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

HAWAII FAREWELL
“It was a good operation, very safe and well done,” adds first assistant director Dave Venghaus.
“Everyone pitched in, lugging equipment around the beach. It was fun, we got it done, and that’s the way
you should do it. It was logistically very difficult, and watching our cast and crew climb up on volcanic
rock was both interesting and unnerving.”
But as always, there were no obstacles to Verbinski completing the final, 272nd day of combined
principal photography of “Dead Man’s Chest” and AT WORLD’S END (that’s 284 days if one counts preprincipal
shooting) on January 10, 2007, just a month and a half shy of two years to the day that the
cameras first rolled on February 23, 2005. And the finale was celebrated in suitably special fashion when
the warm, aloha-drenched locals of Molokai feted the entire company with a real, down-home luau,
replete with beautiful flower leis, a whole pig roasted in an imu (underground lava-rock oven), such
traditional foods as poi and haupia, and a rip-roaring performance by the young and enthusiastic members
of a local halau (hula school).
It was a well-deserved final gift of the heart to a company which had endured the extremes of filming
conditions, weather, discomfort, geography, time away from family and home, and almost never wavered
over the course of nearly 300 days of shooting. “I guess this is what Darwin was writing about,” joked
Gore Verbinski as he surveyed the survivors—those faces which remained from the first day of production
in February 2005—in the lunch tent on the final day of production in January 2007.
For Gore Verbinski and Jerry Bruckheimer, the end of shooting just marked the beginning of an
unbelievably intensive four-and-a-half-month post-production schedule which would see them working
24/7 with film editors Craig Wood and Stephen Rivkin, visual effects supervisors John Knoll and Charlie
Gibson, the Academy Award ® -winning team of supervising sound editor/designer Christopher Boyes,
supervising sound editor George Watters II and sound mixers Paul Massey and Boyes (all of whom were
nominated in two different categories for “Dead Man’s Chest”), and an army of other technical artists. And
once again, as he has for the first two “Pirates” movies and several other Bruckheimer and Verbinski
films, Hans Zimmer would again compose the music. “Hans is one of those artists who always comes up
with something fresh, unique and different,” says Bruckheimer. “He’s a brilliant composer who has these
wonderful melodies in his head. You hear the ‘Pirates’ theme everywhere now, and for AT WORLD’S
END he’s created several new motifs and melodies, as well as a new love theme. It’s wonderful to watch
Hans in the recording sessions, when he has 80 musicians and talks to each individual violinist to tell them
exactly the pitch, tone and feeling that he wants in every note.”
As for the director’s punishing
schedule, “Gore has been on these
two movies for so long without a
break that I’m not sure if he
remembers the names of his kids at
this point,” says Bruckheimer, halfjokingly.
“He’s a consummate
professional and perfectionist, so
every little frame receives his
complete attention. That’s the kind of
director you want to work with.”
Two years is a long time in
anyone’s life, and for the cast and
crew that made it through all 284
combined marathon shooting days of “Dead Man’s Chest” and AT WORLD’S END, approaching wrap
brought a bagful of seriously mixed emotions. “I’m proud of the journey we’ve all made over the past two
years on these two movies,” states executive producer Eric McLeod. “It’s been a huge part of our lives,
and I think in the end the crew will look back on the sacrifices they made and feel that it’s worth it,
because a film like this is not a job. You make it through with a great group of people, and we’ll all be
asked about them for years to come. We’ll all be telling stories about what it was like to work on the
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