Other Titles • Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) • Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Treasures of the Lost Abyss • Dead Man's Chest • Pirates of the Caribbean 2 • Rummty II • P.O.T.C 2 • Pirates 2 • P.O.T.C. 2
“Dominica doesn’t have a history of big film production,” adds Caribbean production supervisor Tom Hayslip. “They’ve hosted documentaries and nature films, but in terms of being able to handle the amount of people we had to bring in—just the accommodations alone—was a challenge for the island.” Adds first assistant director Peter Kohn (who later handed the reins of that position to second A.D. Dave Venghaus when the time came close for his wife to give birth to their new child), “Dominica has its own weather system. It rains in one part of the small island, and not in the other, and somehow it always seemed to rain on us!”
Dominica would present massive challenges for Rick Heinrichs and construction coordinator Greg Callas. “The first time I saw those locations, I was wondering how we were going to do it,” admits Callas. “The island is small, but because of the road conditions it can take you three hours to get from one end to the other. Logistically, it was incredibly difficult, but we had to satisfy the wants and needs of Gore. The art department worked very hard to design things that would fit into certain spaces, and then we had to get to those spaces. Because supplies are so limited on islands like Dominica, we had to bring in everything, like an entire hardware store: every nail, piece of wood, sack of cement and plaster, gallon of paint. The equipment we take for granted, like scissor lifts, boom lifts and forklifts, don’t really exist in Dominica, so we imported them from other countries in the Caribbean and South America. We implemented a lot of oldschool construction, because we didn’t have the luxury of the 21st century there.”
DEAD MAN’S CHEST began shooting in Dominica smack in the middle of a campaign for the island’s prime ministry so heated that it made the last U.S. elections look like a polite tea party. “You figure that a remote Caribbean island would be nice and quiet,” says actor Kevin R. McNally. “But on the first night I was in Dominica, I went to bed at about ten at night, and all of a sudden hell broke loose in the street. They started campaigning at midnight and continued until 7:00 in the morning with whistles, rattles, music, cars revving up and down the street. Back home in England, there’d be, perhaps, a man in a suit coming around once during the campaign at 4:00 in the afternoon so he doesn’t disturb your tea.”
But the film’s company had much else on their minds other than whether or not incumbent Roosevelt Skerrit or challenger Edison James would win (by the way, it was Mr. Skerrit who emerged the victor). For cast and crew, the great challenges were defying the island’s unpredictable weather, with intense heat, humidity and sudden rain showers and thunderstorms, circumnavigating the perilous, narrow mountain roads, hardly big enough for two compact sedans traveling in opposite directions let alone 16-wheel equipment trucks, avoiding constrictor snakes (non-poisonous but with mighty hugs) and other unfamiliar flora and fauna.
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