Daydream Believer

By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY
In 2003's Pirates of the Caribbean, Johnny Depp's swishy pirate upstaged Orlando Bloom's swashbuckling heartthrob.
For Friday's sequel, a creepy villain might steal the show from Depp's iconic Captain Jack Sparrow.

This villain — Davy Jones — literally squirms: He has squid tentacles coming out of his face.

He is just one of the many additions to the special effects-heavy $200 million Dead Man's Chest, expected to be the biggest hit of summer

Coming off the phenomenon of the first Pirates, which took in $654 million worldwide and earned Depp an Oscar nomination, director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer felt they had to raise the bar in outrageousness for the sequel.

And after the original Pirates' memorable skeleton mutineer, Captain Barbossa (played with relish by Geoffrey Rush), the sequel needed a new supernatural foe.

Enter British actor Bill Nighy as Jones and a crew of monsters — part human, part sea creature.

Verbinski says the screenplay originally conceived the villains "as ghosts, but I wanted them to be physical and tactile. I thought 'of the sea,' they should have all this kind of dead sea life, rotting from the bottom of the ocean. So we came up with people formed from sharks and shells and crustaceans and barnacles and mutated. It's a kind of disease."

According to the movie's lore, Jones is such a deeply unloved and unhappy person that he placed his heart in a box — the infamous Davy Jones' Locker of maritime legend. Whoever can find and claim the undead organ will have control of him and his cronies.

"This is a man who felt so much pain in a particular area that he has removed the organ that offends him and stuck it in a chest and put it in the bottom of the sea," Nighy says.

Both Depp's Sparrow and Bloom's Will Turner end up searching for the heart of this sea beast who enslaves sailors in peril. He offers them immortality for a price: serving indefinitely aboard his sea-floor-trolling ghost ship, The Flying Dutchman.

Nighy, Verbinski says, "is an actor who can take the role and really make it delicious. It's really difficult to find actors who know how to celebrate villainy."

Nighy might be familiar to moviegoers as the burned-out, say-anything rock singer of Love Actually, the vampire king of Underworld and the zombie stepdad of Shaun of the Dead.

"I've been very lucky to play a wide range of parts," he says, "but now I joke that I've reached that difficult age where I can only portray men from other dimensions: I've played a vampire, a zombie and now I'm a squid man."

But Davy Jones is cut from a very different cloth. He was created with motion-capture technology, similar to what Andy Serkis did with Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and the giant ape in King Kong and Tom Hanks as the multiple characters of The Polar Express.

Nighy was on the set with Depp and the other actors, but he was not in full makeup or costume. He wore a plain jumpsuit and had a pox of digital sensors on his face to record his expressions in a computer and animate the movement of the eventual squid visage.

Verbinski thought special-effects designers would be able to retain Nighy's real eyes in the finished product, but it was abandoned as too complicated. Ultimately, everything on the villain's face is digitally created.

Nighy says Verbinski, who also made the original Pirates, "was always very reassuring that whatever I did on the day (of the shoot) would survive through the technical process. ... I don't think he was lying."

That's what worried Disney executives, Bruckheimer says. They noted the footage without the special effects in place and questioned why he was overdoing it.

"There's always hand-wringing by the studio," he says. "They were wondering why it was really big — moving his lips and head a lot."

But it was necessary to make sure the performance isn't buried by the layers of special effects.

Armed with Nighy's churning brow, jutting jaw and sputtering lips as a base, animators added the special effects: a face squirming with the translucent, slippery flesh of a soft-bodied sea invertebrate and an elegant captain's uniform overtaken by barnacles and seaweed.

The only time Nighy wore actual rubber tentacles on his chin was for a scene in which Jones leans over to play a pipe organ with his facial appendages. And even then, the prosthetics were only to gauge the correct distance between the keys and Nighy's face, so digital artists could add the actual squid later.

At times, Nighy wished he could have been in costume with his fellow actors.

"I'm in some very unsettling trousers, standing next to Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom," Nighy says. "You walk on the set with these incredibly glamorous people looking fabulous, like pirates, and I walk on the set looking like a reject from (1980s techno band) Devo. I looked like Devo's dad."

According to the screenplay, Jones was once a man but has spent so long at the bottom of the sea that he literally has absorbed it — not as wrinkly pool fingers but in the same way that a sunken ship fuses with the sea life around it.

Not only is Jones' beard a tangle of squid tentacles and burping bladders, he also has other creepy characteristics. Instead of a traditional pirate hook, his left hand is a giant crustacean claw, and his peg-leg has been replaced by a pointy crab leg.

Says artist Crash McCreery, who did all the concept sketches for the characters: "I didn't want it to be a creature movie. It still needed to reference lore and have artifacts from pirate life."

McCreery also designed an unusual hat for Jones with twin peaks at the sides to emphasize the deals made with the supernatural sea captain.

"His hat forms two horns, to subliminally set in the idea that he's demonesque," McCreery says.

The crew monsters have names but are more commonly referred to by McCreery by such monikers as Conch-shell Head, Shark Face and Lobster Guy.

"They eventually take on aspects of the ocean deep, whether it's a fish or shellfish, a sea anemone. The humanity has pretty much left them. And for characters just starting out with him, they are relatively human," says McCreery, who helped design The Penguin in Batman Returns and creatures for Jurassic Park and The Village.

The creatures serve Jones in his pursuit of Sparrow to collect his soul on a deal the hero pirate once struck to save his ship. Sparrow's only hope: Capture the monster's heart.

A competing heart-chaser complicates matters even more. Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander of Stage Beauty and Gosford Park), who runs East India Trading Company, wants to capture Jones' heart and use him as an attack dog to destroy the free-spirited pirates who bedevil his trade ships.

Beckett coerces Bloom's Turner into helping him follow Sparrow to the hidden heart. In exchange, Beckett promises he won't kill Sparrow, but offer to hire him.

Thus, Sparrow faces a true dilemma: work for the corporation or slave for the monster of the sea.

Says screenwriter Ted Elliott: "In the first movie, he was a guy who was free who wanted his ship. But he was still free. That was the challenge for the second movie. What if Jack's very sense of freedom was at threat? What would he be willing to do to preserve it?"

And the challenge for the third movie, already in production and expected next May: What will filmmakers do to top Davy Jones?