After Captain Jack Sparrow regains command of his precious ship, the Black Pearl, an old friend comes to collect on a debt. Unfortunately Davy Jones requires 100 years of Jack’s servitude on board the Flying Dutchman and Jack just doesn’t feel like doing the work. Instead he tricks Will Turner into taking his place, a compromise that will get Jack into serious trouble with Will’s fiancé, Elizabeth Swann.
Dead Man’s Chest delivers the same swashbuckling action and fantasy-horror characters that made The Curse of the Black Pearl so popular. So much so, that in some moments you may feel like you’re watching the same scenes – Davy Jones and his monstrous crew have much the same feel to them as Captain Barbossa and his undead pirates.
The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was made as a stand alone and was considered a financial risk at the time. Its success at the box office paved the way for not just one sequel, but two. The only problem was not having a script ready. And none of the costumes remained from the first movie. All in a day's work when you're making a blockbusting Hollywood movie!
I like to watch creative movies like this on the big screen, but I like to buy the DVD for the "making-of" documentaries, and, like many DVDs of special effects-rich movies, Dead Man’s Chest offers a bonus extra features disk with documentaries on the creative processes involved. Unfortunately the documentaries are heavy on the production and logistics side, and rather light on the set-building, costume design, and make-up, which are my particular interests. The main point of interest was the lack of script and the problems this caused with the preparation work. The scriptwriters (Ted Elliot and Terry Rosio) joked that the best time to hand in a script is on the first day of filming, to avoid any changes being made. They must be worth the problems, though, because I’ve never known writers to be given such leeway in a cutthroat industry like film-making. Also, as a disorganised creative type, I found myself intrigued by the sheer size of this production and the co-ordination involved. It makes me feel grateful that there are logically minded people in the world who can take care of details such as booking ten thousand plane tickets in and out of various destinations, sorting out the logistics of transporting, parking, and accommodating the equipment, trucks, containers, crew, and actors, specifically when much of the filming took place on tiny islands that had no infrastructure for ordinary vehicles, let alone the dozens of huge trucks that needed to manoeuvre up and down hills and around tight bends. It’s exhausting just watching. And that’s before having to evacuate everyone and everything for the “hurricane season”.
Costumes and make-up are combined in one documentary called “Captain Jack Sparrow from head to toe”, and as the title suggests, focuses only on Jack’s costume. I can’t even imagine having to start again from scratch when you’re asked to reproduce your work from something you created almost two years previously. But costume designer Penny Rose shrugs it off by simply explaining that although they initially couldn’t find the fabric they’d used for the coats anywhere, a costume specialist in London happened to have stashed fifty yards of this same fabric behind a sofa, presumably having had a premonition that they would need it again. The hats had to be remade by the original milliner in Rome. I would have loved more details, not only on this mad scramble to reproduce the costumes from the first movie, but also on the design phase of all the costumes.
Like many people, I believed that the rendering of the Davy Jones character involved far more makeup, prosthetics, and costuming than it actually did. I was a little disappointed that the monstrous crew were almost entirely created by CGI. This is still an amazingly creative process, with a lot of physics and mathematics thrown in for good measure. It’s fun to watch the transition from a scene of Bill Nighy acting out his lines in a black tracksuit with dots all over his face, to the deepening layers of animation being added one by one. Most fascinating is the information that the colour and texture used for Davy Jones’s facial tentacles were inspired by a coffee-stained Styrofoam cup that was flattened and scanned. It just goes to show that there is creative inspiration wherever you care to look.
Pirates of the Caribbean : Curse of the Black Pearl and Pirates of the Caribbean 2 : Dead Man's Chest are both available from Amazon.com
The third movie, At World's End is also now out on DVD.
