William Turner, a resourceful young blacksmith, teams up with the eccentric pirate 'Captain' Jack Sparrow to save his love, the Governor's daughter, Elizabeth Swann, who has been mistakenly captured by the clever and treacherous Barbossa, a former ally of Jack, to make a blood sacrifice so as to end the curse that has been casted upon him and his crew. Will and Jack steal a ship from the Royal Navy and arrive at Tortuga, a pirate port. There Jack meets his friend Joshamee Gibbs and with a buccaneer and 'able bodied' crew, set sail to save Elizabeth and take back the Black Pearl. Meanwhile, Barbossa discovers that not Elizabeth's but someone else's blood was required for the sacrifice. Whose blood is it?
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Long before Gore Verbinski signed on, the script did the rounds in the early 90s and actually landed on Steven Spielberg's desk. His take on it wasn't quite what Disney wanted, but he'd apparently floated Bill Murray, Steve Martin, or even Robin Williams to play a version of Jack Sparrow. Wild to think how different the whole franchise could've looked.
Gore Verbinski has said the reason he took the job was down to childhood memories of the Disneyland ride, which somehow managed to spook him and make him laugh at the same time. He deliberately chased that exact same tone for the movie, which is why you get walking skeletons in the same film as a permanently sloshed lead character.
Robert De Niro was reportedly offered the role of Jack Sparrow ahead of Jim Carrey, but passed because he was convinced pirate movies were box office poison. When the film went on to make hundreds of millions, he took a role in Stardust instead, chasing that same swashbuckling fantasy lightning. It didn't strike twice.
Depp has explained that his whole approach to Jack came from treating pirates like the rock stars of their era, so he leaned hard on Keith Richards for the swagger, then mixed in the flouncy, lovestruck energy of Pepe Le Pew for good measure. It's a genuinely bizarre combo on paper that somehow just works on screen.
Geoffrey Rush has said he didn't need to do much soul-searching to find Barbossa's character — the moment he put the hat on, the arrogance and theatrical flourish just came naturally. He's joked the feather alone told him everything about the man's ego.
Depp's leather hat kept getting knocked or thrown into the ocean during shoots, and after they'd lost around ten of them, costume designer Penny Rose gave up and had a rubber version made instead, purely because it would actually float. Practical problem solving, pirate-movie style.
Keira Knightley was only 17 when she made this and has said her bust looks noticeably bigger in the film than in real life because it was, in her words, literally painted on with makeup. She's talked about it since as just one of those strange, slightly uncomfortable things that used to be considered normal on a big studio shoot.
According to director Richard Curtis, while Keira Knightley was filming her small role in Love Actually she mentioned she'd just signed on to a pirate movie and flatly said she didn't think it would work, because pirate films always flop. She wasn't exactly wrong about the genre's track record up to that point — just wrong about this particular film.
Jack Davenport, who played Commodore Norrington, has admitted he was never a fan of pirate movies growing up and didn't rate the recent ones much either. It was reportedly Verbinski's pitch that this could be the first genuinely good pirate film in fifty years that finally won him over.
Long before Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy, Zoe Saldana played crew member Anamaria in this film, and she's since said the experience wasn't a good one. She's described feeling completely overwhelmed by the scale of a major studio production, the shifting locations, and the pace, and has said she walked away not having enjoyed it much at all — which probably explains why her character never returned for the sequels.
