DVD Commentary: Drink Deep, or Taste Not

[erinya]

At leobrat's request, my commentary for the second part of my Johnny/Keira series. And yes, as many of you have asked me, there is a third part, but as was the case with this one, it's been very difficult to make it do exactly what I want it to do, so a good deal of it has been waiting on my hard drive for months for the right kind of beginning.



Drink Deep, or Taste Not

Yeah, of course he knows. He tried to ignore it at first, but she's all too easy to read. He hears it in the nearly-concealed hitch in her voice when she speaks to him, sees it in her heightened color, the way her gaze follows him and then slides away when he looks up to meet it. It surprises him, her transparency, for young though she may be, he knows she's quite the accomplished little actress.

I was extremely nervous about writing a Johnny Depp POV for this fic--this is a man whom I respect intensely, and it felt extremely presumptuous to pretend to know what the inside of his head looks like, let alone put these kinds of thoughts into it--but at least I knew where I wanted to start, which was with a parallel of the first part's hook. The things they know about each other.

He begins to wonder if she wants him to know, after all.

Which she does and she doesn't. But she's far more obvious than she thinks she is--she's barely twenty, and he's in his forties and undoubtably knows his way around women. He's also familiar with what it looks like when his costars fall in love with him, as it's happened more than once. He used to make a habit of falling in love with them back.

He knows that Jamie hasn't been visiting her as much lately, although he doesn't know whether that lapse is a symptom or a cause of this...thing...she's nursing.

Knightley's relationship with Jamie Dornan ended around this time.

Call it a crush. It can't be more; they both know that. He hopes.

He doesn't necessarily trust her judgment, but he doesn't think it's more than infatuation, puppy-love.

Still, there's danger here between them. He knows that well enough; and not just because she exudes the kind of beauty that he's always found irresistible.

Keira is very decidedly Johnny's type--she actually looks quite a bit like Winona Ryder--which is why I found it fairly easy to imagine an attraction between them. Look at the women he's dated, including Vanessa, and you'll see what I mean. And again, he used to make a habit of dating his costars. Danger, Will Robinson!

Certainly that graceful gamine body, those luminous eyes and delicate features of hers, occasionally trouble his dreams--smooth skin, the slender curve of her waist, the shape of her against him, small pert breasts filling his hands, his name desperate on her lips as she wraps her legs around him and he sinks into her, takes her, the hot breathless Island night pulsing around them as if in approbation--but if they do, he draws on them to fuel his acting and reminds himself that he often dreams in character while on a project. Tells himself that these are Jack Sparrow's dreams, and not his own at all.

Johnny is a method actor, and takes his roles extremely seriously--he does any number of crazy things to get himself into character, which probably has goes a long way towards how much of a chameleon he is. He really becomes them. Knowing that I dream from the point of view of my characters when I'm deep in the writing groove, the idea that Johnny dreams in character isn't much of a stretch.

That's not what worries him.

It's her feelings that worry him, after all.

Here's where I struggled for months with this fic. I wrote at least three different transitional dialogue pieces--one between Johnny and Gore, one in which Keira and Johnny talk about her breakup with Jamie, and a couple others that never went anywhere. Then I hit on this scene.

She'd asked him, once, during the second week of shooting on Dead Man's Chest, "Johnny, do you ever…" And trailed off, tracing the rings of condensation on the table with her finger, frowning into her glass. They'd been stuck inside the hotel VIP lounge for several hours, waiting for word on whether they'd be working tomorrow in spite of increasingly dire hurricane advisories, or if the production team was going to pay to fly them all home for the duration.

Based on fact! The shooting schedule for DMC was put on hold for six weeks, because 2005 happened to be the most active hurricane season in recorded history.

Confronted with forced inaction, Johnny smoked incessantly; Jack, Kevin, and Naomi began a cutthroat but well-lubricated poker tournament; Orlando, blessed by a conjugal visit-lucky son of a bitch that he was-had vanished in the direction of his suite, his lovely Kate in tow.

I particularly like the image of "Norrington," "Tia," and "Gibbs" playing poker and getting drunk together. (Although if I wrote it now, I would have made it Liar's Dice, since apparently Jack Davenport is the one who introduced the game to the writers.) To be a fly on that wall...but that would have been a tangent for this fic.

Keira merely fidgeted, chattering brightly and inconsequentially; so the abrupt change in tone that accompanied her words made Johnny sit up a little in his chair and turn to look at her.

Keira is not always brilliant in interviews, although she's quite cute, and she fidgets a lot. Johnny, on the other hand, doesn't strike me as a small talk kind of guy. Neither of them appear wholly confident in public appearances--in fact, they both fidget--but Keira rambles nervously and Johnny speaks with long pauses.

Curious when no further query appeared forthcoming-his full attention, now given, seemed to unnerve her, for she dropped her head and bit her lip--he prompted, "Well? Do I ever what?"

His full attention would make me nervous too. Keira seems to fangirl Johnny quite a bit herself, so I don't blame her for being tongue-tied.

She glanced up at him suddenly, seriously; the intensity of that glance sent a shock through him, something like adrenaline. Alarm, even.

Or attraction...

It stilled his hand for a moment as he stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. But she went on to say, "When you're acting. Do you ever get…blurred? I mean, forget where you end and where your character begins?"

Relieved, he laughed. "Oh, yeah. Always. That's what acting is. The process of losing yourself." He searched his pockets for his rolling papers and the right words. Ah.

I've watched a lot of Depp interviews, as you may have guessed by now, and I can't count the number of times I've seen him use his smoking habit to stall for time.

"You learn everything about that character, really get to know him. Or her. Of course the edges blur." His practiced fingers made short work of his next smoke; he tongued the end, regarded her thoughtfully. "Almost like falling in love, isn't it?"

Oh. Oh. This is where I first got an inkling about what this fic was really about, which was much more complex than I'd realized. And here I just thought I was writing naughty RPF. But no, I was blurring the lines of what is acceptable in fanfic to write about lines getting blurred--between character and actor, love and art, the acceptable and the forbidden.

He flicked open his Zippo, and saw the spark flare in her eyes. "You want to crawl inside someone else's skin," she said softly, holding his gaze. "Only when you act, you can. You forget yourself."

When you act, or when you write. You fall in love with the characters, crawl inside their skins, lose yourself to the story.

"Creative abandon," he said, equally softly. "Yeah. It's a kind of happy insanity. Like love." He grinned. "Or, you know, just plain insanity. Multiple personalities. We're all a little psychotic in this business."

Johnny likes to play characters who are a little bit crazy. Mort, Sands, Don Juan de Marco. Jack. Yet he's not the kind of actor who seems to play the same character in every movie. He has a lot of faces in his pocket, to misquote Marlon Brando's famous words to JD. It's a little bit like MPD. So is writing, if it comes to that...it's hard to talk about inspiration without sounding schizophrenic.

"Speak for yourself," she laughed. "I'm quite sane, thanks."

"Give it time," he growled. Then, struck by a thought, he leaned forward, pointing his cigarette at her for emphasis. "And if you aren't crazy yet, maybe you should be. Art, any art, is about letting go, Keira. Not holding back. Not staying safe."

Good art is dangerous. When you're out of your comfort zone, you're probably doing your best work. And there's some meta-commentary here for this story in particular. I wonder if that's not part of why this darn fic is so popular...

"Rather like love," she said. Her face, upturned to his, glowed with the flush of discovery, her lips slightly parted, her eyes dark and wide and shining.

A look of worship, really. Again, can you blame her?

Sweet Christ, she was lovely. And young, so very young. He felt suddenly ancient, a tarnished old man next to her incandescent purity.

I'm paraphrasing something Johnny himself said about working with Keira in CotBP--that he felt like a dirty old man during the filming of the island scene. Of course she was underage then; in this fic, she's not.

"Mmm." He drew a deep breath, sat back in his chair. "Exactly like love."

She appeared to remember that she had a drink in front of her, took a small, distracted sip. "But how do you get you back? After you've risked it all and lost yourself?"

"You don't."

What are they really talking about here? I'm not even sure myself. More than one thing at once, certainly.

"What do you mean, you don't?"

"The metaphor holds up. How do you bring yourself back from love? You don't. It changes you. Each and every time."

"But when it's over…when you go your separate ways…"

"You put yourself back together. But you won't ever be the same."

There's no going back. Only going forward. You can glue a vase back together, but the cracks will still show. Now I'm close to sure they're talking about love.

She considered this, wide-eyed. "That's…terrifying."

"Yeah. Yeah, it is. But it's worth it. It's joyous." He knocked ash off the end of his cig into the tray, quirked an eyebrow at her. "Ever been in love, Keira?"

"No." She blushed, looks away. "Yes. I…maybe. I don't know."

This is where they might have talked about Jamie. There's a undercurrent that didn't make it into the text, that Keira is vulnerable because one of those early twenties kind of relationships has just ended for her, and she's feeling a bit lost and adrift, so she's turning to someone stable and wise to the world to help her make some sense out of it.

"Then you haven't. If you had, you'd know it."

And this is where, in an earlier draft, Johnny talked about Vanessa and his kids, but the conversation didn't quite develop in a way I liked, so I cut it.

She grimaced. "You shouldn't say things like that. You sound just like my Dad."

"I'm old enough to be," he said, meaning to remind them both.

He's finding he has to. The conversation they've just had puts them on a new level of understanding, unintentionally and unexpectedly. The kind of intimacy of which it's hard not to drink deep.

"I'm not that young," she protested, inaccurately.

She wishes he wouldn't remind her.

"Oh, but I am that old."

She'd shot him an odd look, then, like she wanted to say something more, but thought better of it; he had pretended not to notice.

Not sure what she was going to say here. Probably something unwise.

They'd been allowed to fly home that night, the separate planes that carried them skirting the edges of the gathering storm that tore through carefully-constructed sets and scuppered their production schedule

I wrote this before it came out, but if you've watched the extras on the DMC DVD, you can see the destruction on film. Wasn't pretty.

for six precious weeks of Provence and Vanessa and his little ones; and he didn't think much at all of Keira when he was sprawled on the floor under joint attack by Jack and Lily-Rose, or in later hours under a wholly different brand of irresistible assault by his wife.

There was no way I was going to ignore the fact the Johnny loves Vanessa and his kids. At least, I felt, I could redeem myself a little by acknowledging the ascendancy of that relationship for him.

But when they are called back again, finally, to resume the project, and Keira presses up against his back, warm and pliant as the cameras roll and she murmurs in his ear (You do know Will taught me how to handle a sword, and that throaty voice she's using for the line makes it hard, indeed, to miss its double edge)

Double entendre upon double entendre. Once again, we have words that mean more than one thing at a time.

he knows that something's changed about her in those too-short weeks. And when he turns to look at her and sees not the blithe, bubbly Miss Knightley but instead a fierce Elizabeth Swann-all powerful desire and self-righteous pride-he knows.

Keira's stopped playing it safe, and now she's well and truly lost.

She's off the edge of the map, pushing both their comfort levels--both in and out of character.

He smiles; Jack Sparrow smirks. And when she tilts her face up to his, eyes half-lidded and dark with Elizabeth's lust, her breath warm on his cheek, he's lost right along with her. He forgets that he's a father, and she barely more than a child at nineteen-twenty, now, because he sent her flowers on her birthday;

A tabloid rumor that was too good to leave out...

not that it matters, she's still young enough to be his daughter either way-forgets that he knows it's wrong to want her this way, for she's not his daughter after all, and they both know it all too well. Forgets the degree to which he's been feeling his age lately, thinks that to taste the sweet vibrancy of her would be to forget that gnawing awareness of time, of having everything to lose; thinks even that her touch might erase the cold sense of mortality from the back of his neck and the base of his spine.

Also based on Johnny's interviews, in which he's started to say he's feeling his age--and he is at the age when men tend to have that "midlife crisis." Although I think Johnny went through his crisis period much earlier in his life, with the drugs and hotel room vandalism and all the rest.

He forgets himself, gives in to piracy and the surge of Jack's blood pounding in his ears as it races south to his groin.

They're both in that moment of forgetting that they talked about. The danger zone.

Even though they've read the script, he knows they both think for a moment that he's really going to kiss her. Perhaps Gore thinks so, too, because Johnny hears him, faintly, shouting "Cut!" It takes another moment for the directive to register before they break apart. Keira's deep flush belies her attempt at a casual grin before she flees below, muttering something about the heat.

The scene we saw from her point of view in the first part.

He seats himself on one of the prop cannons, accepting the bottle of water handed to him absently as he comes back to himself, carefully piecing back together enough of Johnny to get by with from the soul of Jack, and willing his hard-on to subside.

He is only a man, after all. He can't help it.

This is going to be a long shoot, he thinks. A long project, with another whole movie to go, and he and Keira will have to play a full range of variations on this theme, carry this tension through scene after scene. And they haven't even made it to the actual Big Movie Kiss yet. Well, fuck.

And then he thinks, at least he will have his chance to taste her.

Hear those alarm bells going off?

"Oh, fuck," he says, startling the makeup artist who has swooped down upon him to touch up the "raw spot" on his jaw. "Sorry, Heather. Ignore me. Ravings of a madman. Carry on with Jack's syphilis, by all means."

I love Jack's syphilis sore--which, if I remember correctly, was a Johnny-suggested detail. It certainly sounds like something he'd come up with. I have to more or less ignore it when I write J/E fic, so it was fun to get to show it "onscreen" here.

He wonders, not for the first time, just how closely Jack Sparrow's desires are woven into his own, and whether he'll be able to untangle them when the third movie is finally in the can, whether he knows even now which threads are which. And he wonders which of them is really crazier, in the end.

Where does Jack end and Johnny begin? He's talked a lot about how he loves playing this character and how he doesn't want to say goodbye to him when the last movie wraps--he calls it "separation anxiety." Perhaps his affection for Jack has a lot to do with how beloved the character has become. It's fun to watch someone have fun, and Johnny certainly has fun being Jack Sparrow.

Still, Jack's life isn't exactly simple, and being him could bring its own set of complications...