iFMagazine has a really interesting update – brought to my attention by Dark Horizons – on the status of the sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s interesting not because I care about the sequels (I enjoyed the first film, but it screamed “fluke” to me and I always expected any sequels to resemble Cutthroat Island), but for what an overly candid director can let slip about the production process for Hollywood movies today:
Although the movies are shot back-to-back, Verbinski reveals they’re shooting both films simultaneously with both scripts constantly in flux.
“We’re shooting scenes in the third movie without even knowing what the hell we’re doing,” laughs Verbinski. “We actually have a pretty good second script and the third script is still on the operating table. And we’re in triage constantly, everyday. I don’t recommend making two movies at once. I think that we’re going to get there, but it’s just madness. You’re like building ships and the ships aren’t ready and you have four hundred extras. There’s a lot of fun and I think that the second movie is strong and clever and has a lot going on. The third movie we’re still working on.”
Verbinski did discuss shooting back-to-back movies with director Peter Jackson who did three films at once with his LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy and he did have one bit of advice.
“I did talk to Peter Jackson about it and he said, ‘Re-shoots,'” says Verbinski who adds that might not be a luxury the PIRATES sequels will have. “We don’t have time for re-shoots. We don’t have the time.”
This says a lot about how Hollywood blockbusters can go off the rails. As my hypothetical longtime readers will know, I’m not one who says that Hollywood is going downhill (see here), but when films are produced like this, it does seem kind of miraculous that the big studios do manage to produce any decent films at all.
Firstly, the Pirates sequels have been put into production before the scripts are complete. It should be obvious that a lack of a script is going to be a recipe for disaster, and complaints about weak scripts for blockbusters are a familiar refrain amongst critics. The problem persists because of the simple reality that the screenwriting process can be squeezed in a way that no other part of the production process can. Studios build a release schedule around the delivery of a movie on a certain date, and because so many films are “packages” of star, director, and actors, this commitment is frequently made when no script exists. (Picking up a script, and then trying to cast it, is far from the norm, and even when the script does come first, the attachment of particular talent might trigger rewrites anyway). Having locked in a date, most phases of the production require a certain finite period of time that can’t really be compressed. When a project is making a late run at its opening date, there is very limited scope to accelerate principal photography or the construction of sets, for example. Some aspects of post-production (editing, scoring, special effects, etc) can be accelerated a little, but this usually either costs a lot or saves only a little time. So the sacrifice is often made at script level: the film moves ahead before people are happy with the script (perhaps with the rationalisation that it can be fixed on the run).
While it might seem obvious that this is likely to lead to a flawed film, script problems are a minor concern for studios: they only rarely tip a production into chaos (as appears to be happening to the Pirates sequels), so they don’t cost anyone money in a tangible, measurable way. The cost of a bad script is lost revenue due to the film being no good when it’s released, and that’s hard to quantify. What’s more, from a studio’s point of view, you can see why they don’t want to risk a key date just to give a writer longer to hone a script: after all, there’s no actual guarantee the extra time will make it any better. Trying to discern the vagaries of a writer’s creative process must seem a pretty unproductive way for businessmen to spend their time: much better to just manage the logistical side as best you can and let the lightning of artistic inspiration fall where it will.
Films do sometimes triumph over compressed schedules and rushed scripts. However, usually the best a director can hope for is to paper over the plotholes and make something moderately entertaining out of their ramshackle first draft script. (A really textbook example of this kind of film is Jurassic Park, which ran out of time for script rewrites and went ahead with a last minute draft that David Koepp whipped together in a matter of weeks. As a result, there are whole scenes that go nowhere, characters that are written out awkwardly, and a host of other problems that would have been smoothed out in any subsequent draft).
Even by these sort of standards, however, the Pirates sequels are showing a particularly swashbuckling sense of adventure in terms of forging ahead with incomplete scripts. One of the keys to good sequel-making is to have some overall idea of where the series is headed and how the sequels build on each other: this is notable in series such as the original Star Wars, Harry Potter and Spiderman films, where the sense of multi-film story arcs is very strong. (Even the early Bond films had a multi-film arc that built from Dr No to a climax in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service).
This is all the more important where sequels are filmed back-to-back. This is usually only done where there is a really tightly worked-out scenario that everyone is certain of (and, of course, when good box-office is almost guaranteed). Examples include The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Back to the Future parts two and three, and the first two Superman films. While the latter example ran off the rails somewhat due to discord and disorganisation behind the scenes, those projects are notable for the way in which an overall story arc for the concurrently filmed parts was very clear from day one. When Peter Jackson suggested the key to such a production model was reshoots, I imagine he took it for granted that those involved would have some basic knowledge of what was to happen in each film during principal photography. By contrast, it seems that the only overarching idea driving the Pirates sequels is that all involved thought it would be great to make more money… and the only idea behind filming them back-to-back was that it would be great to make twice as much money.