Ted Elliot, co-writer of Pirates of the Caribbean, speaks at USC

Tonight I went to a screening of Pirates of the Caribbean that featured a Q&A afterword with co-writer Ted Elliott. He and his writing partner had pitched the idea of doing a PotC movie to Disney back in ’92 and been turned down. Ten years later, after a change of leadership at Disney, an exec called him up and, knowing nothing of his earlier pitch, said Disney was thinking about doing a PotC movie and would he be interested. He leapt at the chance. Having done Shrek, he was interested in doing more movies that drew on material that was already a part of the audience’s mental vocabulary. Everyone’s familiar with the idea of ghost pirates and cursed treasure, but there haven’t been any big movies about them in recent memory. In fact, there hadn’t been a successful pirate movie in about 50 years. (The most recent big attempt being the ill-fated Cutthroat Island. Its major flaw, according to Elliott, is that it’s an action movie with pirates rather than a pirate movie.) Disney already had a PotC script in development that had no supernatural elements. Elliott and his partner took some characters and elements from that script and added the ghost pirates. A few weeks ago in my screenwriting class, my professor was talking about PotC and said, “What makes that movie work is Jack Sparrow. Without him, there’s just no movie. If I were to pitch it, I’d say, ‘It’s a pirate movie with Bugs Bunny as the main character.'” I thought that was interesting, and thought about asking Elliott for his take on that, but he beat me to it, saying, “Jack Sparrow is a Trickster character. Trickster characters are more common in other cultures, less so in western cultures, though there are a few — like Bugs Bunny.” Someone asked how much of Jack Sparrow’s screwball persona was in the script. Elliott said that’s why you cast a great actor like Johnny Depp — he brings a whole other intepretation to the character that you could’ve never imagined. In the case of PotC, what Depp really seized on was Jack Sparrow’s line, “But you have heard of me,” and started conceiving the character as a sort of pirate rock star.