"A [film]like this tends to involve more elaborate sets both built on location and built on stages. There's more of an intent, for example, to do more exteriors on stage, which is always a challenge, and a fun one," says Heinrichs. "In the movie we go to Singapore. And it was kind of a challenge to figure out what that ought to look like, since there really isn't any recorded evidence from the early 18th century of Singapore. There's mostly later stuff when it's just too much more modern development. But we took some images from other Chinese cities of that era, as well as just kind of sprinkled in other Southeast Asian influences to kind of create hopefully not too much of a Hollywood take, if you will, but certainly a stylized and expressionistic feel of a Chinese/Malaysian [approach]."
While planning this new locale for the third Pirates film, Heinrichs became a bit self-conscious when he realized that one of the film's stars knew more than a little about the real-life Singapore.
"I was a little concerned because Chow Yun-Fat's wife is from Singapore and I was concerned that they'd be offended with the liberties that we took," he laughs. "But I don't think they really know what it looked like 300 year earlier either, and certainly they were thrilled with what they did see and the spirit that it was given. It's a fun Hollywood film that also has this amazing depth of character."
Heinrichs says that his goal was that once anyone walked onto the Singapore sets (on Stage 12 on the Universal lot) he wanted them to have the feeling that they were truly in the environment of a 300-year-old, mythical version of a Southeast Asian metropolis. That's something he always tries to do for the company and the actors, in order to give them a sense of time and place to bounce off of.
The Singapore stage is one of the sets he's most proud of; it was a huge challenge that he had to undertake with very little time to get it done, and he thinks it came off "beautifully."
"We had to build a tank for it, so there's a portion of Singapore that's actually built over the water with stilts-based housing," he says. "And then also just land-based and stone-based masonry, so there's the combination of those two styles on one stage at the same time. And then we had an interior set of a bathhouse and had to come up with a whole engineering plot of how exactly to heat up the water and send it through these bamboo pipes. And Gore really wanted the bathhouse to be kind of gross and a bit of a poke of fun at the whole spa culture. So you have Chinese pirates soaking in these skanky looking tubs of water with mushrooms growing all over the place! It's pretty funny."
With the Singapore sets all constructed in Los Angeles, there was no need for the Pirates production to actually travel to that far-off locale.
"The only thing I might have gotten out of a trip to Singapore is I would have been able to really do [perhaps] better research as to how it would have looked back in that time, but I don't really think much is left. The city has so renewed itself over the years, there isn't much left of what we were going after," says Heinrichs.
Instead, as with most of the locales seen in the series, this Singapore is more a representation or an idea of how the city might have looked all those years ago -- perhaps through the googly eyes of a certain Jack Sparrow, that is…
"So Singapore is the name of the city that we were creating but what it represents is a completely different pirate environment that is within the reach of the East India Trading Company," continues Heinrichs. "In the third Pirates movie we go to the other side of the world and beyond, and this is just one stage which we really get into the old mythology of that period. Because the third movie is about the end of the golden age of piracy and the onslaught of the modern global trade and reason and order. And we're celebrating that era in the film."
Obviously, the second and third films, which were shot back to back, had their fair share of location shooting. All of the Southern Caribbean location work for Pirates 3 was done while shooting Pirates 2, so those scenes were fleshed out earlier than, say, the Singapore stuff. Of course, work was also done early in the Bahamas, where the open sea was simulated in a big tank. More of the third film takes place on the water than the second film, so both of these locales figured prominently in At World's End's shoot. And then the third iteration of the production on the two movies began on the soundstages in Los Angeles in August.
"[Singapore] was some of the very first stuff that we shot on Pirates 3," Heinrichs says of the L.A. shoot. "I've been off for three months now, so we were still shooting in January of this year. In fact, that was the big challenge of the time, doing two movies back to back when of course we're frantically trying to finish all of the work for the second picture when we also have to concentrate on this really important scene for a movie that comes out two years later. I don't know how Gore does it, but somehow he has all the threads bound in his head somewhere and he's got all these balls in the air that he's juggling and he manages to make it work somehow."
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