‘Like fighting a war’: how hurricanes and mad stunts nearly sunk the Pirates of the Caribbean films

It was not the most sea-worthy of movie premises. Based on a nearly 50-year-old Disneyland ride with iffy animatronics and iffier depictions of ‘native characters’, hopes for the 2006 original Pirates of the Caribbean film were fuselage-scraping. Though directors including Steven Spielberg had been attached to the franchise since the early Nineties, eventually Gore Verbinski took the plunge.

“There were limited expectations for the first Pirates film,” admitted Jerry Bruckheimer, the franchise’s veteran Hollywood producer, in a behind-the-scenes interview. “Lots of people thought we were making a Disney ride movie for toddlers. The pirate genre had been dead for 40 years, and every attempt to revive it had bombed.”

Yet against the odds, the first film was a smash-and-grab triumph. Helped by its squeaky young leads, Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, irreverent wit, and gravity-defying, Errol Flynn-esque stunts, it stormed the box office, taking $653,913,918 worldwide. In particular, Johnny Depp’s gamey performance as Captain Jack Sparrow - part Keith Richards, part collision with a Brighton fancy dress shop - was singled out for praise, despite the fact that Disney execs threatened to fire him for his capering, and considered subtitling his dialogue. But the film netted five Oscar nominations, including a Best Actor nod for Depp.

But it finished on a moment of neat resolution. Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa was dead (again), Knightley’s Elizabeth and Bloom’s Will were married, and Captain Jack was sailing off on the Black Pearl into a blazing Caribbean sunset to roister, drink up and yo-ho. The end?

Not a chance. With swashbuckling alacrity, Disney execs greenlit a new franchise, retrofitting the self-contained Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl as the first instalment. Since then, another four films in the series have been released, with a sixth and a spin-off in the works. Yet even before Depp’s private life put a black spot on his career, the franchise was in the doldrums. The plots had gotten wilder, character arcs frayed, and Depp’s once-fresh shtick had long gone bilgy. What went wrong?

“There is no heavier burden than great potential,” said series writer Ted Elliot, as they embarked on the second film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which was released 15 years ago this month. Seafarers should know better than to tempt fate like that.

For financial sake, it was decided to film the initial two sequels - Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End - back-to-back. This meant production could take advantage of the same locations and sets, and monopolise their increasingly in-demand stars. But while there was plenty of momentum behind the project, as filming began in February 2005, the writers were still casting around for a plot. In an unpromising harbinger, they were taken on location to St Vincent to continue rewrites.

“Whereas in the first film, the theme park attraction was a wellspring of ideas,” recalled screenwriter Terry Russio in a DVD extras interview. “For the second and third films we actually went back to the first movie.”

Will and Elizabeth’s wedding day, it was decided, would be interrupted by the appearance of a new antagonist - the East India Trading Company. And other threats were introduced: the supernatural Davy Jones; his ship, the Flying Dutchman, with its crew of undead unfortunates; and a kraken. The story, stretching over two films, would involve Will’s quest to find his missing father, and Jack Sparrow’s attempts to slip the noose and the prospect of 100 years crewing for Davy Jones.

From the beginning of production, spectacle stomped substance. Bruckheimer and director Gore Verbinski storyboarded a sequence of outlandish stunts, such as a fight on top of a moving mill wheel and an escape from zorbing bone cages. And a rough script was hung on that bare scaffold.

Still, it was an approach that had paid dividends in the first film. The ride, after all, was far from its only inspiration. In fact, Bruckheimer and director Gore Verbinski were as drawn by the visual appeal of Howard Pyle’s 1920’s Book of Pirates, with its wind-whipped and eye-patched buccaneers, and classic films such as Robert Newton John’s Long John Sliver, Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood, and Peter Pan.

“Pirates of the Caribbean comes from a literary tradition that goes back a long way,” says historian Adrian Tinniswood, author of Pirates of Barbary, a study of 17th-century corsairs. “If you think of Captain Pugwash, it comes from the same mildly comic tradition. It doesn’t dig too deep into reality.”

Dead Man’s Chest played upon the contrast between the expansive freedoms of its roving pirates, and the enclosing, privatising ambitions of the (fictional) East India Trading Company. Ironically, this was almost a mirror image of the historic reality during the short-lived ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ in the 1600s and early 1700s, says Tinniswood.

“The pirates in the Caribbean fought the Spanish and extended the empire,” he argues. “They were at the forefront of an expansionist British empire in the 17th century.”

Indeed, most pirates weren’t pirates at all - they were ‘privateers’, licensed by royal letters of marque to attack and plunder Spanish trading ships, heavy with gold, which were returning from colonies in the New World. As with more recent conflicts, like the Vietnam War, privateering was a way for Europe’s tussling monarchies to square up to each other at a safe distance from their imperial capitals. A Jacobean Cold War.

And while the buccaneers’ exploits were lionised in contemporary literature, the term ‘pirate’ was an insult, not a badge of honour. One noted Caribbean privateer, Henry Morgan, even employed a solicitor in London to sue a pamphlet which dared to suggest his incessant rape, murder and pillage wasn’t entirely above board. He won ￡100: not bad for a bloodless day’s work.

It was fitting, then, that the Pirates franchise took a similarly expansionist attitude to the Caribbean. While the first movie was largely filmed on LA sound stages, only using the island of St Vincent for scenes in Port Royal and Tortuga, the second and third films were far more ambitious. The decision was made to film up the island chain in the Caribbean, moving from St Vincent to the Bahamas and Exumas, a distance of some 1,300 miles. The operation, involving a fleet of Twin Otter planes to ferry cast and crew, and a roll-on-roll-off transport boat for the heavier equipment, would have shamed the SBS. But it was a decision that would haunt the production teams.

“It was like fighting a war,” recalled Eric McLoed, the executive producer. “It was a moving army. We were going to be a road movie - although those roads were actually vast bodies of water between different locations.”

Unit production manager Doug Merrifield, talking over Zoom from LA, agrees: “It was quite the logistical challenge just mounting that scope and scale of production. The shoot was originally scheduled for 250 days, but the studio tried to cut it back to 200. But, hey, we ended up shooting for more than 280 days.”

Dominica, in particular, proved the filmmakers’ heart of darkness. A tiny mountainous island with a population smaller than St Albans, it was known for its banana exports and boutique ecotourism - oh, and its vicious tropical storms, 30-degree heat and mosquitos. Its suitability for a major Hollywood production was of the lug-a-steamboat-over-a-mountain variety; Verbinski's affectation for wearing a white pith helmet on set completed the picture.

“Dominica is what the Caribbean looked like 200 years ago,” said executive producer Bruce Hendricks. “A rational person wouldn’t go there, and they wouldn’t take along 500 of their closest friends and hundreds of tons of equipment.”

It proved an especial challenge for the set design teams. “The first time I saw those locations, I was wondering how we were going to do it,” remembered construction coordinator Greg Callas. “The island is small, but because of the road conditions, it can take you three hours to get from one end to the other. We didn’t have the luxury of the 21st century there.”

At one point, the Pirates production staff numbered more than 600, with up to 400 Dominicans helping out. They occupied 90 per cent of the island’s pot-holed roads and caused a serious catering headache: for breakfast alone, they would get through 1,500 eggs, 160 pounds of bacon and 80 loaves of bread - all of which had to be shipped from the US.

“I’d worked remotely before,” says Merrifield. “I’ve shot on Easter Island and all over the world, but never on that scale before and especially not two movies back-to-back. For the studio, looking at their budget numbers, it was literally a case of ‘Do they greenlight Pirates Two and Three, or do they buy a cruise ship?’”

A cruise ship would certainly have been more comfortable. When Dominican infrastructure conked out, the production teams had to make their own. One of the film’s set pieces involved an escape from a village of ‘native’ cannibals. The village consisted of huts made of skulls on two sides of a chasm, with a rope bridge slung between. Simply reaching the set was a struggle: to get their lorries to the clifftop, the production team had to build a road up the hillside. “There's no road in Dominica that's 15 degrees,” said Callas. “That's almost straight up! It's pretty radical, but we got all our trucks and crew up there - we even got portable toilets up there.”

For the sequence when Sparrow, Will Turner and the East India Trading Company’s James Norrington sword fight inside a moving mill wheel, they built an 18ft-high, 800kg mock-up - then strapped the cast inside.

“Oh boy, I'll never forget the faces on Gore and George when it was time to load me into that massive wheel,” recalled Depp in a behind-the-scenes interview. “Gore just started laughing, because it was such an absurd and bizarre request for grown men to ask of each other: ‘Okay, what we'd like to do now is bind you inside the wheel, tether you to the walls of this thing, give you a sword, and as the wheel is rolling you're gonna go upside down several times.’”

At least Depp’s antics were somewhat curtailed on this shoot. For instance, on the shoot for the fifth Pirates film, 2017’s Dead Men Tell No Tales, he was often AWOL from set, fighting a torrid legal battle with his ex-wife Amber Heard. And production had to be halted when he showed up with a tip of his finger severed. Allegedly he had cut himself on a wine bottle while brawling with Heard, then dipped it in paint and used the mixture to scrawl an abusive message to his wife.

In happier times, during the filming of Dead Man’s Chest, personal issues took a back seat to a struggle against Mother Nature. She was no kinder when the amphibious production lumbered northwards. For Dead Man Chest’s key ‘parlay’ scene, which featured a negotiation between Captain Jack and Davy Jones, location scouts chose a spit of sand on an uninhabited cay in the Lesser Exumas in the Bahamas.

“It was a great location,” says Merrifield. “But it disappeared at high tide. [So we had to] build a floating city out there, between the barges, and the landing craft and everything we had to load on.”

As with the first movie, sequences with the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman were filmed in an old cruise missile base in the Bahamas. There, the 250ft pier allowed close-ups of the ships and, by rotating them as the sun shifted, gave almost completely clear horizons and the illusion that they were far out at sea.

But for the second and third films, it was decided to create fully functioning vessels. The original Black Pearl had been a stationary, floating mock-up. Now, the clean piratical lines of Captain Sparrow’s flagship were built around a squat 104ft tugboat, which had puttered down from the Alabama shipyard it had been gently rusting in after a lifetime servicing oil rigs. The Flying Dutchman, meanwhile, was modelled after the Vasa, a massive Spanish warship which sank in Stockholm’s harbour on its maiden voyage in 1628. Festooned with underwater life, and already archaic in the film’s 1720s setting, the idea for its design was that it had been haunting the high seas for more than 100 years.

Yet neither ship proved much cop when tropical storm Wilma, barrelling towards the Bahamas, was upgraded to a category one hurricane. Despite their 27-page hurricane preparedness plan, the filmmakers were caught on the hop and had to flee the 175mph winds overnight. “We evacuated the whole crew,” explains Merrifield, “and chartered a plane and flew back to LA. It damaged the [harbour], ships and other equipment, so it took a while to rebuild.”

After more than four years, production finally wrapped on both films. Was it worth it? Audiences were enthusiastic: Dead Man’s Chest was the highest grossing film of 2006, and At World’s End was 2007’s. But critics were sniffier. IGN’s Richard George reckoned that a better construct of the two movies would have been “to take 90 minutes of Chest, mix it with all of End and then cut that film in two.” Brian Lowry of Variety, meanwhile, damned At World’s End with the faintest praise. “Unlike last year's bloated sequel,” he wrote, “it at least possesses some semblance of a destination, making it slightly more coherent - if no less numbing during the protracted finale.”

James McAvoy even suggested that Knightley, who was still a teenager during the first Pirates film, had scuttled her career before it had properly begun. “She was in a film that, acting wise, wasn’t that demanding and she got labelled a terrible actor,” he told Deadline in 2011. “That could have been the end for her.”

Looking back on the films now, though, perhaps their most unlikely legacy was that, for a brief, heady moment in the early 2000s, they made pirates palatable again.

“These things are cyclical,” argues Tinniswood. “Recently pirates have been co-opted for all kinds of different causes: proto-Marxists, proto-Capitalists, champions of gay rights and feminism. But they were not nice people. And I don’t think you’ll ever see a celebratory franchise about Somalia pirates robbing oil tankers with rocket launchers.”

But Merrifield believes the fantasy is more enduring. “It’s this myth that has built up over the centuries. There was a time growing up when we were all playing pirates. It was the right moment to release that movie. It captured lighting in a bottle.”

So has the Black Pearl disappeared over the horizon for the last time?

“There’s been subsequent talk of a reboot,” says Merrifield. “But I don’t know what you do with Depp’s Captain Jack now. We threw the kitchen sink at those films. I don’t know where you go from there, aside from sending him into space.”

Stranger things have happened at sea.