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The
production team definitely wanted to shoot the film in the Caribbean.
Surely, there are exotic looking places around Australia and Thailand,
but "there’s a quality to the water, sand and palm trees in the
Craibbean - so we knew we wanted to go there", says Verbinsky. Soon
though, the film makers found out that the Caribbean is not the
Caribbean.
"I’m
sure we looked at a minimum of twenty different islands", remembers
the whiz director. "We were looking for a lush, cul-de-sac-shaped
bay without a hotel right in the middle of it – there’s just no such
thing". Not quite.
The
search squad finally found what they wanted north of Grenada. The
scattered Grenadine islets with their white palm beaches were exactly
what Hollywood imagined the Caribbean to be like. Yet these were nearly
2,000 km from Jamaica and Port Royal - the place where the story is set.
So
the film cracks simply rebuilt a true-to-the-original copy of the
location. 18th century style piers and storage houses emerged in
Walilabou Bay of St. Vincent. The different shooting sites were spread
across the sea within a radius of 70 kilometers: Union Island, the
Tobago Cays and Petit Tabac, where in the end Captain Sparrow and
gorgeous Elizabeth are marooned by the evil Barbossa.
The
film work turned the entire archipelago into one great masquerade.
"We
were allowed to stroll through the background as rich inhabitants of
Port Royal dressed in magnificent robes", recall Maria and Fritz
Meeuwissin, a Dutch couple living on a yacht in Bequia. Entire ships
were given a historical costume: the "Scaramouche", for
instance, a plain two master from Union Island, made it to an impressive
Portuguese merchant ship.
Now
the Scaramouche has gone back to sailing tourists to the Tobago Cays,
and the smoke of the film team’s pyrotechnicians has passed over. Only
Stephen Russell, on whose property the reconstruction of Port-Royal now
stands, is still dreaming of the great pirate’s treasure: "I want
to make the shooting location into a theme park..." |
