Gore Verbinski and his crew donned protective gear to allow the water to roll off their backs, as much as possible anyway. The stars and stunt players weren’t so fortunate. Says Keira Knightley, “You get into costume. You’ve got a wet suit on underneath, which obviously makes going to the toilet really tricky.
Then they turn the rain on, and you’re drenched within 10 seconds. I just feel sorry for the crew because they’re in it all day long. The rain is so heavy at times that you literally cannot see. When the Black Pearl and Flying Dutchman are side-by-side, we’re working on a 15 percent slope, in which you’re running uphill doing a swordfight in torrential rain, with an entire camera crew coming at you. It’ll look great, but it’s definitely a hard one to work on.”
“I wouldn’t call it acting, I call it survival,” laughs Orlando Bloom. “It’s kind of brutal to stay wet from eight in the morning until eight at night. Even though they turn off the rain machines between takes, you’re still soaked all the way through, and I’d be lying if I said it was fun. But it’s hard on everyone, not just the actors. And ultimately, we all have a lot of confidence in the destination, and know that it’s worth the effort.”
“The Maelstrom is like the biblical whirlpool from hell, and we’re shooting it the way Cecil B. DeMille probably would have,” says Geoffrey Rush. “It’s absolutely massive.”
“We were running away from hurricanes in the Bahamas,” adds Johnny Depp, “shooting in Dominica during the rainy season in a rain forest, and then we went to the desert, in Palmdale, filming in a torrential downpour and about 75 knots of wind inside of a massive facility on a ship tilted to a 15 percent rake on the gimbal.
“Once again, this is another one of those situations where it’s so weird that you just don’t question it anymore. `Johnny, we’re going drive you an hour and a half up to the desert, you’re going to climb aboard the Black Pearl and Flying Dutchman built on gigantic rigs, and we’re going to drench you in high winds while you swordfight at a steep angle.
“And you just kind of go, `Okay, fine. No problem.’”
One aspect of the Maelstrom shoot-which lasted for nearly four months-was the change in weather outside of the hangar in desert Palmdale…from the raging 110 degree heat of mid-September to the 20 degree Fahrenheit nighttime chill of early December. Not so bad if one could stay indoors all day, but basecamp was outside, which one had to pass through to a second hangar which housed 50 makeup stations for background players, as well as seating for meals. Sooner or later, the drenched actors, stunt and background players had to expose themselves to the elements, whether hellishly hot or bone-chillingly cold, not to mention the sometimes fierce desert winds whipping across the landscape.
“Obviously, the `Maelstrom’ climax was the most spectacular and challenging for us on `At World’s End,’” notes stunt coordinator George Marshall Ruge. “All of the principal cast were involved, and there were multiple story lines being played out within the epic action.” For this massive final ship-to-ship showdown between the pirates and the East India Trading Company, Ruge coordinated stunt sequences both in The Bahamas and inside of the massive “Site 9” hangar used for shooting in Palmdale, California. “Because the ship set pieces on Grand Bahama were not particularly designed for stunt rigging opportunities, we had to be very creative to pull off the creative action,” says Ruge. “These ships and the pirates on them take heavy cannon fire. We used multiple air ramps and wire/ratchet work to create the illusion of our stunt pirates taking this fire. And because these were floating set pieces, we had the luxury of selling this action all the way to the water in many instances.
“Inside of the Palmdale stage, we at least had the luxury of being indoors and not having to worry about the elements, but we faced a new whole new set of challenges because of the immense number of visual and physical effects required for the sequence.”
The stars finding themselves clinging onto the edge of the Black Pearl for dear life on John Frazier’s “tilt rig” for the Green Flash sequence became major stunt players themselves. “It was actually really scary,” admits Naomie Harris. “The only thing that stopped me from screaming was the fact that I was roped down and no one else was screaming, so I would have felt stupid if I had…but I really wanted to.” The Green Flash was a combination of material shot with the actual Black Pearl gimbaled in the tank on Grand Bahama Island by special effects coordinator Allen Hall and his crew, a Pearl setpiece mounted on John Frazier’s tilt rig in the Palmdale hangar, and underwater shooting in another tank in the Falls Lake section of the Universal Studios backlot.
The Hai Peng’s descent over the edge of the world was also a matter of putting together a complex cinematic puzzle that had been evolving over months. “It began, filming-wise, by shooting from tugboats in Greenland going through ice fields,” explains executive producer Eric McLeod. “That sequence alone was shot almost two years before. We also shot plates in Niagara Falls. And from there, we had a motion base specifically built for the Hai Peng that can take 100 feet of the set and tilt it at 90 degree angles. We filmed the dialogue portion about four feet off the ground on the full sized Hai Peng, then had a large crane come in, set up the Hai Peng setpiece onto the motion base, strap the cast in with safety lines on them and the crew, and then tilt the set. It’s a little nerve wracking when you have your cast up there dangling. At first everyone’s a little timid and reserved, but after a while, you could take them anywhere. It’s like,` Oh, you have to jump out of a boat, rappel down a cliff, and hang from a ship at a 90 degree angle and have chairs and barrels fall down on you from the deck,’ and everyone’s like `Oh, okay, that’s great. I can deal with that.’”
Riding the waves, sometimes literally, was director of photography Dariusz (Darek) Wolski, who along with his team of camera operators, clappers, loaders and assistants, as well as key grip Mike (Pop) Popovich and chief lighting technician Rafael (Raffi) Sanchez
met every impossible challenge with a high degree of extemporaneous imagination. “We’ve had an amazing opportunity on these films to experiment and do different ways of filming,” says Wolski. “We’ve shot pretty much every possible thing: in the jungles, on the water, under the water, in dark holes, on soundstages, in super-bright salt flats. In terms of scale, I will never be able to top `Dead Man’s Chest.’ To go any farther, you’d have to completely go in the opposite direction.”
In the post-production phase, it would be up to John Knoll and his team at ILM to provide the environments, including the churning, turbulent sea and terrifying, mile-long whirlpool that threatens any ship that comes too close to its vortex. “Visually, it’s a very bold idea,” says Knoll, “but there’s not really anything that you can shoot practically for that. So all the water has to be computer-generated throughout, and it’s very difficult to do that very realistically. We’re going to end up with approximately 400 visual effects shots in that sequence, with rain, giant waves, whitecaps, foam and spray. These are all challenging things to execute believably.
“What’s happening in the foreground is pretty complicated as well,” Knoll explains. “There’s a huge battle between the Black Pearl and Flying Dutchman, so we have computer-generated characters in the midst of rain, atmospherics and splintering wood. Not to mention hundreds of pirate and EITC ships that are seen in the sequence.”
Next Page – Chapter 12: Dressed for Success
