When Johnny Depp walked out onto the sea-blue carpet under the atrium of London’s Westfield, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if the ceiling of the shopping centre had blown off, so loud were the screams and chants.
Earlier in the day at the press conference, when iconic producer Jerry Bruckheimer was asked if this fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie would be followed by a fifth, he replied: ‘ I think it all depends on how the audience embraces this one. We’ve done the movie, we had a blast making it and if everyone enjoys it as much as we do then hopefully we’ll get the whole team back together and do another.’ Judging by the UK premiere reception received by Depp and his co-stars, Penelope Cruz, Ian McShane and Geoffrey Rush, no-one wants to enjoy this latest movie, On Stranger Tides, more than the fans of Captain Jack Sparrow.
All those in London this week to promote Pirates clearly enjoyed the whole experience, whether it was the chance to work with friends for the fourth time or, as in the case of newbies Astrid Berges-Frisbey (mermaid Syrena) and Sam Claflin (missionary Philip Swift), here was the opportunity to fulfil childhood ambitions of playing at pirates. Even better, playing at pirates with Johnny Depp.
Claflin most recently played as a knight opposite evil bishop Ian McShane in the TV drama The Pillars of the Earth. ‘I recall calling my mum up after that and said ‘OK, I’ve finished being a knight, next childhood dream on the list, I want to be a pirate.’ And this is before I even knew the fourth film was happening. The next audition was for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and she said ‘It’s fate, Sam, it’s fate!’ and I went ‘No! It’s never gonna happen, it’s never gonna happen.’ I’m shell shocked to say the least. I’m overwhelmed. I’ve grown up watching all of these guys’ films so I’ve still got butterflies in my stomach. It’s a thrill ride, really, and I’m very happy to be here. Thank you to all these guys for making it happen.’
Sam and Astrid were in, according to Sam, ‘deer-in-the-headlight mode’ through the shoot, and ‘the thought that I’m living the Goonies kind of stayed with me’. ‘I remember the first time I saw the pirates ship,’ said Astrid. ‘I went to see the pirates ship because I had no scenes on [it], I knew I was like a kid, like a little girl, jumping everywhere, wishing to see every detail of the incredible ship they made. It’s a real one, by the way.’
Making her debut as pirate Angelica, Penelope Cruz had the additional pressure of being pregnant. ‘The reaction of Bruckheimer, director Rob Marshall and Johnny Depp could not have been better and I’ll never forget in my life as that was a very special time for me. To be working and to feel so protected and taken care of by all of them, every single step of the way, made it the most special movie I’ve done to date. To see how much they cared about me, how protected, meant so much to me.’
Ian McShane grabbed the chance to play the well-known pirating villain of Blackbeard, ‘The script was terrific – literate, funny. It has a linear line that goes back to the first one more in terms of the simplification of the plots and who the hell is Blackbeard? Is Penelope his daughter? Is she? I often wondered. All the characters lie to each other… I’d love it if you weren’t my daughter.’
The Pirates franchise is, as Jerry Bruckheimer stated, Jack Sparrow’s. ‘It’s his invention. It’s his series. He’s made it a success along with a lot of other talented people behind him and with him. It’s his to champion and hopefully carry on.’ Returning to the role time after time has given Depp the rare opportunity to develop a character and play with its creation. ‘It also gives me the opportunity to wear women’s undergarments… which you don’t get everyday and so when you get the chance grab it.’ Jack is never hard to find these days. ‘With all the characters I’ve played… they’re still pretty close to the surface. They’re still each and every one relatively accessible. But some of them you have to kind of work up to and other ones come a little bit easier and Captain Jack certainly, having played him now four times, yeah he arrives pretty quickly. He arrives a little too quickly. He arrives in life a lot. Dropping the kids off at school and he’ll just show up (laughter). It’s weird.’
When asked about his responsibility to his younger fans, Depp replies ‘the only responsibility really is to deliver something that’s fresh, something that’s new. At least to attempt that. The real responsibility is to entertain them, to try and make them laugh and that’s really it. And already starting out as a pirate. You’re not on a good footing in terms of making an impression. If a pirate’s too good he’ll probably be thrown out, thrown overboard. I think our own, my own, responsibility is to try and invent new situations and bits and pieces that entertain’.
On Stranger Tides also gave Depp the chance to work again with the father of Sparrow and that character’s inspiration, Keith Richards. Although it seems it wasn’t all Richards, some of it was down to a certain skunk. ‘It was very strange initially’, says Depp. ‘The idea came up of mixing Keith Richards with Pepé Le Pew. I was a little worried about what Keith was going to think. I didn’t fear Pepé Le Pew. I was a little worried about Keith. Because for a good portion of the time that I was spending with him I was sponging as much of him as I possibly could to use for the character and when he found out what I had been doing he was… yeah, it could have gone either way, but he was very nice about it. ‘I had no idea, mate’. He was very sweet about it and to be able to then bring him into the fold and bring him into the film and do scenes with him is yeah… it’s just the most amazing… It’s one of those things you know that’s been seared on to your brain and will never leave. It’s one of those moments. I’m really lucky to be here at this moment and I’m really lucky that I’m aware that I’m lucky.’
And then there was a certain Dame of the British Empire: ‘This is the second time I’ve been lucky enough to work with Dame Judi Dench’, says Depp. ‘Very briefly on Chocolat and very brief on this but she’s wonderful. She’s such a major force, a fun, smart, elegant angel. I got to dance with her on Chocolat briefly and I get to bite her ear on this. What’s next?’
Geoffrey Rush also returned as Barbossa, although not completely in one piece. ‘In the very first film there was a memo that came down… that we’re not going to have any eye patches in these films. No-one’s allowed to say ‘Aarrr!’ but I slipped in one in a post-modern quote. In the third one, Ragetti (Mackenzie Crook) loses his wooden eyeball and puts on an eyepatch. We like that to be seen as maybe the first pirate that ever wore an eyepatch and similiarly noone’s had a pegleg so far and somewhere in the story coming between the end of part 3 and the beginning of part 4 he’s lost a limb. I did get into discussions with an amputee prosthetist… because I was going to do the old Robert Newton thing of strapping my leg up. But he said it takes 18 months to 2 years to train your muscles to find the proper restructuring and balance and so forth. So I went to Rob and Penny Rose the costume designer and said ‘You know what? I think I can act the leg’. I knew that the CGI guys could work with a blue stocking and do incredibly.’
The big difference this time round was the input and direction of a new director. Gore Verbinski was unable to return to do his fourth Pirates film due to commitments on Rango. Instead, Rob Marshall (Chicago, Nine), and his team, including executive producer John DeLuca, took up the helm, selected by Bruckheimer and Depp. Bruckheimer: ‘I think part of the success of this film is the fact that we got the very talented Rob Marshall to work with us and it was a real coup for us… What’s so great about working with Rob he adds his own twist to the story and the characters and also made it his own. The series had completed our trilogy and we started a new one and he did an amazing job doing it.’
‘I was asked, which was a lovely thng, by Jerry Bruckheimer and Johnny Depp and, listen, for me to get the chance to work with Johnny was the thrill of my life and so to be asked by him was extraordinary,’ said Marshall. ‘And I’ve always wanted to do an action adventure piece for families. As a director I like to challenge it up and do different things. It’s your life and for many years of your life, for this it was three years, and so for me I like trying different things, genres, and this was an opportunity to do that. Working with Jerry was exquisite. He’s an iconic producer and there’s a reason why. He’s the best there is. Johnny is unbelievable, in every way, as a collaborator, as a person, there’s no one like him, so to have this opportunity was huge.’
However, there was more to it. This was the first 3D Pirates film. ‘We had a choice at the beginning whether to do it in 3D and I’m sort of from that school where not every movie should be in 3D’, explained Marshall. ‘I think the material has to lend itself to it. And in this it just made sense. We were creating a world where you can send pirates to London, to the Caribbean, all over the world and so it just felt like to immerse youself in that great world and take this wonderful ride of Jack Sparrow and all these fantastic characters made a lot of sense. It was challenging. I think we were very much pioneers in a way because we brought this very delicate 3D equipment up into really remote locations which maybe in retrospect was ridiculously stupid because it was hard and challenging. But for me it was worth it to shoot in real 3D, not in 2D and then convert it and in these real locations. I think you really feel like you’re there. It was tricky but it was worth every bit of it.’
John DeLuca explained a little more to me at the premiere about taking on the project with Marshall: ‘Rob and I came on for 4… It was a little daunting following the success. We’d never worked in this genre before. With Jerry Bruckheimer. We were the new ones so it was a little bit daunting. But we approached it like we approach everything. We started with the script and then moved on to casting, filming and editing and so the two worlds kind of met. We really loved working with every one involved and especially Johnny. He was just delightful.’
Known for their expertise in musicals and choreography, Marshall and DeLuca were given control by Bruckheimer and Depp. ‘They hired Rob and myself to bring what we would bring to a film like this, the performances, our focus and our take on the script and we have also done musicals which we worked in, in terms of the fighting, the choreography and the way it moved. The pace. So the two worlds came together and I really thought the marriage was a good one.’
The action scenes were a first for Penelope Cruz, ‘It was the first time I touched a sword. I had no idea. But I had wonderful teachers… hey were really amazing and they taught me for a couple of months before the movie started to shoot and then I worked when I could, always being very safe, with Johnny.’ Marshall interrupts: ‘Penelope is being too humble. She’s amazing physically. She’s a dancer as I know well [from Nine] and she knows how to time things brilliantly and she’s just physical. And that’s one of the millions of things that Penelope can do that a lot of people can’t. It’s extraordinary in every way. To be an actor at that level and also be so physical and so funny and so beautiful. An amazing combination.’
All of the cast were exuberant about the beautiful locations used for On Stranger Tides, whether on the paradise beaches of Kauai and Oahu or on the fantastical man made set of the Fountain of Youth, built on the Bond sound stage at Pinewood. ‘ It was really like being at Disneyland everyday on set’, said Penelope. ‘Shooting in the jungle, on beaches, in places that you can only visit if you have special permission and being in nature all day and I remember the first day I shot. To get to the set we have to take a boat and then we have to take a jetski from the boat and then you have to get out of the jetski and swim to the beach and then come back in a helicopter. And that was the first thing I heard about how you get to the set everyday’. Marshall admitted to having to swim to location.
Geoffrey Rush: ‘In Hawaii we were often on night shoots in fantastical bamboo forests, or crawling through very murky strange undergrowth, skulking our way in to the Spanish camp. The art department could feasibly create closer scenes like that, possibly in a studio environment, but when you’re on location it does I suppose 90% of the acting for you because you’re really there and you do feel and smell things lurking around, wildlife, which was silently nearby in the scene with you. Johnny, you were pretty frightened of bugs, weren’t you?’ Johnny agreed, ‘Yes, there were some very large ones there. They had their eyeball on me and I didn’t like it… Whenever you have some sort of species of insect, animal, whatever that has not only more legs than you but no SAG card. When it goes from being called a centipede to a millipede – I mean you lose count. Plus it’s got these other bits that stick out that taunt you as it’s about to bite you with its ass. And they’re quite big. Crawling horrible things in Hawaii. Yeah, I was in fear.’
Geoffrey continued that some of the beach locations were ‘historically fun, because the shore that we shot on for the lighthouse was where they shot From Here to Eternity. There was something kind of thrilling about how Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster played there before you.’
Kevin R McNally, or Mr Gibbs, told me at the premiere that he did enjoy his ‘six week holiday in the sun’ with ‘those lovely mermaids. I offered to cast them but they weren’t having it. It was pretty well mainly the people we’d had before but obviously a few different. The new director up there. So yes, there was a different feel and also there’d been a longer gap this time. But it’s always like coming back after the summer holidays. And it’s really great to see everyone again so I love it. Every time I do it, it just feels like seeing your old friends again. It’s got a really good feel to it.’
‘We had to reboot the series’, Bruckheimer said. ‘We’d finished our trilogy four years ago and now we’re starting a whole new set of adventures for Captain Jack Sparrow. The trick was of course to get Johnny back and thanks to his efforts to working very hard with our screenwriters he committed to do this. And he’s very difficult to commit to something. He doesn’t want to disappoint his fans. He worked very hard on the screenplay. You saw how much fun he had making the movie so were were fortunate to have him and we got very lucky to get Geoffrey back and we started with getting Penelope Cruz, who’s a beautiful and amazing actress, an Academy Award winner, to add to the excitement of the movie. And of course Ian McShane who’s a great baddie in this one. Fantastic. And then our new kids who are beautiful and very talented. Sam’s a homegrown gentleman and so I hope you all enjoyed his performance.’
And where next? To Cannes Film Festival. Depp: ‘To go into that place and be able to show this film on that grand stage, it’s pretty incredible. We’re very fortunate to be invited there. I just hope we win.’
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides opens in the UK on 18 May.
