By Yaniv Rokah
(Apr/May 2007) What started as a boat ride at Disneyland turned into a movie with the biggest opening weekend box office in history. The expectations are even higher for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, which will be released May 25th simultaneously worldwide, ironically to undercut piracy. To find out what it took to shoot Pirates 2 and 3 at the same time, Moving Pictures Magazine spoke with Patrick Loungway, director of photography for Pirates' second unit. "It was really hard shooting the two films together. The writers were still making changes to the script of the third film while we were already shooting both films, so it was a complex scenario. It's hard to keep the details of even a single film in your mind as you're working on it, because you want to know where you've been with the story and where you're going and how things interconnect visually. I think [Pirates' director] Gore Verbinski was really amazing in terms of keeping everything in his head at once. And he would immediately spot something that was wrong and set you right. But I think he may have been the only person who had the whole thing in his brain at one time, so everyone else was scrambling to keep up." Managing the logistics of huge production sets and hundreds of crew for the two films was - surprisingly! - the easy part. Filming at sea turned out to be the biggest challenge. "Boats don't stay where you want them. They never stay put. We did a lot of sequences where we had three or four boats that all had to be in exactly the right spot crossing each other, firing cannons at just the right time. All of these shots had to be done perfectly. Working on water is just not predictable. The whole crew had to be evacuated for Hurricane Wilma. The storm almost destroyed one of the boats and it took weeks to fix the damage to the set, so production went over schedule. The good news is that, because the second film was so successful, no one seemed too concerned about all that overage." According to Loungway, there is a healthy tension between production and post-production. "We were shooting scenes where you want the boat ‘at full sail,' which means that you have to be sailing downwind. This means that you're sailing with the waves - but of course the director wants the boat crashing into giant waves. Then you have to motor the boat into the waves, but then the sails are negative. Oh, and make sure the boat is in backlight and you don't see the land! A lot of it is going to be fixed digitally, but you still want to get it all on film. You want to get it all perfect, but sometimes you have to acknowledge that some of it's better done in post. Part of the job nowadays is to know when to cut your losses and know when to hand it over to post-production. It's so interesting where that line is. It's easy to just say, ‘Oh, we'll fix it in post,' but on a movie like this, the post-production schedule is very short compared to how much work there is to do, so we really tried to make it work on camera. People will see a lot of the large-scale physical stuff like the great swordfights and will, hopefully, realize that it is real. It's hard on a movie where there is so much done digitally, but it's important not to forget that lots of this stuff is real." So how does the Pirates trilogy come to close? "I can't give anything away. That's no fun," says Loungway. "There's a lot of high-quality Johnny Depp in the third movie - I mean, the whole gang is in there, but he does some truly amazing stuff. Really good comic acting. There are some very demanding sequences in there, physically, but he pulls them off himself and his timing is brilliant. Technically, the film is phenomenal. Pirates 3 goes to even more exotic locations than the first two films; it really opens up their world. It's a giant film. It's wall-to-wall pirates." |
