Movie Cloning (Pirates)

“We didn’t intend to have sequels. The first [movie] is a story in and of itself, a sort of capital ‘r’ romance in The Prisoner of Zenda* sense that ends in an idealized love between Elizabeth and Will.”
Screenwriter Ted Elliot, co-writer on the first Pirates of Caribbean movie

Having grown up in Orlando and spending a chunk of my youth on the Disney World ride Pirates of the Caribbean I was not thrilled when I first heard that there was going to be a movie based on the ride. Just the whole concept seemed a step down from movies that became rides. Casting Johnny Depp at that time made it a little more interesting to think about the possibilities.

Depp’s three films before Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) were From Hell, Blow, and Chocolat. (Mix that around and it’s a pretty decent title: “Chocolat & Blow from Hell.”) Depp was also the actor who was in the off-beat roles Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands. He just wasn’t the kind of actor who you thought would pop up in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

A few Pirate film sequels & a gazillon box-office dollars later it was a fine move by several people. (Of course, I love the story kicking around that Disney executives didn’t care for Depp’s pirate interpretation when they saw the first dailies.)

“I think it was Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time, who was quoted as saying, ‘he’s ruining the movie.'”
Johnny Depp
BBC

Now, Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow has become one of the most memorable characters in modern blockbuster cinema.

The first Pirates of the Caribbean first script (which created the franchise that still has legs) was written by Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, from a story that Stuart Beatie and Jay Wolpert. What DNA did they tap into for creating Johnny Depp’s iconic character?

“We wrote a very specific character and Johnny played that character but his performance was one neither of us could have imagined. We wanted to create this trickster. If you go all the way back to [Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel] Treasure Island, we kind of borrowed the moral ambiguity of that story. The whole thing comes down to [young boy] Jim Hawkins making the call as to whether [pirate] Long John Silver is a good man or a bad man—that’s the emotional crux of that story. Silver does kill people—he betrays everybody—and this moral ambiguity is inherent in the pirate/swashbuckler genre. To that regard, the trickster archetype seemed appropriate. That’s what we wanted to do with Jack Sparrow. Whether Johnny identified that consciously, he definitely found a perfect performance.”
Ted Elliot
Interview with Scott Holleran

I’ve also read on the DVD commentary that Elliot and/or Rossio say there was originally a little Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx influence in the concept stages of Jack Sparrow. Of course, Depp himself said his inspiration behind Captain Jack Sparrow was Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.

* The Prisoner of Zenda is an adventure novel written by Anthony Hope and published in 1894.  It has been made into a film several times: 1913, 1915, 1922, 1937, 1952, & 1979 as well as a couple TV movies, a play, and an operetta. The 1937 movie, produced by David O. Selznick, has been called by Halliwell’s Film Guide as, “One of the most entertaining films to come out of Hollywood.” The bulk of the script appears to have been written by John L. Balderston (with five others writers said to play a part).  So before they spent a lot of money, they new they had the bones of a story that worked. Toss in a very popular theme park ride, a the classic novel Treasure Island —that’s movie cloning.

Scott W. Smith