelation of the curse
and how the pirates discovered they were cursed, and the effect that had.
Basically this is a monologue.
It's a three-page monologue for Geoffrey.
Then when Geoffrey came on board
we must have spent 20 or 30 hours with Geoffrey just on this scene,
refining it as he created his performance,
as he came to understand how he would perform it.
And we came to understand the information we need him to say
and what he can do with a look or a sneer or a lift of the lip.
Geoffrey's process was that he always wanted to discuss the scene,
talk about the scene, the character, the lines, rehearse it,
and I was amazed.
Long after I thought we had it, he still wanted to refine it.
- [Terry] It kept getting better. - [Ted] I think it works. Also...
...in this scene, there's a very important part about the curse.
Whoever takes a piece of gold out of the chest becomes cursed.
I don't know how people missed this, because he emphasizes it once.
He talks about the chest, and inside was the gold.
"We took it all."
[Terry] I love that we got to use the word "slake" in the story there.
"Slake our lust" is my favorite phrase.
Great performance by the monkey.
And the... blood to be repaid?
That's why there's no sense to be killing ya.
Yet.
Apple?
[Terry] He actually says, "Arr". I love that.
Here's a key moment in terms of the mechanics of the curse.
There is blood on this knife here.
So the pirates, while they cannot be killed, do bleed.
And we made a very strong point of that,
so it made sense to return the coins with the blood repaid, so to speak.
[Stuart] This is a great reveal.
Seeing the pirates in all their glory and skeletons.
Great moment.
This scene is about putting a woman in the middle of the action
and seeing how she does.
[Ted] The idea is not that the pirates are actually skeletons
who by daylight look like they have flesh.
In daylight, in anything but moonlight, they are flesh and blood.
They're simply immortal.
Whereas by moonlight their real state is revealed,
and this is basically a personification, an embodiment of greed.
These guys have been starving and thirsty
and frustrated for ten years.
[Stuart] That's a great monkey.
By the way, you've gotta watch the end of the credits
to get the last little snippet with the monkey.
[Terry] Gore Verbinski had to fight for this sequence,
cause it is expensive and it's so key.
[Ted] The moonlight serenade.
[Terry] The movie has teased the whole notion
of it being a ghost story
and it being supernatural for so long
that it was time to come out and give the audience a real taste of it.
It's very powerful, I think, that we have a villain
who, in...
...a profound way, is sympathetic or at least in a sympathetic situation.
You actually feel bad for the state that they're in
and the amount of torment that they've been through.
[Jay] It's interesting about villains.
The most interesting villains have contradictions.
Deep down, they are not entirely who they are showing us.
In Geoffrey Rush's case, although he's doing all these heinous things,
there is a suspicion that he's not a bad guy at the bottom of it all.
There's a vulnerability about him.
And after all, he's a man who is weary.
He is weary of not living and I think he lets that out.
I have seen much bigger stinkers in my life than Geoffrey Rush.
[Ted] In terms of production, this was probably the hardest thing to shoot,
because we had this location for exactly one day.
And the scene as written was at least a day and a half to shoot.
You had all of these characters, you had the bird.
You had to keep all of the modern aspects out.
Just on the other side of the camera is a town. There are cars driving around.
[Stuart] Funny enough, in my old script The Quest of the Caribbean,
I had a mute and a parrot, a parrot that talked.
And I purposely didn't put them in my script for legal reasons.
And then they turned up anyway.
Cause you can't have a pirate movie without a mute and a parrot.
[Terry] The parrot was actually necessary
because again there's some ride references that need to be done.
And having the parrot say different lines
gave us an access back into the ride.
[Ted] Anamaria's introduction here is important
because she is a woman pirate.
It's really very simple.
[Terry] I always wonder if people got the notion, or if it was clear,
that Anamaria's boat that Jack stole
was the boat that sank at the start.
Nor am I sure if it's clear that's why Jack says yes to Anamaria,
because he knows the storm is coming and he's going to need
every able-bodied person.
[Ted] I think that he knows the storm is coming is clear.
Jack has a larger than life aspect.
He is tied into things differently
than the other mortal characters.
This was miserable for the actors, shooting this.
This was actually out on real water,
with fireboats spraying them down at 3:00 in the morning. Not fun.
The compass doesn't point north,
but we're not trying to find north, are we?
[Stuart] I was ten when I saw Raiders Of The Lost Ark
and I thought it was the greatest film ever and still do in many ways.
That's what I was always trying to emulate, but on the high seas.
And, uh...
...and that meant, you know, real action.
Real jeopardy, real stakes.
A great bad guy, and impossible odds.
Time to go, poppet.
[Ted] So Terry. Was the Black Pearl actually cursed?
Is there a curse of the Black Pearl? On the Black Pearl?
With the Black Pearl? What's the story there?
[Terry] Despite the subtitle,
there is some question as to whether the Black Pearl is a supernatural ship.
Certainly the production design seemed to allow it to move about very quickly
with sails that didn't seem as though they would be all that functional.
And wherever the Black Pearl goes,
there is fog following it, preceding it,
and certain environmental changes.
But, technically speaking, the reason the Black Pearl is the fastest ship
is because it has the oars,
and not necessarily supernatural power.
[ted] Although it does have a supernatural aspect,
even when it's under Jack's command.
But that's not relevant to this story.
[terry] That would be more a sequel.
[Ted] Back when we were shooting the stuff in Tortuga, talking to Orlando,
I mentioned it would be fun, at some point,
if Will imitated Jack in his delivery.
I just meant if he gave a little twist to the words.
Later, Orlando said,
"It'd be more fun to actually imitate his movements."
And so he suggested that to Jerry Bruckheimer.
Jerry was worried that people understand what's wrong with Jack Sparrow.
Why does he act like that? Why is he so goofy?
So then we got the note
that there has to be a place where Will does this physical imitation of Jack.
And we realized it would work in this scene,
because it is a scene where Gibbs talks about Jack.
Will is asking a question about him.
The most difficult line I had to write was Gibbs' response to Will's question.
He says, "Is that why he's...?" and he does the imitation.
The response, "Reason's got nothing to do with it"
was the single, hardest line we wrote.
Because it had to allow Gibbs to get back to the story.
And in a way,
I hate to put it this way, but it also...
...a reason is given, heatstroke...
...left on an island, that Jerry wanted.
And then we immediately negate that as the reason why Jack is the way he is.
[Terry] But that works.
All the audience needs is a possible explanation.
Of course the fun is, is Jack sunstroked? Is he drunk?
Is he sly like a fox? Is he crazy?
[Ted] As always, he's the trickster. You can't pin this guy down.
It's just not his nature.
[Stuart] He'd decided pirates were like rock stars in their day.
Who's the greatest rock star? Keith Richards.
And he got out the eyeliner and a mouthful of gold teeth,
which they scaled back to one or two gold teeth, but that was it.
What's great is he gives just enough looks every now and then
to let you know that he's ten steps ahead of you.
And that he really is calculating, he knows what's going on.
[Terry] One of the fun things we realized in doing this story structure,
pirates are always associated with buried treasure.
Taking treasure, putting it in a cave, burying it, coming back later.
But there's not a lot of logic to that.
Here, we give a reasonable explanation
for where the legends may come from.
[Stuart] Smaller characters can provide a lot of color
to a script and make it whole.
A lot of your greatest laughs are from side characters.
So they're very important to keep aware of.
I always populate my stories with those characters
and not just think about the main people.
That gives you a more complete world.
Here are more homage's to the ride.
We knew we wanted a boat in a cavern and a crab and a guy with a skull
cause that's one of the iconic images of the ride.
[Ted] That moment is designed
from one of Mark Davis's original sketches for the ride.
Mark Davis was one of the Imagineers,
actually the guy who really created the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride.
[Terry] That was a case where we actually needed a cue
to bring up the notion of betrayal that is on Will's mind.
But how to justify him bringing it up?
We went to the ride and looked at different images
and said, "Well, here's a skeleton with a sword stabbed in his back."
[Stuart] In my draft, we had a whole scenario of how they got in there
and there were traps all through this place, in this Isla de Muerta.
It was like Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
But in the end, it just delayed the story.
You wanted to get in there, get to the treasure, and keep the story moving.
This was on a sound stage at Disney. In Burbank.
[Terry] Here we do justify this treasure.
They've been gathering treasure they can't spend,
sifting through it to find these coins.
[Ted] And they've been robbing ships to return the coins to this chest,
because the curse can only be lifted if all of the gold is returned
and if all those who have taken gold out contribute blood back.
Of course at this point they believe
that Elizabeth...
...has blood they need.
[Stuart] At this moment Jack knows
the curse won't be lifted with Elizabeth's blood.
[Ted] He knows it's Will's blood they need.
[Stuart] He's off to bargain with Barbossa,
keep Will out of the picture...
[Ted] And sell Will out. In exchange for the Pearl.
They've all given blood.
[Stuart] Geoffrey Rush's eyeballs deserve...
[Ted] An Academy Award nomination, absolutely.
His performance...
...the match between he and Johnny is perfect. It works so well.
Barbossa is the dark side of Jack Sparrow in a big way.
Here's our hero...
...knocking out Jack Sparrow and leaving him to the pirates.
Imagine if Luke Skywalker had knocked out Han Solo
and left him to the mercy of Darth Vader? That's not gonna work.
[Stuart] He's a more substantial than the usual straight character.
[Ted] I was talking, in terms of, "Is that going to work?"
setting up the idea they're gonna cut her throat.
But they don't. They cut her hand.
The real important thing is, at this point,
Will is still operating under societal constraints.
He has not yet accepted piracy
as a necessity in his life, obviously.
He's late. He doesn't get there in time.
He doesn't save the girl.
It's only because of Geoffrey's character
that she's still alive.
The whole "waste not" idea.
This was our spoof on all those movies where,
to establish how evil the villain is, he shoots one of his own henchmen.
I've always thought that's a reason why they would have no more henchmen.
But here we actually could justify one and they still stick around.
But it does presage a possible mutiny.
Was your father William Turner?
[Ted] I'm just pointing out here...
...Barbossa takes the coin out of the chest. He's already cursed.
Elizabeth isn't cursed. She did not take a coin out.
But there goes the coin that was taken from the chest, the medallion itself.
I just had to point that out.
[Terry] It does track. But why aren't those other coins stained with blood?
I guess once it goes in, the blood must dissipate somehow, magically.
[Ted] Not all of them have to be stained. There aren't 882 crew members.
- [Terry] But the others have no blood. - [Ted] The blood is all at the bottom.
It's like a parfait, Terry. Everybody loves a parfait.
Here was something really funny.
The monkey was trained to point with his other hand.
So when we were shooting the sequence, they couldn't shoot the monkey pointing.
They actually, uh, Mark and Ursula,
the animal trainers, had to work for like three weeks,
training the monkey to point with that hand.
There's the realities of production.
You can have stunt monkeys, you can have double monkeys, backup monkeys.
But if you don't have one that can point with his right hand,
that'll stall the production.
[Terry] Funny how Barbossa looks to the monkey, the monkey points,
Barbossa understands what the monkey means.
And he then has the ability to not only see that Elizabeth is gone,
but notice that the coin,
amongst all that gold, the key medallion is also missing.
[Ted] They're looking for oars, and here's the only one.
It's the one that Will used to knock out Jack.
You're supposed to be dead!
Am I not?
[Ted] I also like that Jack is suffering from having been hit on the head.
He doesn't immediately recover.
...parsnip... pars-ley...
...Partner, pardoner...
Parley?
That's the one! Parley!
Parley!
Parley?!
Damn to the depths whatever muttonhead thought up parley!
That would be the French.
[ted] When Terry and I set out to write this story,
we wanted to recapture the feel
of those classic Hollywood swashbucklers.
One missing element was the turns,
these great turns for character actors.
You don't see a lot of that,
particularly in summer movies.
These wonderful character turns are just sprinkled throughout.
When we were working on the script we pretended
that we had a whole studio full of great character actors under contract.
So, if, you know, it was like, um...
...with Murtogg and Mullroy the idea with those two guys was,
we had this vaudeville team with one really famous routine.
Put them in the movie as the guards, we adapt the routine to pirate legend,
and play it that way.
And while writing Gibbs, we always thought, "This is the Alan Hale role."
[Terry] Then Pintel and Ragetti.
Again they just came together and played off each other so well.
[Ted] Every actor so loved doing this movie.
They got to all be pirates. How often are you gonna get that chance?
I know whose blood you need.
[Terry] There goes the chess match between those two again.
That idea of the two gods coming together and battling it out.
And the mortals just have to look on.
Usually when Ted and I work together
what we do in terms of process is work out the structure.
In this case, in terms of writing the structure of the movie,
as a writing partnership, we will typically divide up scenes.
We'll write them on our own, then trade.
The main thing is that the scenes be worked out to fit into the whole
before they can actually be written in first-draft form.
[Stuart] I have five rules of screenwriting.
Rule number four is always save the kiss to the end.
Keep that tension going all the way through.
Will they or won't they?
So always save the kiss to the end.
The other four rules... Number one is no bookends.
Number two is no bookends. Number three is never kill the dog.
Number four, save the kiss 'til the end.
Number five is feel free to disagree with all these rules.
It was a gift from my father.
He sent it to me.
Why did you take it?
Because I was afraid that you were a pirate!
That would've been awful!
It wasn't your blood they needed.
It was my father's blood.
[Ted] There's one funny thing about this movie.
The one thing we talked about the most in terms of individual scenes
if I wrote a scene and handed it to you
and you then had notes on it...
...the one thing we talked about most was the rhythm of the dialogue.
It wasn't so much the specific words, it was always about rhythm.
There's a moment with Johnny coming up
that was really fun to work out.
What we had written, he didn't really like.
And... we basically said,
"The only important thing is the rhythm of the dialogue.
It just needs to match that rhythm." I'll point that out when we get to it.
And this again is the two gods. They think the same.
They act the same. They have the same concerns.
They're both trying to create a deal with loopholes and to cover them
and figure out how to come to an accord they'll both be happy with.
[Terry] What I love about this scene is that Johnny is in such a weak position.
We know it, he knows it, Barbossa knows it.
All he's got is his mouth
to keep him going in what he says.
And instead of actually...
recognizing that he's in a weak position,
he decides to go the complete opposite way.
He'll presume that he's in charge, that he's offering a great deal,
that everything should be fine, but...
Another Warner Brothers moment. It's such an act of bravado.
[Stuart] I wrote the first draft in five weeks, the second in eight days.
There was a rush, we needed to get the script to Johnny Depp.
So, um, you work with what you've got.
They're saying, "This is what I need." Your next job depends on you doing it.
That's how Hollywood works once you start getting credits going,
once you start getting films made. People pay attention,
and they believe you know more than you knew yesterday.
A lot of what we do is called writing on assignment
and that's what Pirates was.
It was an idea conceived by the Disney executives
and they brought us in to work on assignment,
to write a script for them.
[Ted] Here is Elizabeth.
She's learned about pirates, which is how she learned about ships.
She's the one who's out there creating strategy that is equal to Barbossa's.
Again Will and Elizabeth, the various mortal characters,
have the potential to match Jack and Barbossa, if they can achieve that.
Neither of us are experts at sailing,
but it was fun to learn about it,
to learn the commands and the maneuvers that are done.
Particularly the clubhaul maneuver.
That's a real maneuver that would be effective in this situation.
[Ted] The strategies used... there's one moment where I wonder, hmm.
But the strategies used in this battle
are actually pretty legitimate.
At least the crew of the Lady Washington
and our historical advisor and our sailmaster
thought they were OK.
It was one of those things where we felt quiet pride.
I guess not so quiet.
The sweeps we borrowed from Captain Kidd's ship.
Captain Kidd's ship actually had a galley with oars in it.
So, that's not made up, that's actually historically accurate.
Anything! Everything!
Anything we have left!
[Ted] Will is taking control of the fight, which is what he knows,
and Elizabeth is in control of the ship,
the piracy, the strategy itself, which is what she knows.
[Terry] I love the expression that, uh,
matches between the monkey and Geoffrey Rush
when he first has the suspicion
that they're gonna do the clubhaul maneuver.
It's just one of those great matching moments.
[Ted] I love the implication that everyone got
what she was suggesting right away
and they're going, "Oh, God, that's..."
And also it's very important that... daft like Jack.
That's an important moment for Elizabeth.
[Terry] The maneuver is one of desperation.
[Ted] You're gonna lose that anchor, at the very least.
I love the fact that the monkey figures it out a bit ahead of Barbossa.
Let go!
[Ted] That is the best position that you could be in a ship-to-ship battle.
[Terry] They don't have ball.
[Ted] The language they use, firing whatever they can,
cut glass and silverware, is more like a neutron bomb.
It's designed not to do damage to the ship,
but to do maximum damage
to the other people on the ship.
[Stuart] Sea battles were violent, violent experiences.
That was a great shot of the men
looking at each other through the gunports.
Cannons in these days weren't accurate, so you had to get close.
And cannonballs were disastrous on wood.
That's what they're firing, iron against wood.
[Ted] I'm convinced Gore wanted
a pirate with a wooden eyeball just for this gag.
I am convinced that was where it came from.
"He's got a wooden eye, we'll fire forks.
Yes, I like that."
[Stuart] The standard practice in naval warfare was...
...usually there were three or four ships per side.
The ships would line up in opposite sides
and slowly sail by each other in two big lines that crossed.
And they would shoot and shoot and shoot
and the decks would be awash in blood and rigging.
These were nasty places to fight.
Once one of the ships was disabled, you'd have the boarding taking place.
Which is what happens next.
This is combat at sea, a fraction of what it looked like.
The reality was much more gory, but we can't show that.
This is a PG-13. We want young teens to be able to go see this.
It's not an accurate reflection of piracy, but that wasn't our aim.
Our aim was an accurate reflection of the romantic image of piracy,
which started with Lord Byron and a poem called The Corsair.
This cannonball is chainlink cannonball.
There were several different kinds of shot
that cannons used.
And that cannon, the two balls linked by chain,
was used to take down masts, as you'll see, take down the rigging.
And there was grapeshot...
...all different kinds, designed to inflict various kinds of destruction.
Taking down a sail's rigging meant disabling a ship.
That gave you a huge advantage.
It often decided the fate of the battle.
Now they can board the ship,
that ship's not going anywhere and they can do what they want to it.
Rigging was as much a target as the guys on the other side.
Once you immobilize them, you're in the middle of the water.
Where are you gonna go? It's not like you can just flee.
Once you take down that mast, you are stuck out there.
And in fact one of the things seafarers feared most
was the mast collapsing or sails ripping
or just being stuck out at sea.
Because you would go nuts, literally.
You couldn't move and you're too far away to swim, not that most could.
You would go through all the food and end up eating each other
and then end up going insane, drinking seawater.
So, for a lot of seafarers of this time,
that was a worse fate than dying.
To be stuck out on a ship that was stuck on the water, dead on the water.
There's a reason they call it a dead calm. There's nothing to get you moving.
You could die out there, unless you get a breeze.
These ships are very accurate to the time periods.
Pirates liked to sail small, fast ships.
Hit and run was their specialty.
And so the smaller the ship, the faster the ship.
The big warships, the galleons,
they were reserved more for merchant and Royal Navy vessels
where you could have a crew of hundreds and tons of cannons.
And tons of storage space for cargo for shipping around the world.
The pirate ships were light fighters. Guerilla fighters, if you will.
Find the ship, hit it, take everything and run.
And so the smaller and faster the pirate ship, the better.
Here the Interceptor is a small, fast ship.
Black Pearl looks a little bigger.
And the Dauntless is the huge one.
That's the most powerful ship in the fleet, but not the fastest,
though not the slowest.
What's good is that they really identify different kinds of ships
and there's not one ship that has everything you need.
Each ship has a strength and a weakness.
The small, light ships can be destroyed easily.
The trick is to run away without getting destroyed first.
That was always the pirates' goals.
They would sail in brigs or in little one or two-masted ships.
The people they preyed on were in huge galleons, three, four, five masts,
and they could hit upon them really quickly.
Any of you so much as thinks the word parley,
I'll have your guts for garters!
[Stuart] You can't have a Bruckheimer film without an explosion.
But, nicely, it works into the plot
and the feeling that you've lost your hero.
In all good stories, too, there comes a moment when you think the hero's dead.
That's part of good storytelling.
Even in "Star Wars", you think Luke Skywalker has died.
He's taken by that creature in the garbage compactor.
For a second you're wondering, "Who am I going to identify with now?
He was the guy that I was rooting for."
And it gets you that involvement.
"What now? What's gonna happen now?"
You can't...
I can.
Like that.
Who are you?
No one! He's no one!
A distant cousin of my aunt's nephew, twice removed.
Lovely singing voice, though. Eunuch!
My name is Will Turner!
My father was Bootstrap Bill Turner.
[Ted] This was really nice. This all worked really well, I thought.
[Terry] We were concerned about this scene,
it could skate real close
to parody or Monty Python.
The key was to have the pistol under the chin and not up by the head.
[Ted] Yeah, you might hit that Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks moment.
Then again...
[Terry] Again, you have to be very careful how you negotiate with Barbossa.
[Ted] And Jack knows, "We're all screwed now."
Will's doing the best he can, though.
That was, you know...
...I look at particularly the work that Orlando and Keira do.
And... you know, Jack and Johnny and Geoffrey
have these big, flashy roles, wonderful performances.
I compare it, in 48 Hours...
...Eddie Murphy was just brilliant in that movie, just electric.
He really got a lot of attention.
But Nick Nolte's performance in that movie
is so important to anchor...
...Eddie Murphy.
It's the same here. Without the reality of Keira...
Keira and Orlando give this movie an emotional grounding.
This was the gratuitous strip on the plank that we were talking about.
It's still warm.
[Ted] We just had to pause a moment.
[Terry] But necessary, so she doesn't sink like she did before.
[Ted] She gets the dress back, and she's...
...a little more vulnerable in this state.
And then the classic iconography.
As far as I know, no real pirates ever made anybody walk the plank.
But you can't do a pirate movie and not have that.
[Terry] Your line was "We wanted to not make a movie about pirates."
[Ted] We didn't wanna make a movie about real pirates but make a pirate movie.
There's a difference.
At any rate the emotional reality
that Keira and Orlando give to this story
is necessary to make
what these two are doing as real as possible.
Off you go!
Last time you left me a pistol with one shot.
[Ted] Seasickness was a real problem.
The first day they were shooting out on the Black Pearl,
which, because of its height, really swayed,
they issued everybody with seasickness medication.
But they didn't read the label that said, "Do not operate heavy machinery.
Will cause drowsiness."
So there are some moments here
where the fact that our actors are awake is just astounding.
It was Zoe Saldana, who plays Anamaria, who was hit the worst.
She was just...
But nobody was having a good time out here the first couple of days.
That's the second time I've had to watch that man sail away with my ship.
[Stuart] You've gotta have a sandy beach.
And you've gotta be stuck with a beautiful girl. And with lots of rum.
And they hit all these beats. Very, very important.
In a movie as specific in genre as this,
audiences expect certain things.
In the same way, seeing a movie like Gladiator,
they're expecting to see gory fights in an arena
and lions and Christians and things like that.
In Pirates, we've gotta hit all those beats
that we know the audience is gonna expect and want.
Walking the plank. The pirate with the parrot.
The drunken pirate town.
And then of course we've got all the scenes and vignettes from the ride,
to get in as many as we can without forcing them upon the story.
This is getting towards the end of the second act.
The end of the second act should be the low point for the heroes.
The moment when they seem completely defeated.
Screenplays are divided into three acts,
which is really just fancy words for beginning, middle and end.
The first act is setting up the characters, getting the story going,
catalysts that inspired the story.
The second act tells the story and the third act's about wrapping it up.
Imagine that in every first act
you're going to be raising a question.
In this sense it's, will Jack and Will rescue Elizabeth?
Something very simple that's going to drive the whole second act.
Then at the end of the second act, you wanna answer no.
As you see, Will's taken away. Though they've rescued Elizabeth.
But Will's gonna die and they're stuck on an island.
And so you're able to bring the audience down to a low
and then bring them back up to a high again,
cause they're about to get rescued.
Again, that's storytelling technique.
Get them low, then bring them back up.
That's how you get that roller coaster. It's a series of highs and lows.
It keeps the audience involved.
A boring ride is a flat ride.
A fun ride is a ride that goes up and down.
That's literally what you're doing as a storyteller.
You wanna provide those highs and lows. And this is the biggest low right here.
Oh, yes.
[Terry] The actors were
incredibly respectful of the dialogue.
It doesn't often happen to such an extent
on a big-budget picture.
But there were cases where, um,
runners would be sent to get either Ted or I
to come to a rehearsal or a scene to change even a single word.
Which was a testament to the actors, but also to the whole production.
[Ted] I was here on this island. I'm ten feet off-screen.
This was shot on a beach because we couldn't get it all on the island,
but we were there.
Most of what the actors say in this movie is as we wrote it, which was nice.
It's almost the first time we've gotten a chance to find out,
does the dialogue we write work for actors?
At least for actors from the Commonwealth and Johnny Depp, it did.
Not good! Stop!
Not good!
[Stuart] This is one of the truer conventions that we know of piracy.
Pirates being obsessed with rum. They were.
And this is quite accurate to what pirates really thought of rum.
They spent it all. They spent it on wine and women.
And then when the purses dried up, they'd go out again,
hit the next ship, bring all the money in, spend it all and go out again.
That was the pirate life.
Very carefree, no rules, and they were outlaws.
It's the mix of all those elements that's made us romance them.
I think in all of us, there's a little bit of us that wants to rebel
and live a life free on the sea, and do as we please, and have a great time.
And that's what pirates did.
Of course, the conditions were hellacious on ships in those days.
It wasn't a pleasant experience. A lot of these crews were shanghaied,
kidnapped at the docks and forced aboard.
Once you're aboard and you wake up and you realize you can't swim home,
then you're stuck there.
And that's how they crewed a lot of their crews in those days.
[Ted] I love how Johnny plays this scene.
This is the only point
where we actually see desperation from Jack Sparrow.
He's right to be desperate, because he's not gonna budge Norrington.
It's actually Elizabeth who's able to make that change,
to get Norrington to do what Jack wants, oddly enough.
There's only two things in this movie
that were in the script that were shot that didn't make it that I wish were.
One of them is, there's about a 50-second coda to this scene,
after Norrington decides to go, between Jack Davenport and Keira Knightley.
It was a nice moment where he acknowledges what the audience knows.
He asks her, "I realize you're agreeing to marry me to go rescue Will."
And she acknowledges that,
but she says, "It's not a condition. It's just a request.
If you said no, I would still marry you because I think you're a fine man."
It's interesting, disillusioned as she is with piracy,
she's now starting to accept these societal constraints,
saying, "I will find a way to be happy within them."
Cotton says you missed a bit.
[Stuart] This was added to get more information out about Will's father.
It's a very delicate balance you have to strike,
knowing how much information to give, to an audience.
Exposition scenes are generally boring,
people telling you what you need to know.
So you try and avoid them. You don't want people talking about the past.
You wanna either show the past or not have it be important to the present.
In early test screenings people were confused about who Bootstrap Bill was.
So this became necessary to explain.
Note that they interject it with jokes to keep it fresh,
so it's not just one person saying, "This is what you need to know."
It's threaded in comedy or in tension or in something else.
It's hard to have two characters talking about the past,
especially if they both share it.
Then you have to make one character angry.
"Remember when you were penniless and I saved you?"
It's the only way to do it.
In this case, this is all about informing Will who his father was.
That's what you'd call ironic.
Bring him!
I don't care for the situation.
Any attempt to storm the caves could turn into an ambush.
Not if you're the one doing the ambushing.
I go in and convince Barbossa to send his men out in their little boats.
You and your men return to the Dauntless
and blast the bejesus out of them with your little cannons.
[Ted] The other scene that I actually miss,
I wish it had been in here,
It wasn't necessary but it was a nice addition,
was the one between Jack and Elizabeth just before this,
where they talk about the fact that...
...where Jack says, "We're not so much different, you and I.
Peas in a pod."
She's done something as ruthless as Jack would have done.
Of course, Jack doesn't trust her because of it.
He no longer trusts her at all to do what he wants,
so he gets her locked away.
No reason to fret.
A prick of the finger, a few drops of blood...
No mistakes this time.
He's only half Turner.
We spill it all!
Guess there is reason to fret.
[Ted] One of the things that solidified for me
working on this movie, and it went to the actors, the crew,
all the department heads, is that everyone in Hollywood
pretty much what they want to do is the best work they possibly can.
Most of the complaints and frustrations in filmmaking
come from feeling artificial limitations
have been put on doing the best work you can.
I remember when we were shooting in the Caribbean
the actors were at...
...at the most luxurious resort in St. Vincent
which is not to say it was a luxury resort,
but it was the most luxurious.
The only time they got frustrated or annoyed
was when they couldn't shoot,
when they knew somewhere acting was happening
and they couldn't be part of it.
It was actually kind of fun to find that out.
[Terry] I was particularly impressed with Johnny Depp,
who the only time I recall him getting upset
was making sure that, uh,
proper safety precautions were in place.
Especially regarding walking the plank or being over the water.
Of course, Johnny hates water.
That may be part of it but he was concerned for the other actors.
[Ted] Closed water he's OK with but that open ocean water,
he's not too fond of.
A line I thought would be nice was, "Do you think he was telling the truth?"
The line was supposed to be:
"He doesn't tell the truth when he's telling the truth."
Maybe that was a bit over the top.
That does sum up Jack's character pretty well.
This was the moment where the rhythm thing I was talking about
initially was in the script.
He says, "Your men do what they do best.
Chop, chop, chop, stab, stab, stab.
There you are with two ships."
Johnny didn't like the chop-stab,
again in terms of constraints.
I said, "All we need is something fun to that hits that rhythm."
And that's when he came up with
"Robert's your uncle, Fanny's your aunt," which has that same...
Chop-chop, stab-stab rhythm.
I just thought it was, uh...
Let them make up what they want as long it fits what we want.
[Terry] In the mechanics of the curse, here's a key moment.
Provided for you in slow-motion
and there's two shots, and we let, uh,
the Will character to register it.
It's right there, for those who might miss it,
mostly critics,
that Johnny has actually stolen the coin for himself.
He's predicted that he may be able to divide and conquer
Barbossa's forces, but he's anticipating the battle to come.
And, if, you're about to...
If you're going to bring off this whole strategy,
and try to defeat this guy he figures a little insurance.
I might as well make myself immortal just in case.
[Ted] That's also the moment when Will realizes,
that from the beginning, this has been Jack's plan,
to get Will close enough to the treasure to lift the curse
at the moment that is most profitable to Jack,
which in this instance would also be most profitable to Will.
I also want to point out
that Jack's plan here was to keep the British on The Dauntless,
and have all of the pirates row out on rowboats
where The Dauntless can keep firing cannonballs at them
until the curse is lifted.
He did not anticipate nor intend
to ambush them as they came out of the cave.
He did not anticipate this.
This moment here is why you want supernatural pirates.
That was our big contribution.
A couple of screenplays were developed previous to our involvement...
...that had a Jack Sparrow character, Will Turner, Elizabeth,
the basic setup, but it was that absence of the supernatural.
What did Barbossa want? At that point, Blackheart.
We just went back to the writers and said,
"There are all these stories, these elements of the supernatural,
that have never been used in a pirate movie.
Let's go ahead and make those elements overt."
[Terry] The ride begins with a talking skull,
"You've seen the cursed treasure."
[Ted] "Not afraid of evil curses, says ye? Properly warned, ye be, says I."
[Terry] The other thing, taking the reality of the movie
into the realm of the supernatural does,
is it actually allows the audience
to go along into a world where they'll accept
a certain amount of stylization.
A supernatural story is a stylized story, a different world.
I'm not sure audiences would have accepted
things such as walking the plank,
talking parrots or the rest of it...
unless we had already brought them in and said,
"This is a ghost story." Once in the ghost story,
they can start to accept
some rather amazing or crazy things,
including the Johnny Depp performance of Jack Sparrow.
[Ted] We didn't want to do a movie about real pirates.
We didn't want a naturalistic pirate movie.
We wanted to do a swashbuckler, a romance.
A romance in the classical sense of the term.
The horror genre descends from romance through Gothic.
There are similarities, a lot of overlapping conventions.
Bringing in the supernatural element, like Terry says,
heightened the reality and allowed us to do the romance.
The Anthony Hope quote,
"The romance genre gives to ambition the boundless field,
to courage the high moment, to love the ideal object."
That's what we wanted, those moments. High adventure.
This was an amazing sequence to watch shoot.
The way it was done, first you had the pirates,
the stunt pirates and the acting pirates, and the navy guys.
They had choreographed this incredible melee.
Then all of the pirate guys went away.
And the navy guys did it themselves, by themselves.
Jack Davenport described it as learning to do a tango,
only you don't have a partner.
Then they brought back the pirates and got rid of the navy guys.
It was an amazing thing to watch,
the coordination and the skill of the stunt performers.
But it turns out you're a hard man to predict.
[Stuart] Every good story leads to an exciting climax.
Several things going on at once.
Several stories being wrapped up at once
in a way that's exciting and doesn't require a lot of explanation.
[Ted] Of course, this is Jack's plan in operation.
Separate, lower the numbers,
and he knows Will's skill with the sword.
My theory has always been that Will in this movie,
Will is the best swordsman. Barbossa and Norrington are matched,
and Jack is the worst of the four.
He loses both of the sword fights he's in.
He technically loses them both.
His idea was lower the numbers, let Will do what he has to do,
at the opportune moment, lift the curse.
He has finally got all the pieces where he needs them.
Right.
[Stuart] One of the most satisfying things about writing this
was being a part of the Disney legacy.
This is a ride that has been around for 40 years now
and has thrilled people all over the world for that length of time.
To be a part of the team
that brought it to the screen is just fantastic.
Scary at the same time. We hoped that this worked.
We were pretty sure it did.
I was always convinced it could work if done right.
The real danger was whether it was done right or not,
and, fortunately, it was.
So... it's been a real joy and a real honor to be part of.
They do a great job of cutting round the different ships,
keeping you aware of which ship you're on.
That's a credit to the writing and the editors.
You could easily get confused about who's where,
and what's happening, but I think it keeps very clear.
Make for the ship! Move!
[Stuart] Here is again, real violence. You don't have to show the blood.
You just have to know that it's happening.
That's the difference. An "R" would have shown that.
We wanted to keep it under "R" and keep it "PG-13."
That was always part of the design.
[Terry] The thing I'm amazed at, having seen it shot,
that Gore and...
...Dariusz... right?
[Ted] The cinematographer.
[Ted] The use of camera movement...
...Gore was able to seemingly predict on the set
and in terms of storyboarding, exactly the times when...
[Ted] There's a shocking moment.
I don't think anybody expected that to happen.
Or that.
Terry and I came up with the idea of a supernatural pirate movie
ten years ago, or a little bit more.
We'd seen the Harryhausen movies where the human fights the skeleton.
We wanted two skeletons fighting.
We finally got it.
I couldn't resist, mate.
[Stuart] There's an expression,
"squeezing the lemon" out of your premise.
That's this here.
They're getting the most out of this idea of undead pirates
being seen as undead in the moonlight.
The two leads jump in and out of the moonlight as skeletons.
A lot of times you see a movie and think,
they could have done more with that. They didn't squeeze the lemon enough.
Squeeze that lemon dry and get the most out of what you've set up.
Good stories will do that every time. It's done here.
[Ted] The CGI here, the animation here,
the fact that the skeletons
maintain the performance of the actors,
but they don't just do it with our hero actors.
Every single one of those pirates is individualized
and the movements are specific
and matched to the actor who was playing the role in the first place.
It's really extraordinary.
No way could that have been done ten years ago.
So what now, Jack Sparrow?
Are we to be two immortals, locked in an epic battle?
[Stuart] This is the final proof that Johnny is a bad-ass pirate,
ahead of everyone, and that he is a real sword fighter
and that he can really hold his own with the best of pirates.
All of you with me!
[Stuart] Here is a great example of the writing.
This idea of the pirate code being more like a guideline.
It starts with Captain Barbossa to Keira.
Elizabeth then transfers it to Gibbs and his pirates,
and then at the end, Gibbs transfers it to Jack Sparrow.
So you get this nice recurring line coming back
and you can see where it's come from.
Jack is saved by his crew at the very end
because of something Captain Barbossa said to Elizabeth two hours before.
That's fun. Very clever.
Here's another pirate convention, a great battle at the end.
In my draft, this was when
the pirates came to Port Royal in force
and tried to take the town.
Here, it's a battle out at sea with the undead pirates.
This is one of the staples.
A big battle with guns and swords. Close-quarters combat.
[Terry] One of my favorite moments is coming up.
Murtogg and Mullroy come up on the ship.
[Ted] They have to lift the curses.
This was pure Gore.
[Terry] You almost half-expect them to back away.
Instead, they become such legitimate characters
by the fact that they step into the fray.
They are actually navy men, soldiers.
[Ted] Second hardest line in the movie to write.
Gore wanted Elizabeth to have that hero moment
when she appears and to have the hero line.
Try wearing a corset.
[Ted] We referred to it as the cheesy hero line.
We wanted that line. It had to be a cheesy hero line.
But it had to be good and have something to do with the story.
Second hardest line of the movie to write.
[Stuart] Pirates favored short swords for close-quarters combat.
They didn't want big broadswords like in Braveheart.
They weren't trying to cut through armor.
They wanted light, short rip swords
that they could stick in their pants and pull out.
This is where the cutlass came from. The short, curved sword.
It's a devastating weapon in close-quarters combat.
I want to point out, everybody who took a coin is cursed.
To lift the curse, all the coins have to go back in,
with the blood of those who took them. Jack just slit his palm
in order to get blood on the coin he took, threw it to Will,
Will now has both, his coin and Jack's coin with blood on it,
and now Will has put blood on the coin he had.
[Terry] This is the opportune moment.
[Ted] There's all the blood, all the coins,
the curse has gone and here's the proof.
The bullet that's still lodged in his heart...
...kills Barbossa.
It all makes perfect sense, Terry. Well done, well done, sir!
[Terry] This is what you, of course, call your irony.
He finally feels, only to feel his own death.
[Ted] A lot of this, I have to admit, was influenced by EC Comics.
The horror comics, Tales From The Crypt.
Not the series of films from the comics, the comics themselves,
where so much of that,
the horror was based on the irony of just desert,
of the "you wished for this, you're going to get it tenfold."
You're greedy? Fine, be greedy for ever.
You'll always starve, be thirsty, be horny.
That's what greed is.
The pirate's curse...
...compelled by greed, consumed by greed.
[Terry] Bruce Hendricks, the head of production at Disney,
[Ted] Line producer, second director... a lot of jobs.
[Terry] He was happy to find out
that we weren't going to actually show the hand,
that it didn't have to be created. Cost savings on a $160 million movie.
[Ted] Also more effective to have it off screen.
Here's the meeting of...
...basically our Abbott and Costello on acid
and Laurel and Hardy.
[Terry] Finally, the pairs meet.
[Ted] This moment, you could have cut sooner.
Let's just watch Jonathan Pryce act here.
- [Ted laughs] - [Terry] There aren't really...
...multiple endings on the movie.
Pretty much until the resolution of the love story,
and whether Jack gets his ship back, the villain has been defeated,
but there are these other stories that have to be tied up.
[Ted] Here's my theory.
We didn't bother with that
three-act action-movie paradigm.
We didn't fit the story to work to it.
Typically, defeating the villain would end everything.
That's your final movement.
We also didn't have the villain have some sort of plot
that was a threat to the rest of the world.
Everything stayed on a personal level.
You made the joke,
we get to make a $130 million character movie.
But it's all driven by the character decision and design.
The story is not over until the character stories are over.
[Terry] It was fun to not worry about convention and break convention.
[Ted] Conventional action-movie storytelling.
We were very aware of romance and pirate-movie conventions.
[Stuart] Jack Sparrow spent the film getting out of tricky situations.
By this time, you know he's got to get out.
But, the great thing is, you don't know how.
Jack Sparrow!
- We have learned that you... - Captain! Captain Jack Sparrow.
[Stuart] Still insists being called captain,
all he wants is the respect.
He just wants respect and he's about to be hanged.
Please call me by my title.
Pirates were hanged.
They started to crack down on piracy in the early 1700s.
They hanged them publicly. Captain Kidd was hanged in 1701.
The rope broke the first time. They had to hang him a second time.
Another pirate was hung. He stopped twitching.
They brought him in to be embalmed and he woke up, alive.
They had to let him go. They'd already carried out the sentence.
Unfortunately, he had lived so he got to go free again.
[man] And for these crimes,
you have been sentenced to be, on this day,
hung by the neck, until dead.
May God have mercy on your soul.
[Will] Governor Swann.
Commodore.
[Ted] Elizabeth had become so disillusioned with the idea of pirates.
Here Will is stepping up and becoming
the romantic pirate hero
that she dreamed of meeting when she was 12 years old.
It's the guy who breaks the law for what he believes is right,
not for his own gain but for other people.
You go back and look at Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk or Crimson Pirate.
Those guys may start off as pirates but they end up as rebels.
They end up as people who are outlaws with a cause.
That's the romantic image and that's what Will becomes.
He's the first and only pirate in the movie
who is actually a pirate-movie pirate.
[Stuart] The thing I try to stick to for the third act
is a hero who does something they never would've,
it's logical because of what they've done in between.
In the simplest terms, that's what you look for.
That gives you a character-driven third act.
That gives meaning to your second act and the growth there.
If your character does something they wouldn't do at the beginning.
He would never rescue a pirate that was about to be hanged.
He'd have enjoyed watching him hang.
He is risking his life, and condemning his life,
to save this pirate because he's learned
that you can be a pirate and be a good man at the same time.
This is the first time Jack and Will are working as a team,
together in tandem.
That's deliberate. That's thought out.
By this stage, we want them reading each other's thoughts.
But not from you.
On our return to Port Royal, I granted you clemency.
And this is how you thank me?
By throwing in your lot with him?
He's a pirate!
And a good man.
If all I've achieved is that the hangman
will own two pairs of boots instead of one, so be it.
[Stuart] This was the lesson.
I know it was a lesson in my draft,
learning that not all pirates are bad.
Of course they were, back in the day.
But in our romanticized version, they're not.
There can be good pirates. That's what Will's come to learn.
He's now imparting the wisdom to Norrington and the Governor.
Norrington represents the guy who thinks all pirates are bad.
They're criminals, hang 'em.
[Ted] If you're going to break the law, break it because the law is wrong.
Not because you want somebody's TV.
There is your moral message. It is a Disney movie.
There is a happy Aesop's fable moral to it.
I love her reaction to that idea.
Doesn't it also raise the question,
exactly how far was she willing to go
and how far did she go on that island?
There is a bit of "Shut up, Jack."
The nice hat was something that Orlando got a couple of comments on.
When he was walking around in the costume
The perfect thing for Jack to say as his farewell line.
Idiot! He's nowhere to go but back to the noose!
[Terry] It's a difficult rescue. You count on different things.
You have to make it to the edge,
you have to survive the fall into the rocks.
You've got to get your ship to come back at the right moment.
[Ted] This is the moment I was talking about, aboard the Dauntless,
when he acknowledged, was she doing it because she loved him
or was she agreeing to marry him out of love for Will?
That moment, I think, would have set this up even stronger.
Without that, Jack Davenport's performance
is what carries the believability and the emotion
of what happens in this next bit.
You accept Norrington having made this small change.
Also, you understand he loves Elizabeth so much
he actually puts her happiness ahead of his.
Had Norrington been a pirate, he would be a pirate-movie pirate.
[Terry] Even though he changes, he doesn't change that much.
He only gives them a day's headstart.
- He will still be after them. - [ted] He's Norrington.
He's still a feared pirate hunter.
"One day's headstart, then we go after them."
There's also just the sport of it, as well.
Actually, Jack does say
the Black Pearl was the last pirate ship in the Caribbean.
Norrington is taking care of that. The last opponent he has is Jack Sparrow.
Room for a sequel? Maybe.
And there's the hat hair.
[Stuart] That's what we waited for the whole movie.
They deliver it right at the end.
That's rule number four. Don't forget that.
Then you've got to end on Jack. He's really the star of the movie.
You want to end a film like this on a laugh.
Again, we're talking about James Cameron.
The last thing you remember as you walk out.
You've had a wonderful climax of pirates and skeletons fighting.
You want to end on a laugh.
[Terry] We were on set for the filming of this scene.
As it turns out, Johnny Depp wrote what I believe is...
- [Ted] My favorite line. - [Terry] Mine as well.
It's the last line.
What was great was because of the stunt of him coming onto the ship,
it caused this line to have to be written that day.
It was written in the morning, so, "Bring me that horizon,"
was not in the movie, uh,
as of 6:00 AM the day it was shot.
[Ted] This was always intended to be the end.
[Terry] Exactly.
It's a good job, Johnny.
Bring me that horizon.
And really bad eggs.
[Terry] There it is, Pirates of the Caribbean.
[Ted] The Curse of the Black Pearl.
- This is Terry Rossio. - And Ted Elliott.
My name is Jay Wolpert. I'm one of the writers.
The only other thing to say is if you're getting ready to set out to sea,
destroy all your rope, pirates swing on that stuff.
I'm Stuart Beattie, I was second writer on Pirates.
Thanks for watching the DVD. Hope you enjoyed it.
Just a quick word about the credits so you understand.
Screenplay and screen story.
All the scripts at the end are given to the Writers' Guild of America.
They get three working writers to read all the scripts
and to decide whose script looks most like the finished film.
They decide the credit based on that.
When certain writers have contributed enough to the film
where they've influenced story elements,
they will get story credit, what Jay and I both got.
We had influenced how the story took shape.
But, it was really Ted and Terry who were on the set every day.
Of course, the whole curse element was all by them.
So that's how it breaks down,
but we were all part of the big process.
I think we had the same goal,
which is why it worked into one cohesive script,
not a butchered script with three different voices,
which then translates into a fun film.
Thanks for watching.
[Ted] For everybody who stuck all the way through to the end,
I'm going to give you the timeline so that you alone can know
how the events of the story play out.
Or what actually happens before the story begins.
Ten years earlier, Jack showed up in Tortuga.
He was the captain of the Black Pearl, going after the treasure.
And he had the compass.
Remember, Gibbs says he gave up the bearings
which meant he knew where it was
and he had to have already had the compass.
He also knew about the curse
and was the person who told Barbossa and the crew about the curse.
That's the point where in the jail cell,
he says there is a curse, he knew about it, he didn't believe it.
Barbossa tells Elizabeth when we first were told the tale.
By who? By Jack.
We thought it was just a ghost story too, and we didn't believe it.
Bootstrap Bill was already a member of Jack's crew...
...before he recruited the people at Tortuga.
That's established when he talks about how he knew Bill as William Turner.
He had a different relationship
with Bill Turner than Barbossa.
He gets the crew in Tortuga, Barbossa and his cronies,
and more than likely Pintel and Ragetti.
They go sailing out.
First day out, Barbossa says,
"If we're all to going to have a share, we should all know where we're going."
That's where Jack made his mistake.
He told him where Isla De La Muerte was,
making Barbossa somebody who could find it
because he already knew where it was.
Jack's thrown overboard with the compass and is marooned.
Bootstrap Bill, while he probably didn't participate in the mutiny,
he stayed on board and the reason Jack is OK with that,
he says at the end of the movie. He did what's right by him.
That's the most you can expect. He stuck by the code.
Pintel says "Bootstrap Bill was a man of the code."
He showed up, he had the compass, he recruited the crew.
Bootstrap Bill, already a crew member.
He gave up the bearings to Barbossa who led the mutiny.
That's why Jack hates him.
He violated the code. Just pointing that out.
He got thrown overboard, Bootstrap Bill stays with the crew.
They find the treasure, they know about the curse.
They take the treasure. Each of them, even the monkey,
takes a bit of the gold, at that point had no name.
Then as they go out partying, carousing,
they discovered that they were cursed.
While it's not specifically stated in the movie
how they learned to undo the curse,
there is a lot of Aztec writing on that chest.
My guess is that they went back,
they learned that they needed to put all the gold back.
Bootstrap Bill had been feeling guilty
because of what they did to Jack.
It was in violation of the code.
He said, "We deserve to be cursed for what we did and to remain cursed."
That's when he sent one piece of the gold to Will in England,
he never wanted the pirates to be able to lift the curse.
Barbossa got pissed off, strapped him to a cannon,
and dropped him into "the crushing depths of Davy Jones' Locker,"
implying that while Bill cursed is still alive,
he may be a very thin puddle
on the ocean's bottom.
That's what happens to Bill.
The pirates are cursed, looking for every piece of gold.
They find out what they haven't found out.
All the blood had to be returned. Now there's two things to do.
Get all the gold back and add their blood to the chest.
Eight years earlier,
that happens between the time that Jack showed up to Tortuga
and when the Black Pearl destroyed
the ship that Will was on,
because the Dauntless was there, the power in these waters,
the Black Pearl left without getting Will and the coin.
For the next eight years, the pirates continued looking for all of the gold.
Finally, Elizabeth wearing the medallion fell in the water.
The gold called to the pirates. They came after it.
It was the last medallion, the last piece they needed.
They thought Elizabeth had Turner blood.
Turner blood was the last blood they needed to lift the curse.
Did I miss anything? Does it make sense?
Go through the movie, it's all there.
[Terry] Do you think that the reason why
the ship was destroyed at the very beginning,
was it the powder magazine, or did the pirates attack?
Was it because the medallion touched the water?
I think so. Otherwise, they were just out searching for gold.
They'd have gotten lucky. The medallion touching the water brought the pirates.
[Ted] And the appearance of the Dauntless.
Again, the power in these waters.
While the Black Pearl does have some amount of supernatural
associated with it... sequel.
It still can be sunk, it can be damaged.
A 100-gun ship like the Dauntless will turn it into kindling.
The pirates, discretion being the better part of valor, took off.
Finally, we catch up to the story.
[Terry] Or we're simply lost in the fog.
- Another possibility. - [Ted] It's an unnatural fog.
[Terry] Or maybe Elizabeth's singing...
[Ted] Drove them away or calmed them down.
Gibbs does say,
"Cursed pirates sail these waters."
Does that all make sense?
- Did I forget anything? - [Terry] It's like fine clockwork.
[Ted] A very odd way to give information in a movie.
- It seems to work. - [Terry] We got away with it.
We're creating a new, cinematic language.