Rob Marshall on Pirates 4: “We’re still trying to figure out if it’s going to all happen”

While on the rounds promoting Nine director Rob Marshall spoke to ComingSoon about Pirates of the Caribbean 4 which he is attached to direct. He told them how it all came about, and he also gave an update on it’s current status.

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.”

Disney have already set a summer 2011 release date and Geoffrey Rush who plays Barbossa said back in September that he was keeping his schedule open for a possible spring start, however it seems something has knocked it off course recently. It could have been the departure of Dick Cook, the longtime chairman of The Walt Disney Studios a few months ago. At the time Depp said that there is “a crack in my enthusiasm at the moment“, so could the uncertainty be due to Depp?