Saldaña hasn’t changed her opinion in the 10 years since that Hollywood Reporter interview, but in more recent ones, she seems a little more measured talking about “Pirates.” In a 2022 interview with Entertainment Weekly, she put less emphasis on the “elitist” atmosphere and more on it being a set with lots of moving pieces, where an inexperienced actor like her struggled to keep up.
“It was my first exposure to a major Hollywood mega movie, where there were just so many actors and so many producers and so many crew members. We were shooting in different locations, and the environments were not that agreeable, sometimes, to our shoot days. I was very young, and it was just a little too big for me, and the pace of it was a little too fast.”
One reason for Saldaña’s anger cooling might be because “Pirates” producer Jerry Bruckheimer reached out to her and apologized for her negative experience. Saldaña said (in a BBC interview) that Bruckheimer’s apology “felt really quite honorable” to her. In a Buzzfeed UK interview, she spoke even more fondly about “Curse of the Black Pearl” — “What a great movie. It was all around such a diverse cast as well, all ages, all walks of life, but a hard production. It was just so big! It was too big of a machine for me, and it was too out of control.”
Saldaña was, again, the only “Pirates” star so put off by the shoot that she didn’t return. That said, other accounts support her claims that it was a chaotic set. The film was shot over five months (October 2002 to March 2003) between sets in Los Angeles and on location in the Caribbean island country Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Michael Eisner, the then CEO of Disney, did not have faith in the project either, so that meant inconsistent support from up top.
Speaking to Collider in 2021, “Pirates” director Gore Verbinski indicated that the chaos only increased during the simultaneous shoots of “Dead Man’s Chest” and “At World’s End.”
“After [‘Curse of the Black Pearl’] was successful, ‘Pirates 2’ and ‘3 start’ to fall into the ‘release date-driven experience’. There’s a calendar and dates and “we need two more of these babies. How soon can you do it?” So you don’t have scripts and you’re making a movie to a release date.”
If Saldaña couldn’t stand how “big” the first “Pirates” shoot was, I can’t imagine she would’ve been happy shooting the second and third. I am happy, though, that she stuck around in Hollywood despite the bad first impression.
