Earlier today, ComingSoon.net had a chance to sit down with director Rob Marshall (Chicago) and talk about his fantastic new Fellini-inspired musical Nine, an interview we hope to share with you soon, and eventually the conversation got around to his next movie, which is taking over the directing reigns on Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer Films’ Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.
“I was so surprised they called me,” he told us when asked how that gig came about. “It was Johnny Depp and Jerry Bruckheimer. Jerry called me, but Johnny was interested in working with me. It’s a wonderful thing when something like that happens, so we sat and met and he could not have been more lovely. He’s the nicest man. I’ve been very lucky to work with some great people and he’s one of them. So I could tell that we could maybe do this, and then they offered it to me.”
“We’re still trying to figure out if it’s going to all happen,” he continued. “If it happens–I think Johnny’s doing a movie with Angelina Jolie in the spring (that’s The Tourist)–so if it happens, we’ll start in the summer, and we’ll see. I’m excited. If it happens, it happens. I’d be thrilled. I just love Johnny and I’m excited about the genre.”
“I would need a script first,” he laughed when asked what direction he hoped to take the movie visually. “It all comes from the script and the story. You serve the story and you find out what the story is and then you work from there, that’s it. It’s simple.”
The question on most minds (okay, maybe not but we asked it anyway) was whether Marshall had the sea legs to direct a “Pirates” movie but he didn’t seem to nervous about the amount of time he might be spending on water. “I like the sea, but I know a lot of it I don’t actually have to be on the boat itself,” he said, “I can be off with my monitor and they can be on the boat. I’m sure I’ll jump on there and be on there many times because I actually enjoy water so I’m excited about that.”
Look for the rest of our chat with Rob Marshall very soon, but in the meantime, his new movie Nine opens in New York and L.A. on Friday and then elsewhere on Christmas Day.