00:04Hey man, how you doing? Good morning.
00:08Good morning to you. So in the beginning, the Bluff is a shop like an Indian movie but with a
00:15big budget. How do you use that?
00:17You know, that came in from the approach from the beginning. You know, we developed this idea with Zoe Saldana,
00:23Cicely and Marielle over at CineStar Pictures and the Russo family at Agbo.
00:27And from the very beginning, the DNA of the movie was I wanted to reimagine pirates in this way that
00:33was visceral and raw and authentic.
00:35I'm from the Caribbean, so I was able to bring in parts of my culture and, you know, growing up,
00:41some of my favorite movies was The Professional and New Jack City and these movies that were almost these gangster
00:48films.
00:48And so what we really tried to do is to make sure that all the action and all the, even
00:55the swagger of the pirates and the costumes and the guns and everything had that little bit of attitude, that
01:01little bit of raw and that bite to it.
01:03And that really led to a style that I think is very fresh and gives you, you know, gives you
01:08what you expect from a modern action movie, but also is very thoughtful about the heart and the emotion and
01:13the authenticity.
01:15I mean, you work on the action sequence. It's so impressive.
01:18Thank you. Thank you. Yes. So are you asking?
01:22Oh, yeah. I mean, you work on the action sequence.
01:25Oh, yes. You know, well, we have a whole team, obviously, you know, any movie is a collaborative effort.
01:29And I had some of the best collaborators in the business. Rob Alonzo is our second unit director.
01:34What's great about Rob is we would sit and we'd have these meetings and we don't talk about what's going
01:41to blow up and all that.
01:42We talk about character. We talk about, you know, even this pirate number four who's going to die very soon.
01:48Where's his weapon come from? Where did he learn to fight? How does he hold that? Right.
01:53So that everything is storytelling. If you freeze frame this movie, nothing is going to feel generic.
01:58And so we really united with that. And the stuff, you know, there were sequences where I would shoot some
02:03and he would shoot some or I would come on while he was shooting.
02:06So we did a schedule so that the first I did. We did five day weeks for first unit and
02:11we staggered it.
02:12So second unit would start the next day so I could come in on Saturdays for certain moments.
02:16And it really is when you have collaborators like that, you're really making one movie and you want it to
02:21feel like that.
02:22Sometimes you watch an action movie and you go, oh, this doesn't match with that. It just feels like a
02:26different thing.
02:27We were all really a family and we made sure that, you know, that rawness came up, came across.
02:33And sometimes I would go in the gym with the guys and we'd push around and, and I would look
02:37at a sequence and I'd say, hey, okay, do it to me.
02:39Because sometimes you want to film something and go, okay, it's cool to do this, but why would I do
02:44this when I could just do that?
02:46Right. So even though it wasn't always the most cinematic or the most flourishing, we wanted it to be real.
02:53This woman is fighting for her life. She's fighting for survival. She's fighting dirty. Right.
02:58And so we wanted every beat to come across like that. So you get that, that animal, that raw, that
03:02authenticity, you know?
03:11Well, Phil Ivey was our set designer. He's a real world builder. He's came up on Lord of the Rings
03:15and then he worked on District 9, a bunch of incredible films.
03:18And from the very beginning, he really accepted this challenge to build this. This world doesn't exist anymore.
03:24I'm from the Caribbean. It's my island, but it's not there. Right. So we went into the archives of Cayman
03:29Islands.
03:29We went to other Caribbean countries and took the architecture and whatever bits we could get.
03:35And we recreated that meticulous, even, you know, the town that we built.
03:40I remember the first day I went, I went into the sheriff's office, the custode, and I opened the little
03:45drawer.
03:45This is nowhere. We're not filming this, by the way. The little drawer had a ledger of the people he
03:50had arrested.
03:51It was that kind of detail, that kind of love that, that allowed us to be able to transport ourselves.
03:57When you came on set, you were transported to this world so we could transport the audience because the actors
04:03were there. Right.
04:04It was, it was, that house was real. We pushed through that window outside.
04:08It wasn't like you did a stage here and the outside here, like everything was one.
04:12And what was great about that is you can shoot 360, you know, you can, you can go around.
04:17There's no telephone poles. There's no airplanes or modern buildings.
04:21You're just surrounded by bush and sugarcane and beach and the sea and these elements that, that never go old.
04:28Right. They're the same today as they were a thousand years ago.
04:31So even though the structures are new, that sugarcane has always looked like this, that sea, that beach, those rocks.
04:38And so that was kind of the formula that we tried to embrace while bringing the actors into these environments
04:43that were, that would look like how they probably looked a hundred years ago.
04:49Why is the periods are so cinematic in your opinion?
04:55I think everyone is curious about this life of freedom and this life of unrestrained rules.
05:04And sometimes that goes dark and bad and toxic, but there's also part of it that if you look at
05:10Captain Connor, for example, he spilled a lot of blood, but he did it to find his place in the
05:16world.
05:16He wants that freedom. He doesn't want to be owned by a society, by people who are going to tax
05:22him and break him.
05:24And so even though he is our antagonist, he has a very strong point of view and something that you
05:29can kind of empathize with.
05:31You know, when the Russo brothers did Avengers, they had Thanos, right?
05:35And Thanos, he's not, you know, the way he goes about it is a little crazy, but his ideas are
05:40not, they're not bad, right?
05:42He wants to save the world because it's overpopulated, right? But the way he wants to do it is absolutely
05:47crazy.
05:48And so with us, I think with pirates are similar, you know, it's a brotherhood, it's a family.
05:54And there's a lawlessness that I think people still romanticize, you know?
06:00Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.
06:02Thank you, brother. Thank you, man.
06:20Thank you.
