Gore Verbinski, 48, the director of the first three “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies and “Rango,” which is nominated for best animated feature at the Academy Awards Sunday, grew up on the beaches of La Jolla.
“It was a great time. The culture was different. We used to have these keggers on the sand where four bands would play,” he says from the set of “The Lone Ranger,” his next movie that is about to be shot in New Mexico with Johnny Depp as Tonto.
“After school we did stop-motion projects, messing around in my friend (musician) Danny Heifetz’ basement on Virginia Way, just making great films, shooting crazy adventures in the canyons and construction sites, wherever we could.”
Kind of a pirate’s early life, you might say.
“I surfed,” Verbinski continues,” but I wasn’t very good at it. Church, school, Walter Stewart’s drama class at La Jolla High — where nobody got an A!” he laughs, “The Boy Scouts, music.” Verbinski played in some memorable thrash bands like Thelonius Monster and The Little Kings, later even backing Stiv Bators, before heading off to UCLA Film School.
“I have a guitar in my office right now that is mocking me,” he explains. “I’m a failed musician at heart. This is my backup gig.”
Verbinski’s eight movies, including the classic teen horror flick “The Ring” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” have sold more than $1.4 billion in tickets — more than Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” series or all of Clint Eastwood’s movies. The cheerful, intellectual Verbinski, who brings a smart, party-hardy mainstream San Diego feel to would-be pirates and lizards globally, may have saved stuffy Hollywood from itself with a blind wink and a raucous arrrgh!
“It’s all about taking chances,” he explains. “With “Pirates,” the first one, certainly, everyone thought we were crazy, but I think that’s the best place to be, in that low-expectations, high-risk arena. I have a belief against all survey data that audiences want somebody to go and try and tinker and create something different. That’s where we were with “Rango,” and it was good to get back to that, where you don’t know what you’re doing. You get out of bed with a spring in your step, when you embrace the unknown.”
Verbinski had never made an animated film.
“Rango,” if you weren’t paying attention when it debuted last March, is a sly sendup. It’s the existential saga of a double beady-eyed chameleon, played by Johnny Depp, who steals his moniker from a bottle of cactus juice, and goes on a ramble in search of his own identity, bringing rehydration to the thirsty town of Dirt, discovering the meaning of lizard love, and reinventing the Western movie in the process. It will make you laugh, whether or not you follow the references to Chinatown, Sergio Leone, Shakespeare and Don Knotts. Not since “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” has a movie of such gravitas been relegated to the animated feature category of the Academy Awards.
Perhaps it was all that teenage filming in San Diego’s canyons but Verbinski most wanted to make a little film about the creatures of the desert, horny toads, red-tailed hawks, rattlesnakes, the sort of animals you might see on a hike down to the old Scripps Pier.
“I started with seven artists out of my house, drawing and creating what we called a story reel,” Verbinski recalls. “I asked John Logan (the personable but heavy-hitting screenwriter of “Gladiator,” “The Last Samurai” and “Hugo”) to come over and work and help out. It wasn’t so much a screenplay as a process where we could form characters, and storyboarding, using a computer and a microphone and doing all the voices ourselves. It was incredibly low-fi for the first year and a half. We kind of scraped together a little startup money from Graham King. (According to The Hollywood Reporter, independent producer King put up 3 percent of the total $135 million “lo-fi” budget.) But really we were left alone. just some guys I knew from playing poker or whatever, like Crash McCreery” — the legendary creature designer on “Jurassic Park” and “Predator,” who followed Verbinski’s dictum on “Pirates”: “Odd but not broad.”
Paramount studio head Brad Grey came for a look.
“Brad drove all the way out to the hills of Pasadena and kind of uttered, ‘Where am I?’ as he stumbled through the pizza crust and Egg McMuffin wrappers into the converted laundry room that was our edit bay, and we showed him the whole animatic, and he was like, ‘That sounds great. You sure you got Johnny Depp?’ ”
All along, “Rango” was built with the actor in mind. Much earlier, Verbinski had started to pitch Depp in detail, and Depp had cut him off, replying, “Stop. You got me at the lizard.”
I ask Verbinski why he thinks Depp — who is paid well over $20 million a picture plus a share in profits said to be as high as $56 million — is so popular.
“I think he’s a real-world chameleon. He is part lizard. He can transform, and I think we as an audience get sick of the same face.”
Verbinski sat the actors, including Depp, Ned Beatty, Alfred Molina (“Spiderman”), Harry Dean Stanton, Isla Fisher, Bill “Davy Jones” Nighy and Abigail Breslin, together on a makeshift stage with funky props. “I wouldn’t know how to get the performance out of people one at a time (as is done in most animated movies) because much of what we do is getting them to react to one another.”
They then spent another 18 months playing around at Industrial Light & Magic in Northern California, “where things got very high-tech (and very expensive) very quickly. That’s kind of the shape of it, really humble beginnings.”
As for Verbinski’s own San Diego beginnings, he is a proud graduate of not only La Jolla High, but Muirlands Middle and Torrey Pines Elementary. His mother was an accountant at UCSD, and raised five kids. “She would say, ‘If you want to dance with the bear, don’t tell me you’re tired!’ People in Hollywood ask me how you make it. I don’t have an answer beyond hers: incredibly hard work.”
His father was a nuclear physicist at SAIC, who taught him “to tinker, to learn to fly into the unknown because that’s where the exponential returns are.”
Walt Stewart, now 78, the Mr. Stewart of Verbinski’s tough drama class back at La Jolla High in 1980, remembers, “He was not one of those kids who would sit in the corner. He was always willing to participate in things creative and weird. That was never a problem for Gregor. That’s who he was in high school — since he went to the big town, he became Gore. Gregor wasn’t necessarily an actor per se type, but within the classroom situation he showed a willingness to make discoveries on how to create a situation. Nice kid.”
Verbinski chuckles when talking about high school. “Either you remember the coolest teachers or the hardest ones,” he says. “I was very lucky. I remember taking drama with Mr. Stewart and thinking. ‘It’ll be an easy A,’ and it’s the hardest class you could ever take. It was sort of a renaissance education, La Jolla back then. We had everything from auto shop and metal shop and music and drama and all these things. We had a really wide view.” Where does he think the film business is heading?
“That’s a profound question. I have one eye on what happened to the record industry, but I think the bottom line will be determined by whether people continue to go to the theater. There will always be stories to tell and there will always be ways to tell them. It’s just whether it’s going to stay cinematic and big and something you share with 500 strangers. But it’s not going to go away.”
Steve Chapple’s Intellectual Capital covers game-changing people, ideas and perspectives. He can be reached at intellectualcapitalchapple@gmail.com
“It was a great time. The culture was different. We used to have these keggers on the sand where four bands would play,” he says from the set of “The Lone Ranger,” his next movie that is about to be shot in New Mexico with Johnny Depp as Tonto.
“After school we did stop-motion projects, messing around in my friend (musician) Danny Heifetz’ basement on Virginia Way, just making great films, shooting crazy adventures in the canyons and construction sites, wherever we could.”
Kind of a pirate’s early life, you might say.
“I surfed,” Verbinski continues,” but I wasn’t very good at it. Church, school, Walter Stewart’s drama class at La Jolla High — where nobody got an A!” he laughs, “The Boy Scouts, music.” Verbinski played in some memorable thrash bands like Thelonius Monster and The Little Kings, later even backing Stiv Bators, before heading off to UCLA Film School.
“I have a guitar in my office right now that is mocking me,” he explains. “I’m a failed musician at heart. This is my backup gig.”
Verbinski’s eight movies, including the classic teen horror flick “The Ring” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” have sold more than $1.4 billion in tickets — more than Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” series or all of Clint Eastwood’s movies. The cheerful, intellectual Verbinski, who brings a smart, party-hardy mainstream San Diego feel to would-be pirates and lizards globally, may have saved stuffy Hollywood from itself with a blind wink and a raucous arrrgh!
“It’s all about taking chances,” he explains. “With “Pirates,” the first one, certainly, everyone thought we were crazy, but I think that’s the best place to be, in that low-expectations, high-risk arena. I have a belief against all survey data that audiences want somebody to go and try and tinker and create something different. That’s where we were with “Rango,” and it was good to get back to that, where you don’t know what you’re doing. You get out of bed with a spring in your step, when you embrace the unknown.”
Verbinski had never made an animated film.
“Rango,” if you weren’t paying attention when it debuted last March, is a sly sendup. It’s the existential saga of a double beady-eyed chameleon, played by Johnny Depp, who steals his moniker from a bottle of cactus juice, and goes on a ramble in search of his own identity, bringing rehydration to the thirsty town of Dirt, discovering the meaning of lizard love, and reinventing the Western movie in the process. It will make you laugh, whether or not you follow the references to Chinatown, Sergio Leone, Shakespeare and Don Knotts. Not since “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” has a movie of such gravitas been relegated to the animated feature category of the Academy Awards.
Perhaps it was all that teenage filming in San Diego’s canyons but Verbinski most wanted to make a little film about the creatures of the desert, horny toads, red-tailed hawks, rattlesnakes, the sort of animals you might see on a hike down to the old Scripps Pier.
“I started with seven artists out of my house, drawing and creating what we called a story reel,” Verbinski recalls. “I asked John Logan (the personable but heavy-hitting screenwriter of “Gladiator,” “The Last Samurai” and “Hugo”) to come over and work and help out. It wasn’t so much a screenplay as a process where we could form characters, and storyboarding, using a computer and a microphone and doing all the voices ourselves. It was incredibly low-fi for the first year and a half. We kind of scraped together a little startup money from Graham King. (According to The Hollywood Reporter, independent producer King put up 3 percent of the total $135 million “lo-fi” budget.) But really we were left alone. just some guys I knew from playing poker or whatever, like Crash McCreery” — the legendary creature designer on “Jurassic Park” and “Predator,” who followed Verbinski’s dictum on “Pirates”: “Odd but not broad.”
Paramount studio head Brad Grey came for a look.
“Brad drove all the way out to the hills of Pasadena and kind of uttered, ‘Where am I?’ as he stumbled through the pizza crust and Egg McMuffin wrappers into the converted laundry room that was our edit bay, and we showed him the whole animatic, and he was like, ‘That sounds great. You sure you got Johnny Depp?’ ”
All along, “Rango” was built with the actor in mind. Much earlier, Verbinski had started to pitch Depp in detail, and Depp had cut him off, replying, “Stop. You got me at the lizard.”
I ask Verbinski why he thinks Depp — who is paid well over $20 million a picture plus a share in profits said to be as high as $56 million — is so popular.
“I think he’s a real-world chameleon. He is part lizard. He can transform, and I think we as an audience get sick of the same face.”
Verbinski sat the actors, including Depp, Ned Beatty, Alfred Molina (“Spiderman”), Harry Dean Stanton, Isla Fisher, Bill “Davy Jones” Nighy and Abigail Breslin, together on a makeshift stage with funky props. “I wouldn’t know how to get the performance out of people one at a time (as is done in most animated movies) because much of what we do is getting them to react to one another.”
They then spent another 18 months playing around at Industrial Light & Magic in Northern California, “where things got very high-tech (and very expensive) very quickly. That’s kind of the shape of it, really humble beginnings.”
As for Verbinski’s own San Diego beginnings, he is a proud graduate of not only La Jolla High, but Muirlands Middle and Torrey Pines Elementary. His mother was an accountant at UCSD, and raised five kids. “She would say, ‘If you want to dance with the bear, don’t tell me you’re tired!’ People in Hollywood ask me how you make it. I don’t have an answer beyond hers: incredibly hard work.”
His father was a nuclear physicist at SAIC, who taught him “to tinker, to learn to fly into the unknown because that’s where the exponential returns are.”
Walt Stewart, now 78, the Mr. Stewart of Verbinski’s tough drama class back at La Jolla High in 1980, remembers, “He was not one of those kids who would sit in the corner. He was always willing to participate in things creative and weird. That was never a problem for Gregor. That’s who he was in high school — since he went to the big town, he became Gore. Gregor wasn’t necessarily an actor per se type, but within the classroom situation he showed a willingness to make discoveries on how to create a situation. Nice kid.”
Verbinski chuckles when talking about high school. “Either you remember the coolest teachers or the hardest ones,” he says. “I was very lucky. I remember taking drama with Mr. Stewart and thinking. ‘It’ll be an easy A,’ and it’s the hardest class you could ever take. It was sort of a renaissance education, La Jolla back then. We had everything from auto shop and metal shop and music and drama and all these things. We had a really wide view.” Where does he think the film business is heading?
“That’s a profound question. I have one eye on what happened to the record industry, but I think the bottom line will be determined by whether people continue to go to the theater. There will always be stories to tell and there will always be ways to tell them. It’s just whether it’s going to stay cinematic and big and something you share with 500 strangers. But it’s not going to go away.”
Steve Chapple’s Intellectual Capital covers game-changing people, ideas and perspectives. He can be reached at intellectualcapitalchapple@gmail.com
