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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Then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner was reportedly never sold on this project. He worried the PG-13 rating would scare off Disney's usual family audience and thought teenagers would see a movie based on a theme park ride as embarrassingly uncool. At more than one point during production he was ready to pull the plug entirely.
Before it became one of the biggest films of 2003, this was originally planned as a direct-to-DVD release, the kind of treatment Disney usually reserved for cheap animated sequels. That's how little confidence the studio initially had in the whole idea.
The earliest concept for the character was a much more standard swashbuckling hero, with Hugh Jackman apparently in the mix at one stage. It was Depp who pushed the performance into stranger, funnier territory, and while the studio was reportedly baffled by his choices at first, they let him run with it.
Before principal photography even started, a fire tore through one of the sets in September 2002, racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Thankfully nobody was hurt, but it was a rocky start to an already nervous production.
During a night shoot, Keira Knightley and her mother, who had to be on set with her since she was a minor, ended up marooned on a reef for close to an hour before anyone could get them off it. Locals had apparently warned the crew that night shoots out there were a bad idea.
Shooting for weeks on the open water off St. Vincent left a huge chunk of the cast and crew seasick, and the medication they took to cope came with its own price: it knocked people out with drowsiness, which slowed filming down even further on an already tight schedule.
The finished cut only came together around four months before the premiere, with Gore Verbinski reportedly putting in 18-hour days in the edit suite to get it done in time. Given the chaos on set, it's a small miracle the film even made its release date.
Geoffrey Rush apparently has a theory that most people's eyes are naturally drawn to the left side of a screen first, so as Barbossa he tried to position himself there in shots whenever he could. Whether or not the theory holds up, it's a nice bit of insight into how deliberately he built the performance.
The role of Will Turner came down to a straight choice between Orlando Bloom and Heath Ledger. Bloom's stock had just shot up thanks to Lord of the Rings, and that timing is generally credited with tipping the casting in his favour.
Rather than relying purely on effects, the production built a full-size, genuinely seaworthy replica of the Black Pearl for filming. That physical ship went on to become just as much a symbol of the franchise as any of the actors.
