Pirates of the caribbean: at world's end - Disney

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
ILM’s Hal Hickel, on “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”); special effects coordinator ALLEN
L. HALL (who shared the “Dead Man’s Chest” Oscar ® with Knoll, Gibson and Hickel); stunt
coordinator/second unit director GEORGE MARSHALL RUGE; three-time Academy Award ® -winning
key makeup artist VE NEILL and key hair stylist MARTIN SAMUEL, both of whom shared an Oscar ®
nomination for “The Curse of the Black Pearl”; and composer HANS ZIMMER.
Joining this world-class team on the new film is Academy Award ® -winning special effects supervisor
JOHN FRAZIER (“Spider-Man 2”).
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Success can be a tough taskmaster…and coming off of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,”
which garnered more than $1 billion internationally and took third position for the top-grossing films of
all time, Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski were absolutely determined to once again rise to, and then
go beyond, audience expectations. “It’s scary when you make a picture that’s such a huge success,”
confesses Bruckheimer. “You never
quite know. It was against
conventional wisdom that a pirate
movie based on a theme park ride
could be such a hit. Then we came
back with the second film, and it’s
common knowledge in our business
that a sequel will make 20 to 30
percent less than the first one. And
yet, ‘Dead Man’s Chest’ made almost
double of what ‘The Curse of the
Black Pearl’ took in.”
Bruckheimer attributes the
massive success of the first two “Pirates of the Caribbean” films to the enormous amount of hard work
put in by the filmmakers and talent on both sides of the camera. “You start with the writing, and Ted Elliott
and Terry Rossio did a brilliant job creating great new characters and exciting arenas for them to work in.
Then you add a director who’s as talented as Gore Verbinski, who gave audiences such a thrill ride in the
first film, and took them even further in the second. And what really makes it all come together is when
you see actors like Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom and Geoffrey Rush going through the
paces of what Gore, Ted and Terry worked so hard to create with characters who are engaging, funny,
romantic and witty. It took a lot of energy, brain power and time on the part of Gore, Ted and Terry to work
out all of those amazing characters, situations and set pieces.
“Then you go behind the scenes,” continues Bruckheimer, “with Rick Heinrichs’ production design,
Darek Wolski’s cinematography, Hans Zimmer’s music, and the rest of the people who worked so hard on
these pictures and helped make them the huge success they became.”
For the third film, the producer and director encouraged screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio to
push that envelope even further…quite literally, to the ends of the earth. “What we set for ourselves with
Jerry, Gore, Johnny and everyone else,” says Elliott, “was to figure out a way to do two more movies that
were of a piece with the first one, and yet still be unique in their own right. What we had to do with each
one was, as quickly as we could in the story, satisfy expectations. And then set ourselves the challenge to
go past that, and create events that people could never anticipate. Which isn’t easy.”
“The overall theme that we’re dealing with in AT WORLD’S END,” adds Terry Rossio, “is the nature
of what it takes to be a good person, and each person faces that struggle. We embrace the idea that all
pirate movies are about moral ambiguity, and good people can be forced into circumstances wherein they
do something bad. So from the point of view of every character, they all have to go through that challenge,
that transformation, facing their own ability to do something they’re not comfortable with, and making
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