It took 100 craftsmen five months to build the cave set. It was then filled with 300,000 gallons of water, a process that took three to four days, and dressed over a period of three weeks.
Set decorator Larry Dias and his staff spent a considerable amount of time researching the era and hunting for appropriate items to decorate the vast set. “It was a big job just trying to stay true to the period and to the style of movie Gore was making,” says Dias. “We had to make the sets look authentic because the film has a dramatic flair, but it’s also comedic; we tried to set a mood so that the atmosphere would be realistic yet theatrical at the same time.
“The treasure cave was very large and very dark,” Dias describes further, “so getting the quantity and the quality of stuff these pirates have been dumping there for years was quite an undertaking.”
Verbinski wanted gold everywhere. He repeated his mantra to his art department at every turn: Pirates are not art collectors—they’re just after the money. “Gore would remind us that pirates are only interested in the face value of any given item,” recalls Dias. “We painted hundreds of cubic feet of rock to look like gold nuggets and collected hundreds of yards of fake pearls and beads. We found a mass of odd objects that would have been looted by pirates. It was tricky; we tried to get a certain texture going without becoming too ridiculous. We were very careful in creating disorder and making the cave look haphazard, as though the pirates had taken boat loads of their loot and just dumped it in heaps wherever they found space.”
Dias found two manufacturers of imitation coins, one in New Orleans used to turning out trinkets for Mardi Gras, and another company in Canada. He ordered close to a million doubloons minted in three different colors, all replicas of the “piece of eight,” or Spanish silver dollar.
No pirate movie is complete without the proper pirate ships. Three ships dominate the action in “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.” Filmmakers focused on two ships within the British armada—the Interceptor, a sleek two-masted clipper purported to be the fastest vessel commissioned to His Majesty’s Service; and the H.M.S. Dauntless, one of the Empire’s premiere warships—and a third, with a mysterious past, starring in the title role; the Black Pearl, a galleon stolen from Captain Jack by Barbossa and his evil crew several years earlier.
Few ships in existence today could pass for a vessel dating back to the 18th century. The studio and the producers initially assumed they would have to build every ship featured in the story, never imagining they would stumble across a virtual treasure trove of information and contacts who knew just where to find viable stand-ins when they hired Marine coordinator Matt O’Connor. A boating enthusiast and a marine specialist working in the film industry for over 15 years, O’Connor contacted an associate in Seattle and persuaded him to convince his board of directors to allow the production company to use their prized tall ship, along with a fully staffed crew, for an unprecedented amount of time, in a location halfway around the world from her home port, but only after making substantial structural modifications to the vessel. Les Bolton, executive director of Grace Harbor Historical Seaport Authority, which owns and operates the Lady Washington, embraced the challenge, undeterred by the obstacles such an undertaking presented. The offer was too exciting to pass up, and so the Lady Washington became a valued member of the cast, ‘starring’ as the Interceptor.
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