Scalawags and Landlubbers Beware: Pirates Are Both Creative and Entertaining

            Growing up there were few movies I returned to over and over again, but I always seemed to drift back to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. These adventures had everything: treasure, danger, action, a love story. So I dove into the depths of  how they came to be. 

Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio are the actual dream team when it comes to writing family friendly blockbusters. Their works have included Shrek and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. When asked about how the series began Ted Elliot said, “Our involvement actually began around 1992. Terry and I had come up with this great approach to a pirate movie.” They pitched it to Disney as “a tie-in to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and at the time Disney said, ‘No.’” The writers, fortunately, kept their concept on the backburner and in the meantime continued to work. Ten years later. They got a call. Bruckheimer Films’ Mike Stenson Elliot explains that he and Rossio jumped at the opportunity but were very firm in adapting their original ideas and approach. Elliot conveys that they told Stenson they already had an approach and “it’s the only approach we want to write…If you don’t like this approach, we really don’t want to do the story.” Both creatives stayed true to their narrative and ideas, demonstrating extensive confidence in their creative abilities, and displaying tha often trusting your gut can lead to meaningful and successful art. Faith Ringgold was a woman who was not recognized or acknowledged for her art, demonstrating the black experience from the 1960s forward, until much later in her life. Yet, she stayed true to her narratives, communicating her experiences and those of African Americans in the US which ultimately led to her success. However, often outside influences or pressures can cause an artist to question their work or the inspiration behind it. These creatives however, firmly adhered to their unique ideas and artform and in the end were rewarded for their efforts. 

Novelty too is exceedingly important for successful creative works. Elliot and Rossio’s concept for this movie was unlike any before - “it was the idea of bringing in the supernatural element. Instead of doing a swashbuckling romance, doing a swashbuckling Gothic romance,” said Elliot. Rossio elaborates that, “there really hadn’t ever been a supernatural pirate movie attempted. We went to Disney and said, ‘Look, the ride itself begins with a talking skull.’” Both creatives wanted to stay true to the ride itself. Elliot goes on to say, “There are story elements to the ride, and a lot of them appear in the movie, but it wasn’t about adapting the story. It was about creating a movie for which the audience experience of the movie was similar to the audience experience of the source material.” Much of the inspiration for the movie came from the backstory of the ride. Pirates of the Caribbean is a “ghost story” that needed to begin like a “horror movie,” setting up a foreboding narrative that evolves into an eerie, haunting tale. These writers too have different tests with which they are able to conclude that the story they are telling is a good one. They communicate that they call one test the “strange attractor” test. Rossio says that,  “strange” signifies that “your idea should be unique” and “attractor” means “you’ve got to get people attracted to it.” For Pirates, they wanted to hit both elements and so their original ideas were centered around “a pirate movie, [where] instead of looking for treasure, they have to get back the treasure that they’ve stolen.” It’s unique and intriguing, inverting the script of a pirate’s journey for treasure. Inversion and intrigue too allow for the creation and the success of novel ideas. Ringgold wanted to uniquely portray her own experiences and that of those in her community. She invests the role of an artist both by painting and writing. Even as an author she succeeds at both writing children’s books and her memoir. Ringgold inverts the role of an artist itself, stepping out of conventional boxes to produce different forms of art. The mediums she uses present intrigue both to tell the story and to communicate her as an artist. She is uniquely gifted within her creative process to create both inspiring and thought provoking visual art as well as communicate stories on the page that draw in her audiences, making them ask more or question their own experiences.  

Elliot, Rossio, and Ringgold all create art collaboratively. Not only were Elliot and Rossio writing partners, but they described their collaborative process as unlike any usual Hollywood interactions. Instead of “shut up and do what we say, or else we’ll fire you and get somebody else who will,” they allowed their script to be fairly malleable, working with the director and the various actors - “Johnny Depp [Jack Sparrow] and Geoffrey Rush [Barbossa] and Keira Knightley [Elizabeth] - going through the script, incorporating their ideas.” Elliot said that “the final version of the story that Barbossa tells of the curse was probably twenty or thirty hours of work with Geoffrey Rush.” Faith Ringgold was a woman whose artwork, though her own, was created by collecting and working with the stories of herself and others. She felt called to create her own vision and version of the black experience in the 1960s in conjunction with others leading the movement like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Art and the inspiration behind her art was a collaborative experience. 

All of these creatives finally are storytellers. Their creative processes are  They also utilized classic movies such as Jaws a, “sea story,” and the Story of the Indianapolis. They concluded that in their artform, they wanted their characters to tell tales, communicate stories, and  recount legends. They worked with the actors to tell these stories correctly in an interesting and haunting way. Rinngold too worked to tell stories. Her memoir includes hundreds of remembered moments all folded into the pages. But her artwork too communicates stories. One piece in particular named Members Only documents the racial hostility Ringgold faced as a child on a school trip when a group of white men surrounded her and her classmates, carrying sticks. The drive to tell stories and do it well within her artwork could be inspired by how as a child she grew up in a family of storytellers and that was the primary way of communicating in her household. Stories are an incredibly powerful form of communication and the legends and stories in the Pirates movies bolstered them and their appeal, displaying that within that world there is a whole oral history. Stories are more than pieces of entertainment but a means of preserving your legacy. One story which becomes a recurring bit throughout Pirates is the tale of how Jack Sparrow escaped an island riding on the backs of two sea turtles. Stories hold gravity and throughout history and I thought it was so interesting that these writers made adamant choices about incorporating them into these movies. These three creatives inspired wonderful reactions for the works they’ve created and their ability to tell stories in a powerful, exciting, and thought provoking way. 

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Source: 

https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/pirates-caribbean/