'Pirates' blew Johnny Depp away by making him '21 Jump Street' young again
LOS ANGELES — The fountain of youth at last! Even Johnny Depp was floored by scenes showing his famed Jack Sparrow character as a young man in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.
Pirates directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg turned back time on Sparrow, who is depicted in flashbacks meeting a young Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem), the villain in the fifth installment of the Disney franchise.
Depp, 53, loved seeing the young Sparrow saunter onscreen.
"Johnny was super-happy with it," says Sandberg. "He said, 'This adds years to my career.' "
"Imagine seeing yourself walking and talking like when you are a teenager. It's trippy," says Rønning. "He almost couldn't believe it."
The filmmakers spent a year working on the prolonged sequence that involved an extensive "de-aging" process by the visual effects company Lola. The goal: To bring Depp back to his heartthrob heyday as Sparrow to explain the origins of the Pirates legend.
"The age we went for is the end of his teens. It was like 21 Jump Street Johnny Depp," says Rønning, referring to the star's breakout role in the 1980s TV series (when Depp was actually 24).
The Pirates scene features a sea battle between Salazar's and Sparrow's rival ships. Depp shot his role in full Sparrow attire with image tracking dots on his face. A 23-year-old lookalike, Anthony De La Torre, was brought aboard, also in full Sparrow attire. This was another shocker for Depp.
"When I first turned around, Johnny looked at me and literally said, 'Bloody hell,' " De La Torre laughs.
De La Torre had to walk precisely through the scene that Depp had just filmed. He did a lot of prep work to serve as the young stand-in for Depp.
"You have to watch all the Pirates movies non-stop, you have to drink some rum, get the sea legs a bit, and do some salsa to loosen the hips, and you're ready," says De La Torre. "Then I'd watch (Depp) and mimic him, we'd do a little back and forth."
The young actor was needed, literally, for his skin, to use on Depp's face through computer effects.
"This sounds gruesome, but we use elements of the young actor like skin and tones and put them them on top of Johnny," Rønning says.
The technology has vastly improved since Lola worked on landmark films such as 2008's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Brad Pitt, which means Depp's true performance is seen during the battle scene. But it was complex, painstaking work for a team of 12.
“We are trying for that indescribable youthful quality people recognize," says Lola special effects supervisor Trent Claus. "The way (young skin) reflects light is different, the elasticity of the skin, the way it hangs on the bone structure is drastically different and a thousand other little things we keep track of.”
Claus says the challenge was greater because Depp is such a major superstar. But they got there.
"We are altering his appearance, but keeping his performance. He has a very definitive look, everyone knows what Johnny looks like," says Claus. "We're really happy how it turned out."
