Interview — Stuart Beattie

Today’s interview is with screenwriter Stuart Beattie. Beattie’s writing credits include Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Collateral (2004), 30 Days of Night (2007), and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009).

You’ve done spectacle before, with “Pirates.” I recall there was resistance to Johnny’s take on Jack Sparrow.
Yeah, I created Jack Sparrow. His name came from the idea of a beautiful bird that should never be caged. I wrote him as this kind of swashbuckling Errol Flynn-type pirate, more like Captain Blood.

He did all the same things. He stole the bigger ship to get the smaller ship, breaking out of jail, coming into town without a boat, always trying to get a boat. So all the actions are the same and all the dialogue is the same — but Johnny played it 180 degrees different than anyone expected. It’s why you love actors, right?

And, yeah, there was this initial knee-jerk reaction to seeing something that you weren’t expecting to see. To be fair to the Disney executives, they were looking at rushes and getting Johnny Depp’s version of Jack Sparrow for an hour of rushes. And when you see the film, it’s cut up into bits. It’s two minutes here and then three minutes there and one minute there. It works totally in the movie — but maybe it’s just an overload in an hour full of nothing but Jack Sparrow.

Were you pleased with the results?
Oh God, yeah! For the first few minutes I was in shock — the shock of, “Hang on, that’s not it.” Then I started cracking up.

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When will people start seeing videogames as something other than a toy?
I just think it’s a matter of it’s something new. They’re on a level now where the stories are amazing, the characters are so wonderful and deep and rich, and the mythologies are just so well thought out. There are a lot of great games out there that are operating on as much the same level as classic books, classic movies, the classic form of storytelling.

But still it’s generally derided.
I think there’s a stigma to the word “game,” and “video” is also a stigma.

You can read the rest of the interview here.