Orlando Bloom recalls the scene as well. “We were just sailing this huge ship on the open seas,” he says. “I looked over my shoulder one time and there’s Johnny at the wheel with the hat and the gold teeth, and there’s me just yanking on a rope going, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’”
Commodore Norrington’s ship, the Dauntless, was constructed to resemble the British warship, the Victory. A famous 100-gun ship that won countless battles during its heyday, the Victory was the pride of the British fleet. Because no such ships exist today, the company was forced to recreate portions of the vessel using models of its vintage predecessor.
To create the ship, they ended up building sections of it on a floating barge docked at Pier C in Long Beach. Construction Coordinator Bob Blackburn and his crew began building the Dauntless here before moving the launch to the Port of Los Angeles for filming.
The Dauntless was one of the most innovative movie sets ever produced. Construction began before plans for the vessel were even complete. At one point, 150 people worked on construction of the floating set, which took about three and a half months to build, rain or shine. The set itself looked like a partially dissected ship with a section cut out of its port side. At completion, the ship measured 170 feet long, 34 feet wide and consisted of approximately 40,000 pounds of steel and 1,000 square feet of sails. Seven cell phones, five men, three welding hoods, two dozen tape measures, one metal cutting saw and countless tools fell overboard during construction.
Fabrication of the Black Pearl in the Long Beach Dome next to the Queen Mary was a little tamer. This stationary set was built on a moving gimbal. Blackburn’s crew worked on the set for three months.
Says Gore Verbinski: “The Black Pearl is a ghost ship. We shot it in sections; some on stage and some on a barge that was towed in open water.” Often, the Black Pearl had a tugboat pulling it, which had to be painted out during the visual effects process.
Like any tricked-out luxury sports car on the road today, the Black Pearl is ‘loaded,’ equipped with all the bells and whistles, all the appropriate accoutrements of any good pirate ship. There’s a good reason why both Captain Jack and Captain Barbossa lay claim to the vessel.
“The Black Pearl had to be the quintessential pirate ship,” says Bruckheimer. “Gore and I agreed it had to be iconic. Because this is the ship that’s caused the lifelong feud between Jack and Barbossa, to the victor go the spoils. The ship is a symbol of every treasure they’ve targeted.”
“We have an added ingredient in this film,” says Bruckheimer. “And that’s the supernatural aspect of the story. It lends itself to incredible visual effects, so we went to ILM because they’ve done a great job for us in the past.”
“The effect of the pirates turning into living skeletons in the moonlight adds to the level of excitement on screen,” says Verbinski. “It allowed us to have even more fun with the genre and the characters.
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