by Gill Pringle
Rising to prominence in the excess-filled ‘80s (Flashdance, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop), producer Jerry Bruckheimer has gone on to make some of the most successful movies and TV shows [the CSI franchise] of all time, with the latest Pirates of the Caribbean set to add more gold to his loot.
Could you go back to the very beginning and tell us how the first film came about?
I was sent the script and it was great. We sent it to Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio who were the two writers we wanted to work with, who wrote Shrek and they came back to us and said we want to make the pirates turn into skeletons in the moonlight and return to steal the treasure, so they added the supernatural and I said, ‘that’s a movie that I’d go see’. I thought when I first read the script that I was going to make a movie based on a theme park ride so that’s the end of my career because what happened was that The Country Bears (2002) had come out and failed and The Haunted Mansion (2003) had come out and failed so I said, ‘Oh boy. What are we going to do?’ But then they came in and Gore, someone we had been following since he was doing commercials as he’s a really brilliant humourist and visualist. So, we got him excited so the next quest was, who do you have play Jack Sparrow? And I had the idea that it had to be Johnny Depp because he had only done movies that were really character studies like Edward Scissorhands, so he was more of an artistic choice. He had never really done big movies and that excited me so I flew to France and had storyboards and drawings done and got him excited about it and he just had a daughter so he wanted to make something for her.
Were you always clear on Johnny’s take of the character because there are some tales where he was very unique…
You put it lightly. He was like a drunk gay pirate, as I saw it. It doesn’t quite work with the Disney brand so when Johnny talks about the character, the character is not drunk. He’s just been on a ship for so long so he’s always kind of off balance.His daughter, Lily Rose was pretty instrumental in creating the character because she was watching a lot of cartoons with him and he fell in love with Pepe Le Pu, so between Pepe Le Pu and his friend, Keith Richards, he came up with this character. When we first did camera tests or makeup tests, all his teeth were gold so that really set off an alarm through Disney, so we convinced him to have a few regular teeth in there as well.
There are a couple of versions of how Paul McCartney got involved with Dead Men Tell No Tales. How did you make it happen?
I didn’t make it happen, Johnny did. Keith wasn’t available as he was on tour so Johnny had just worked with Paul on a music video as they are friends so he called him up and asked him do you want to be a pirate? And he said sure. So, the two of them got together and they created the costume design, they created the look and they worked on the scene together and Paul brought a lot, he came up with a song, he did a lot of great stuff so they had a blast shooting it, they really did.
Why are there two titles? The other one is Salazar’s Revenge.
I think some of the countries just thought it was a better title for their particular country so our exhibitor and marketing people decided what we should call it in the various territories.
How did the process of picking your next director, or in this case directors [Joachim Ronning, Espen Sandberg], go?
Hollywood is full of characters who are fantastic salesmen. They can talk the talk then you look at their work and they can’t walk the walk so, they came in and did both. They came in and read the script and they had really interesting ideas of what they were going to do with the franchise and their movies were good. Kon-Tiki was nominated for an Academy Award, Max Manus, a great character study and they were given no money to make these movies. You look at the scope and the size of this movie, and they are two filmmakers that have never done anything this size. They are terrific filmmakers and that’s what we do, we try to get great filmmakers.
Five films in the can, what do you think you have learned from film to film?
It is always how can we make these stories more effective? How can we have more interesting characters? How can we layer the characters? And I think what we have learned is that in the past our plots have been very complicated and the films have been long so we have simplified the plot in this one. It’s easier to follow and it’s shorter, 15 or 20 minutes shorter than the previous one so we felt that is something we have learned. We don’t want to give the audience Jack Sparrow fatigue.
We hear opinions from people like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg about the future of cinema. How do you see that future?
You all have kitchens in your homes, right? But you go out to eat so hopefully cinema will be around for a long time. You always want a change, a change in scenery, and it’s a communal experience in the theatre. It’s up to the Spielbergs and Lucas’ and Jim Camerons to take filmmaking to another level in technology and I’m working with a filmmaker right now who wants to shoot the next film we do together in 120 frames 4k 3d which is quite an undertaking – 120 frames is where you’re seeing it like it’s real life. It’s a whole different experience. So that’s what we are working on with Dolby Sound and Dolby Vision. There’s a thing in Asian that we are doing called Screen X where there are these theatres that surround you with the entire scene. It goes up on all three walls so that’s changing cinema. Then of course you have Imax which is a great experience. So as long as we can have this technology and ways to get people out of their houses, because there is so much good television… But you know, a pirate movie like this, you want to be there on the first weekend and that’s the fun. We have all of the fans and they dress up and they cheer and that’s great! That’s like going to a concert. By the way, if you have any time, I just watched Hans Zimmer’s concert. It’s spectacular. I saw it in LA and it’s all film score but the one that brings everyone to their feet is the pirate score. Everybody stands up and applauds.
Since you also do TV where the quality is very advanced, do you try to bring that to films?
Well there’s a big difference. Quality in movies versus quality television is that you are able to create a character in 22 hours and we can’t do that in film, we only have 2 hours to tell the story so plot always wins out over character. If you focus too much on character in a scene and the film is too long, that is the scene that always gets cut, so we like to keep plot and character together, so you can’t take out the character scene.
Would you say it is trickier?
It is tricker. Yeah of course. In TV, you have more time to stretch out your story and I’ve worked with all the major networks and especially cable people, they say don’t give away too much, start slowly but we want to cram everything in. They say ‘no, no, we will do that in the second season.’
After doing it for all these years, how are you able to keep going, and working at such an intense level? Are you still having fun?
I love it. The most fun I have is standing in the back of the theatre when the movie opens and watching people really enjoy it. I had a great time at our premiere in Hollywood just watching the reaction from the audience and the fans as they watch the story and laughed and applauded at the end. That is the difference for me between television and movies. For television, you wait until the next morning to get good ratings but with movies, it’s instant, you just feel that electricity in the audience.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is in cinemas May 25, 2017
