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"Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest" First Look In theaters July 7, 2006 $55 Million First Day Biggest First Day Ever Biggest First Weekend Ever Read the Orlando Bloom Interview Watch Six Exclusive Clips and the Trailer - Below Captain Jack is back.and so are Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, joined by a roistering shipload of characters both new and familiar, in PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST- the epic second installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean saga. Once again we have JOHNNY DEPP starring in his Academy Award®-nominated role, ORLANDO BLOOM and 2005 Best Actress Oscar® nominee KEIRA KNIGHTLEY. Produced by JERRY BRUCKHEIMER and directed by GORE VERBINSKI, Captain Jack sets sail on this all-new adventure. In this swashbuckling and spectacular follow-up to the blockbuster 2003 film, the decidedly eccentric Captain Jack Sparrow is caught up in another tangled web of supernatural intrigue. Although the curse of the Black Pearl has been lifted, an even more terrifying threat looms over its captain and scurvy crew: it turns out that Jack owes a blood debt to the legendary Davy Jones (BILL NIGHY), Ruler of the Ocean Depths, who captains the ghostly Flying Dutchman, which no other ship can match in speed and stealth. Unless the ever-crafty Jack figures a cunning way out of this Faustian pact, he will be cursed to an afterlife of eternal servitude and damnation in the service of Jones. This startling development interrupts the wedding plans of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, who once again find themselves thrust into Jack's misadventures, leading to escalating confrontations with sea monsters, very unfriendly islanders, flamboyant soothsayer Tia Dalma (NAOMIE HARRIS) and even the mysterious appearance of Will's long-lost father, Bootstrap Bill (STELLAN SKARSGÅRD). Meanwhile, ruthless pirate hunter Lord Cutler Beckett (TOM HOLLANDER) of the East India Trading Company sets his sights on retrieving the fabled "Dead Man's Chest." According to legend, whoever possesses the Dead Man's Chest gains control of Davy Jones, and Beckett intends to use this awesome power to destroy every last Pirate of the Caribbean once and for all. For times are changing on the high seas, with businessmen and bureaucrats becoming the true pirates.and freewheeling, fun-loving buccaneers like Jack and his crew threatened with extinction. STARRING: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Geoffrey Rush, Stellan Skarsgård, Naomie Harris, Alex Norton, Chow Yun-Fat, Jack Davenport, Bill Nighy, Tom Hollander WATCH THE "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" TRAILER
See the Complete 2006 Movie Release Schedule Behind The Scenes In art, as in life, history has a strange way of turning full circle. The first on-screen image ever to appear in an all-live-action Walt Disney Studio feature was none other than a closeup of the skull-and-crossbones Jolly Roger flag in the classic 1950 version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.” Some 53 years later, it took the very same studio’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” to spectacularly reinvent and reinvigorate a moribund genre which once again is delighting millions. From childhood classics like Treasure Island and Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, to such classic films as “The Black Pirate,” “The Buccaneer” and “The Crimson Pirate,” the swashbuckling tales of high-seas derring-do, both nefarious and noble, were seemingly neverending. Alas, as far as filmmakers were concerned, pirates were forgotten as subjects worthy of contemporary moviemaking. It took Jerry Bruckheimer, Gore Verbinski and a brilliant company of actors and behind-the-scenes artists to breathe new life into the Jolly Roger’s sails, inspired by the great Disney Theme Parks attraction which has enchanted generations since its 1967 debut at Disneyland in Anaheim. The Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, which utilized the then-brand-new technology of audio-animatronics which Walt Disney and his Imagineers magnificently developed, soon became a major part of pop culture, with its cheery refrains of “Yo ho yo ho, a pirate’s life for me” (and the less cheery warning that “Dead men tell no tales”) sung and quoted by millions. Using the ride as a springboard, with clever references to the attraction’s content sprinkled throughout, “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” was a smash hit everywhere it played, amassing a domestic U.S. gross of $305,413,918 and, including its record-breaking overseas engagements, a worldwide total of $653,913,918. The film also received five Academy Award® nominations, including Best Actor for Johnny Depp. Like the ride itself, “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” appealed to the little bit of pirate that lives within us all, the desire for freedom, adventure and not a small amount of mischief. While paying affectionate homage to the cinematic adventures which preceded it, “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” sailed into entirely new territory, breaking with tradition by linking its high-seas tale with lashings of irreverent humor, as typified by Johnny Depp’s original and brilliantly inspired creation of Captain Jack Sparrow…a pirate the likes of which audiences had never seen before.
That success was never a sure thing, Bruckheimer now admits. “There were limited expectations for the first ‘Pirates.’ Lots of people thought we were making a Disney ride movie for toddlers, and what’s more, the pirate genre had been dead for 40 years, and every attempt to revive it had bombed miserably. But then ‘The Curse of the Black Pearl’ was released and caught everybody by surprise, which is the best way to do it. The artistry that Gore and the writers brought to it, and the performances by Johnny, Orlando, Keira and Geoffrey, just captured everybody’s imagination and it became a huge success internationally.” “Everything that we set up in the first movie gets pushed forward in the second,” Bruckheimer continues, “and of course we have the same creative team. Gore is such a brilliant director, with a wonderful sense of humor and a great visual sense. Often, strongly visual directors aren’t great storytellers because they focus so much on the physical look of the movie. But Gore has both the visual acumen and the understanding of storytelling and characterization. “Johnny, Orlando and Keira are all back for the ride,” adds Bruckheimer, “plus some wonderful and interesting new faces. The Black Pearl will, of course, be back, along with a new mystery ship, the Flying Dutchman, which is crewed by a very exciting and unusual group of sailors under the command of Davy Jones. “It all comes down to the imagination of the director, writers and the hundreds of people working on the movie,” says the producer. “Everybody’s excited about making an enormous piece of entertainment that audiences will love.”
Clearly, there was a worldwide mandate for more “Pirates,” and Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski, along with Walt Disney Pictures, decided that just one sequel would not be enough. It made practical sense, economically, to film two follow-ups simultaneously, taking full advantage of locations, sets and availability of its increasingly in-demand stars. It also made sense creatively, because with the characters so well established in the first film, taking them on further voyages was an exciting prospect. “We were hoping for the success of ‘The Curse of the Black Pearl’ so that we could make more ‘Pirates’ movies,” notes Bruckheimer, “and when you see the second and third films you’ll see that everything relates back to what started everything off in the first. It’s a true trilogy.” “You really need to have some substance behind it,” confirms executive producer Mike Stenson. “You need to not only deliver the entertainment value, the roller-coaster ride and the laughs, but if you’re going to ask people to stay around for three movies, you have to feel like there’s something thematically significant that you’re going to explore.”
“Similarly,” Rossio continues, “much of the basis of the first movie was the romantic story between Will and Elizabeth, and we knew we wanted to get into more of a mature examination of the relationship between the two of them. What happens to Will and Elizabeth after that wildly romantic final kiss with the beautiful sunset at the end of ‘The Curse of the Black Pearl’?” DEAD MAN’S CHEST also dips deeply into the treasure trove of pirate and seagoing lore and mythology, from Davy Jones, he of the famous “locker,” to the legendary Kraken, a sea monster fabled since the 12th century. “You think of the sea,” says Elliott, “and there are a lot of supernatural stories you’ve heard. But nobody had actually done those stories as part of a larger pirate movie or swashbuckler, so there was a wealth of legends to draw from. We touched on some of those in the first movie: there’s a line of dialogue in which Will talks about sending himself down to Davy Jones’ Locker. So, in DEAD MAN’S CHEST, we decided to explore who Davy Jones is, and then we brought in another well-known legend of the seas, the Flying Dutchman, and combined them together.”
Elliott and Rossio also cleverly utilized one of history’s greatest economic and political powers—the East India Trading Company—as a pivotal entity in the plot of DEAD MAN’S CHEST. Like much else in the “Pirates” movies, historical reality is used as a springboard for fun and fantasy. The real British East India Company was a tool of imperialist domination, economically and politically, from 1600 to its dissolution in 1858, essentially ruling India and spreading its tentacles as far as the Persian Gulf, Southeast Asia and East Asia. Even the most generous contemporary histories describe the East India Company’s activities as extraordinarily greedy and inhumane. “What we like about pirates,” states Elliott, “is that they represent freedom. And the East India Company, as a giant multi-national corporation, represents the end of individual freedom. They’re defining the world as they want it to be, and there will be a lot of people they’re going to leave out. The more dominance they have, the less room there is for people like Captain Jack Sparrow.” And Captain Jack Sparrow, it can be said with some degree of authority, is the only truly iconic screen character to have yet come out of this new millennium. A wholly original and thrillingly eccentric creation conjured up by a famous shape-shifter named Johnny Depp, this ducking, weaving, highly superstitious pirate captain of equally dubious morality and personal hygiene became the screen anti-hero for a new century. With his long dreadlocks and braided beard adorned with a wild assortment of beads and baubles, various and sundry amulets hanging from his attire, and teeth studded with gold and silver, Captain Jack Sparrow, like the film itself, appealed to audiences that ran the gamut in age, gender and nationality. Depp’s performance as Jack Sparrow was recently named one of the 100 greatest performances of all time in the May 2006 edition of Premiere magazine, which, tellingly, featured the good Captain’s visage on the cover more prominently than anyone else’s (Depp made the list a second time, for the title role of “Edward Scissorhands”). “If you ask most people what they loved most about the first movie,” says Mike Stenson, “it’s usually this completely iconoclastic Jack Sparrow character. In a 500-channel universe, where you have so many different opportunities to be entertained in so many ways, you have to give the audience something that’s unique and different. That’s exactly what Johnny did with Captain Jack Sparrow in ‘The Curse of the Black Pearl.’ He created this character and had absolutely committed to it, and both Jerry and Gore had to tell the powers that be to trust them on it after they saw the first dailies. At the end of the day, Johnny took a risk, and Jerry and Gore backed him 100 percent.”
“Johnny is one of our greatest actors,” says Bruckheimer. “He invented Jack Sparrow in the first movie, and he’s not somebody who wants to rest on his laurels for the second and third. He takes a character to even newer heights. None of us would be back if Johnny had not wanted to play this character again. He loved making the first movie, and audiences loved him right back.” As for Depp, the actor claims that “It is beyond me how such a character has sort of taken root in some people’s hearts. It’s still shocking to me. I was handed this opportunity to make something of this character, and I had pretty solid ideas about who he was and what he should be like. There were a number of people who thought I was nuts. But I was committed to the guy, and I think that’s what happened to me in terms of finding the character. “What I set out to do,” continues Depp, “was to try and make Captain Jack appeal to little kids as well as the most hardened adult intellectuals.” Notes Terry Rossio, “One of the archetypes that is really underused in American cinema is the trickster character. Most American movies tend to celebrate the warrior who does the right thing at the right time. But the fun thing about Jack, who is definitely a trickster, is that he’s not particularly good at avoiding getting caught. He will get caught…you just can’t hold on to him for very long. Jack knows that if he can just bide his time, eventually the world will come over to his side, and that gives him this sort of supreme confidence that he can handle just about any situation.” “The other fun thing about the trickster character,” continues Ted Elliott, “is that he basically is just out to have his own good time. He’s following his own self-interests. The things he does will affect other people—the mortals, if you will—and sometimes it will be to good benefit, and sometimes it will be to their detriment. So that goes back to the whole question posed in the first movie: is Jack Sparrow a good guy or is he a bad guy? Is he a pirate hero or pirate villain? Well, it really kind of depends on the perspective you have.”
With “The Curse of the Black Pearl” having been crucial in launching both actors to major international stardom, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley were enthusiastic to return alongside Depp as, respectively, young lovers Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann. (The fourth member of the original quartet, Geoffrey Rush, is not in the second film, his character of Captain Barbossa having been dispatched to the underworld by Jack Sparrow at the climax of the first film.) Jerry Bruckheimer, who has a knack for discovering young talent before the rest of the world catches on, secured Bloom as a young U.S. Ranger in “Black Hawk Down” before the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy was released and cast Knightley in the first “Pirates” film when she was only 17 years old and “Bend It Like Beckham”—which was her breakthrough movie in the international arena—had not yet been released. “We could see that Keira was an extraordinary actress when we cast her in ‘The Curse of the Black Pearl,’ Bruckheimer recalls. “She’s not afraid of anything. In the two years between the shooting of the first film and the start of the second, her skills had heightened with the work that she did and the experience she gained.” (This experience, incidentally, included her performance of Guinevere in Bruckheimer’s production of “King Arthur.”) “As for Orlando,” continues the producer, “he also did an enormous amount of hard work between the first and second ‘Pirates,’ working with some wonderful directors, like Ridley Scott and Cameron Crowe. Orlando started out as a really terrific screen actor and has only gotten better with time.” At the hands of screenwriters Elliott and Rossio, Will and Elizabeth were to undergo considerable development in the story of DEAD MAN’S CHEST.
Says Bloom, “I wanted Will to be less of the kind of earnest, upright young guy of the first movie and, this time, to see his darker shades. Will’s real journey throughout the second movie is his concern for his father, Bootstrap Bill, who is an important element of the first film without actually being seen. Will needs to rescue his father from the fate that he’s been destined to live on the Flying Dutchman with Davy Jones and his frightening crew. So Will’s objective is to reconnect with his father and, at the same time, somehow maintain his relationship with Elizabeth. Each of the main characters in DEAD MAN’S CHEST have their own objectives, which are to some extent in conflict with each other’s. There’s a real sense of young lovers’ tension between Will and Elizabeth.” Keira Knightley, like much of the rest of the world, had been happily surprised by the massive success of the first film. “We were doing a movie based on a Disney theme-park ride in a genre that hadn’t been successful in something like 50 years,” she recalls. “But we had Gore Verbinski, whose vision is quite extraordinary, and Johnny Depp, whose portrayal of Jack Sparrow kind of brought the film into a whole new phenomenal world. “What’s nice about this movie,” adds Knightley, “is that the characters have evolved. When we first meet Elizabeth at the beginning of the story, she’s on the brink of getting married to Will, which falls to pieces because a character named Lord Cutler Beckett comes into the equation, and he wants to annihilate piracy from the world. He’s determined to arrest Will for being a pirate and Elizabeth for aiding in the escape of Captain Jack Sparrow. Elizabeth becomes a woman on a mission, and there are some quite nice undertones to her relationship with Will, as well as to Jack Sparrow…which grows into something very interesting.”
Also returning from “The Curse of the Black Pearl” is Jack Davenport as James Norrington, the British naval officer who loses Elizabeth Swann to Will Turner and gets one-upped time and again by Captain Jack Sparrow. “Jack Davenport is such a superb actor that we wanted him back in the party,” says Bruckheimer. “He’s fun to work with and created a wonderful character which becomes more embellished, richer and adds to the story. Jack is a major player in both the second and third films.” “When we last saw Norrington,” says Davenport, “he was losing big-time on all fronts. He was losing girls, he was losing people out of jail, being humiliated in every way. Hopefully, whilst he was being humiliated, you kind of got a sense of him making mature decisions at difficult times. The thing that always interested me about the role in the first film was that you have this character who’s a leader of men in a very public role. And at the end of the first story, he’s in a situation where he’s having to deal with things which are very private in an incredibly public arena, with something like 200 people standing around. “When I read the script for DEAD MAN’S CHEST,” Davenport continues, “I was delighted to see how they developed his character. Norrington has fallen on hard times. He doesn’t look the way he looked before. He’s lost his job, his girl and his self-respect. And suddenly, he has a chance to sign up as a crewman with none other than Captain Jack Sparrow. The question is, what’s Norrington after? Revenge? Elizabeth? Or something else?” (Coincidentally, Jack Davenport’s father—the distinguished British stage and screen actor Nigel Davenport—was one of the stars of Alexander Mackendrick’s “A High Wind in Jamaica,” made some 40 years ago and one of the best examples of the genre before it vanished from theater screens.)
Nighy’s primary challenge would be that because of Davy Jones’ astonishing physical appearance, he would be acting throughout the film in what resembles a gray track suit and matching cap with reference marks for Industrial Light & Magic’s computer wizards, who would embellish it with the amazing details as imagined by Gore Verbinski and famed conceptual artist Mark “Crash” McCreery. But Nighy was game to take it on. “The first movie was not only successful,” he notes, “but is actually beloved, and has entered the language in a way that I think few movies do. To be part of this was a very satisfying notion. As for playing a character which will be physically embellished by computer wizardry, as an actor you use your imagination. The same things are required of you, generally speaking. “Of course,” adds Nighy dryly, “in DEAD MAN’S CHEST I’m playing a man who has an octopus growing out of my chin, which I must admit, has thus far been outside of my experience.”
“Especially Jack Sparrow,” Hollander continues, “who in Beckett’s view is naughty, messy, has dreadlocks, could do with a few more baths and, worst of all, is a pirate. To Cutler Beckett, Jack Sparrow is a stray dog.” Stellan Skarsgård, who has been a major star in his native Sweden since the 1970s and has become an international player of considerable reputation and abilities, was pleased to be asked by Verbinski and Bruckheimer to portray Bootstrap Bill Turner…a character much discussed in “The Curse of the Black Pearl” but heretofore unseen. Skarsgård was well known to Bruckheimer, who had previously cast the actor as a marauding Teutonic in “King Arthur.” “Stellan is a world-class actor,” says Bruckheimer, “and Johnny and Orlando wanted to work with him. We knew that with Bootstrap Bill, Stellan would create a wonderful, compassionate and interesting portrait of a man who’s losing himself bit by bit.” “You could see in the first film that there was a lot of space for the actors to expand and bloom within scenes,” says Skarsgård. “You also felt like they had a lot of fun doing it, which is very endearing.”
David Schofield, the noted British character actor cast as Mercer, Lord Cutler Beckett’s merciless enforcer, was delighted at the prospect of working with Keira Knightley. The last time he had seen her in person was when she was three years old, and Schofield was performing on stage at the Chichester (England) Festival with her father, actor Will Knightley. Schofield was also amazed at how many of his countrymen (and -women) were to be performing in the second “Pirates” film. “It’s like there are all these English theater actors being floated on a very luxurious Walt Disney mattress to exotic places. And they can chat away happily about their English lives and their English feelings about things. But they’re supported by this American structure. It’s a bit like an English glove with an American hand in it.” Then there are the returnees who have come back to take yet another fantastic voyage on the Black Pearl. “I never expected to be back,” says Jonathan Pryce, who indeed is back as Port Royal Governor Weatherby Swann, Elizabeth’s loving if slightly befuddled father. Having missed all of the original screenings and premieres of the first film because of his busy schedule, Pryce finally bought himself a ticket to a cinema in London, “and could barely get a seat, which I thought was ironic. It was four or five weeks after its initial opening, but the cinema was packed. It was a wonderful experience seeing the film with a real audience, watching them laughing and watching the screen in amazement. It was very gratifying to be in a commercial film that audience, young and old, responded to so well.” Returning as Pintel and Ragetti—who endeared themselves to audiences as a sublime comedic pairing in “The Curse of the Black Pearl”—are, respectively, Lee Arenberg and Mackenzie Crook. “Pintel and Ragetti are marvelous characters to begin with,” says Jerry Bruckheimer, “but Lee and Mackenzie did a brilliant job of taking something that was on the page and amping it to the nth degree."
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