The filmmakers made no secret about taking liberties with the time period in which their story takes place. “It’s a fantasy, so we weren’t married to any specific period,” explains Bruckheimer, “but we did want to be true to the overall feel of the era. We paid particular attention to the years between 1720 and 1750 in an effort to find an approximation.”
“I think it takes place roughly at the tail end of the Golden Age of Piracy, when the Morgans lived,” Verbinski asserts. “Maybe the late 1720s. Barbossa is one of the last dregs of piracy that needs to be removed and consequently he’s the most difficult to get rid of. So we come into a world where the myth of pirates is way ahead of the actual characters, which was fun to play with.”
To maximize authenticity in the film, all of the actors playing pirates and some playing British naval officers spent weeks training with stunt coordinator George Marshall Ruge and his sword masters, Robert Anderson and Mark Ivie. Ruge originally met Anderson and Anderson’s protégé, Ivie, while working on “The Mask of Zorro.”
“Bob is a legendary sword master,” says Ruge. “When he arrived in Los Angeles, the fight choreography was basically done, but I wanted the actors to have a chance to meet him and work with him just to give them that extra ten percent that only Bob can give because he’s been doing it for 50 years. No one else has that expertise or spark. It was well worthwhile. Just the idea that the actors knew Bob’s history and the fact that he’s the best in the business, a legendary sword master, made them excited about training.”
Any pirate worth his salt has the scars, and oft times a missing body part or two, to prove his prowess with a sword. For the actors portraying pirates, the sessions with the sword masters were crucial, something akin to “Pirate School 101.”
Having starred in “Don Juan DeMarco” several years earlier, Johnny Depp had already received some training in the art of fencing. “I remembered the fencing I’d done as a total body workout,” recalls Depp. “It’s a beautiful sport, very balletic and precise. On this film, the sword work, putting the ‘umph’ into the attack, was much more involved. It was a lot more work and more moves to learn. Some of the fights felt like they lasted ten minutes. It was all about the choreography in those scenes, the words came later.”
As luck would have it, Orlando Bloom had already spent time with both Ruge and Anderson on “Lord of the Rings.” “It was great to work with Bob again,” says Bloom. “I’d done some fencing when I was in drama school in London, but working with someone as proficient as Bob is quite a different matter. I mean, this is the guy who trained Errol Flynn!
“I watched ‘The Master of Ballantrae,’ where he doubled Errol,” Bloom continues. “It was awesome. What’s so great about Bob is that he knows character; he understands the necessity of getting a fight to look slick and clean without losing the sense of character.”
“Bob understood acting with the sword,” agrees Geoffrey Rush, who primarily trained with a cutlass. “He said, ‘Just because it gets faster doesn’t mean it’s better.’ The beats in between and the games that you play eyeball to eyeball are just as important as fast, dazzling work. He was great to have around.”
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