''Welcome to the torture chamber.'' Director Gore Verbinski slumps in a chair in a sound-mixing studio, wearing a yellow Ramones T-shirt, faded jeans, and a get me the hell out of here expression on his face. On a giant screen, a 15-second snippet of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is playing on a loop at a deafening volume, showing Orlando Bloom standing on the deck of a pirate ship in a howling storm, looking valiant, vigorous, and ready to buckle some serious swash. Verbinski, by contrast, looks completely beat, so overworked and underslept that a slight gust of wind could blow the man down. ''It's just this, over and over again,'' he says. He shapes his hand into a pistol, puts his index finger to his temple, and, with a weary smile, pulls the trigger.
With a month to go before release, Verbinski and his team are working double shifts with no days off in a mad dash to finish the second installment in the planned Pirates trilogy. But as grueling as the postproduction schedule has been, it's a luxurious Caribbean cruise compared with the shoot. In perhaps the most audacious filmmaking undertaking since The Lord of the Rings, Verbinski and company shot both the second and much of the third Pirates movies simultaneously, at an enormous cost of toil and treasure — with the budget for part 2 alone reportedly topping $200 million. Disney originally hoped to release the concluding film this Christmas, but, with the fates throwing up every obstacle imaginable — from maddening technical snafus to hurricanes — that proved impossible. And with more than half of part 3 yet to be shot, there will be no rest for the weary Pirates crew any time soon.
For decades, the conventional Hollywood wisdom had held that filming a pirate movie was an easy way to make a whole lot of doubloons disappear in a hurry. Many a director had drowned in the genre's perilous waters, including Roman Polanski (Pirates) and Renny Harlin (Cutthroat Island). So when Disney launched Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl in July 2003, expectations were not high. A pirate film based on a theme park ride, starring Johnny Depp, an actor hardly known for delivering blockbusters, and relatively untested up-and-comers Bloom and Keira Knightley — with the word curse in the title? ''We all thought it was going to be s--- and tank,'' Knightley admits. ''I remember sitting at a screening with Orlando, going, 'Just smile through it. United front. It's gonna be all right.'''
It was more than all right, of course. Verbinski's crowd-pleasing high-seas romp about cursed pirates — buoyed by Depp's brilliantly skewed, Oscar-nominated turn as the legendary (in his own mind) Capt. Jack Sparrow — hit the summer-movie sweet spot, pulling in more than $300 million at the box office. Where many saw a fluky hit, Disney saw a franchise in the making. Now, doubling down on their original gamble, they have reassembled the main players for a second film — pitting the shifty Captain Jack, dashing Will Turner (Bloom), and plucky Elizabeth Swann (Knightley) against the fearsome, tentacle-faced pirate Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and the giant sea monster he commands — while also teeing up a grand finale for next summer. ''Some would say it's pretty risky and teetering on ballsy,'' says Depp.
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