Trivia / Pirates

• Box Office Bomb: Big time. The film's production cost was in the vicinity of $40 million. It grossed a little over $6 million worldwide. It was the most expensive budget for a European movie at the time.
• Copycat Cover: The logo of one French DVD version◊ from the 2000s obviously looks like Pirates of the Caribbean.
• Creator Backlash: Walter Matthau was pretty open about disliking the script and only made the film to appease his youngest son. After the film came out, he praised the its atmosphere but said the plot and action were lacking.
• Playing Against Type: The cantankerous, Jewish-American, comedic actor Walter Matthau is not exactly the first person you'd think of when picturing a swashbuckling pirate captain.
• Saved from Development Hell: Roman Polański planned to make the film in 1976. Some things got in the way in the meantime, and it finally got made a decade later.
• So My Kids Can Watch: Walter Matthau's son convinced him to do the film:
  I didn't like the script. I didn't understand the script. First it was the ship against the pirates, then the pirates against the ship, then the ship against the pirates. I didn't think it was funny or adventurous or anything. And the thought of swimming and climbing and duelling on one leg for five or six months in Tunisia didn't appeal to me. It was my youngest son Charlie who changed my mind. He said, 'You gotta take it, Poppa. You'll get to work with Roman Polański, one of the great directors today. It's an open-air part that could change your career.
• Troubled Production:
  • Roman Polański planned this as his next film after Chinatown in 1976, starring Jack Nicholson and Isabelle Adjani, with himself playing the sidekick. When production was postponed, he made The Tenant instead, which he rewrote for Adjani. In 1976 he said he aimed to make Pirates the following year in England and Malta and that he would act in the film but only play a small role. However production was put back even further after Polanski was arrested in California in 1977 on charges including rape by use of drugs of a minor. Polanski fled the United States to avoid sentencing.
  • Polanski's legal troubles meant that the film couldn't be shot in America, so production restarted in Paris with a whole new production company, Cathargo Films, and a new producer, Tarak Ben Ammar, who had pioneered Tunisia as filming location.
  • In May, 1983, Universal Studios agreed in a memo to provide two-thirds of the budget of Pirates, then estimated at $28 million. Six months later there was a studio shake up and Universal pulled out. By this stage Ben Ammar had already invested $8 million. He could not find a new distributor. By the time shooting began the budget had blown out to $40 million - Polanski and Walter Matthau each commanded $1 million and the galleon built for the film cost $7-8 million, with $10 million spent on constructing two sound stages.
  • The full scale galleon was built in a shipyard in the port of Port El Kantaoui situated at the city of Sousse, Tunisia, adjacent to the Tarak Ben Ammar Studios, which had been constructed exclusively for this production. An accurate replica above the waterline, but sporting a steel hull and a 400 HP auxiliary engine, the Neptune was and still is entered into the Tunisian naval registry, and is currently a tourist attraction in the port of Genoa, where its interior can be visited. The galleon was not finished until April 21, 1985, five months later than intended, and ran into a storm. It was later used as Captain Hook's ship in Neverland.
  • Filming was extremely problematic, the shoot cursed by poor weather and a number of accidents.
  • On May 14, 2010, actress Charlotte Lewis and her attorney Gloria Allred accused Polanski of predatory sexual conduct against her when she was 16 years old, claiming that Polanski insisted that she sleep with him in return for casting her in the film. However, she gave a very different account of events in an interview with News of the World, which was unearthed by the French newspaper Libération. In that interview, she had recognized a consensual relationship with Polanski, along with several other actors, which contradicts every other interview she gave before and after.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally, Roman Polański intended for his Chinatown lead Jack Nicholson to play the central role of Captain Red, and Polanski himself would play Red's sidekick. Then complications arose partially due to the enormous fees Nicholson was demanding (according to Polanski, when Nicholson was asked what exactly he wanted, he replied "I want more"). As late as 1984, Polanski wanted to cast Nicholson opposite Nastassja Kinski.
  • By February 1984, Michael Caine was attached as the lead. By April, Caine was out and Rob Lowe was being discussed as his sidekick.
  • Timothy Dalton was to play the part of Don Alfonso de la Torre, but backed out of the movie to make himself available to play James Bond in The Living Daylights. He also didn't get on with Polanski, and Damien Thomas replaced him in the role on short notice.
  • At one stage, Dustin Hoffman was to play The Frog.

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