For the Pirates crew, doubling down on the initial bet proved more grueling than expected. The Caribbean production was plagued by hurricanes, construction delays, and countless logistical nightmares. When the cast and crew reconvened in California last August to finish At World's End, they still had about 60 percent of the film left to shoot. The story Verbinski and the writers had devised to fill out the trilogy was as supersize as the production, bursting with interweaving story lines, MacGuffins, and mythological references. At times, even the actors were hard-pressed to keep it all straight. ''You had to leave a trail of bread crumbs to know where you'd been,'' says Depp. ''You'd walk out of a door in scene 191 and then you'd shoot scene 192 a year and a half later, where you've just arrived outside that door.'' Says Bloom, ''Someone asked me, 'So tell us about your character's arc in the third movie.' I said, 'Dude, the writers can't even explain the third movie.'''
Verbinski defends the more-is-more approach to storytelling: ''I don't mind if people find it confusing. I don't want to dumb it down to where it's just processed cheese and you're not thinking about it afterwards.'' He and the screenwriters insist nothing was done to take the criticisms of Dead Man's Chest into account when production resumed on At World's End. The films had been ''designed for multiple viewings,'' says Rossio. ''You couldn't do a course correction. That presumes that the course was off.'' Bloom, however, says, ''There was talk of that stuff. Clarity was something that was talked about.''
But in the midst of filming sequences like the massive battle in the maelstrom, which was actually shot in a stealth-bomber hangar in Palmdale, Calif., there was little time to dwell on the reviews. Says Rush, ''You've got 140 pirates sword-fighting, there are rain and wind machines going, you're doing critical dialogue — in that situation, you're not thinking about the critics. You're just going, I hope that cannon doesn't roll over my foot.'' Anyway, those staggering grosses more than offset a minority of naysayers. ''When you pass the $1.1 billion mark,'' Nighy says drily, ''you start to suspect that you must be doing something right.''
NEXT PAGE: ''It's Keith Richards! Of course he snorted his dad! I mean, I don't know if he did or he didn't, but does it matter?''
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