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Filming wasn't smooth sailing the whole way through. Hurricane Wilma barrelled toward the shoot while the crew was working in the islands, and everyone had to pack up and evacuate all the way back to Los Angeles until it was safe to return.
Keira Knightley had chopped her hair into a short pixie cut for the film Domino, and there simply wasn't time to grow it back before shooting started. So most of Elizabeth Swann's flowing locks in this one are actually extensions.
Early plans had the Flying Dutchman crewed by literal ghosts, but director Gore Verbinski wasn't keen on that idea. Instead they went with living, barnacle-encrusted crewmen, brought to life using motion capture suits on real actors.
Johnny Depp's other favourite director popped up in an unexpected way here. Tim Burton, busy with his own projects at the time, still carved out time to help design the look of Davy Jones' grotesque crew.
Getting the Kraken's tentacles to move convincingly was a nightmare for the animators. The solution came from an unlikely place: the animation director had his team study the octopus fight scene from the 1962 classic King Kong vs. Godzilla for inspiration.
Bill Nighy's iconic tentacled face didn't come from squids or barnacles as a reference. The grimy texture and colouring were actually developed from a scanned image of a dirty, discarded Styrofoam coffee cup.
Not everything in that climactic Kraken confrontation was digital. When the beast spits and sends Jack flying, that gunk hitting Johnny Depp was genuine practical slime, not a CGI effect.
The first film stuck to a single Caribbean island for its shoot. This sequel had a much bigger budget and went for it, filming across Palos Verdes, the Bahamas, Dominica, and St. Vincent, plus sets built at the Disney studio lot.
To save money and keep everything consistent, Dead Man's Chest was filmed back-to-back with its follow-up, At World's End. It made for a brutal, marathon production schedule across multiple countries, but it let Disney release both only a year apart.
Rather than relying purely on models and green screen, the production built two full-scale, functioning ships for the film: real-life versions of the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman that could genuinely sail.
