Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)

“If you ask most people what they loved most about the first movie,” says Mike Stenson, “it’s usually this completely iconoclastic Jack Sparrow character. In a 500-channel universe, where you have so many different opportunities to be entertained in so many ways, you have to give the audience something that’s unique and different. That’s exactly what Johnny did with Captain Jack Sparrow in ‘The Curse of the Black Pearl.’ He created this character and had absolutely committed to it, and both Jerry and Gore had to tell the powers that be to trust them on it after they saw the first dailies. At the end of the day, Johnny took a risk, and Jerry and Gore backed him 100 percent.”

“Johnny is one of our greatest actors,” says Bruckheimer. “He invented Jack Sparrow in the first movie, and he’s not somebody who wants to rest on his laurels for the second and third. He takes a character to even newer heights. None of us would be back if Johnny had not wanted to play this character again. He loved making the first movie, and audiences loved him right back.”

As for Depp, the actor claims that “It is beyond me how such a character has sort of taken root in some people’s hearts. It’s still shocking to me. I was handed this opportunity to make something of this character, and I had pretty solid ideas about who he was and what he should be like. There were a number of people who thought I was nuts. But I was committed to the guy, and I think that’s what happened to me in terms of finding the character.

“What I set out to do,” continues Depp, “was to try and make Captain Jack appeal to little kids as well as the most hardened adult intellectuals.”

Notes Terry Rossio, “One of the archetypes that is really underused in American cinema is the trickster character. Most American movies tend to celebrate the warrior who does the right thing at the right time. But the fun thing about Jack, who is definitely a trickster, is that he’s not particularly good at avoiding getting caught. He will get caught…you just can’t hold on to him for very long. Jack knows that if he can just bide his time, eventually the world will come over to his side, and that gives him this sort of supreme confidence that he can handle just about any situation.”

“The other fun thing about the trickster character,” continues Ted Elliott, “is that he basically is just out to have his own good time. He’s following his own self-interests. The things he does will affect other people—the mortals, if you will—and sometimes it will be to good benefit, and sometimes it will be to their detriment. So that goes back to the whole question posed in the first movie: is Jack Sparrow a good guy or is he a bad guy? Is he a pirate hero or pirate villain? Well, it really kind of depends on the perspective you have.”

With “The Curse of the Black Pearl” having been crucial in launching both actors to major international stardom, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley were enthusiastic to return alongside Depp as, respectively, young lovers Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann. (The fourth member of the original quartet, Geoffrey Rush, is not in the second film, his character of Captain Barbossa having been dispatched to the underworld by Jack Sparrow at the climax of the first film.) Jerry Bruckheimer, who has a knack for discovering young talent before the rest of the world catches on, secured Bloom as a young U.S. Ranger in “Black Hawk Down” before the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy was released and cast Knightley in the first “Pirates” film when she was only 17 years old and “Bend It Like Beckham”—which was her breakthrough movie in the international arena—had not yet been released. “We could see that Keira was an extraordinary actress when we cast her in ‘The Curse of the Black Pearl,’ Bruckheimer recalls. “She’s not afraid of anything. In the two years between the shooting of the first film and the start of the second, her skills had heightened with the work that she did and the experience she gained.” (This experience, incidentally, included her performance of Guinevere in Bruckheimer’s production of “King Arthur.”)

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