Words Katrina T. Rivere
The very first time Bill Nighy stepped on board The Flying Dutchman, he was left speechless. As Davy Jones, the underworld captor of sea-faring souls in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Nighy gets to have his own 17th-century-inspired galleon, albeit a dingy and old-looking one.
"When [Director Gore Verbinski] said to me, 'Have you seen your ship yet?' I said 'No, I haven't,'" says Bill. "And he said, 'You wait until you see it.' I just stood on board the first time and at first I was speechless? It is an incredible ship."
And indeed it is - or at least as far as we've seen from the trailer. It has that "abandoned undersea ship" look to it, and it's on gimbles to enable it to rock back and forth and mimic the motion of the ocean.
Production Designer Rick Heinrichs says the Dutchman is probably the most elaborate of the ships in the movie. Aside from it being ornately sculpted, the Dutchman isn't on a barge. Instead, it's a floating vessel that's pulled behind by other boats and puppeteered to make it appear as if it's sailing. The other ships - the Black Pearl and Edinburgh Trader - are also built the same way to make them more realistic.
Heinrichs says that the boat construction was one of the biggest challenges for the sequel: "[I] haven't really built boats before. We're building boats that actually work on the water. The Black Pearl's built on top of another boat, so it's got twin diesel engines and can have quite a bit of a bow wave this time, something Gore really wanted to do. He felt that in the first movie, all the boats felt a little turgid, and they were basically barges that were being dragged behind another boat, except for the real sailing vessels that they rented. This time we actually built the boats so that they do have that feel of reality to them."
Dead Man's Chest is the sequel to Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. It reunites the stars of the critically acclaimed first film including Johnny Depp as the lovable rogue Captain Jack Sparrow, Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann, and Orlando Bloom as Will Turner.
