AHOY THERE ME HEARTIES!
Actually - - - no. Stop right there.
I’m really not going to do me Pirate blogs in ‘Pirate’ language.
It just gets really annoying really fast. And there’s very little ‘Piratespeak’ in the movie anyway, so let’s just quietly forget about it and move smoothly on.
Hello.
Peter Lord here. I’m one of the co-founders of Aardman, and I’m currently among the luckiest people alive, because I’m directing a movie. And not any old movie, but THE PIRATES! A magnificent animated comedy adventure loosely based on the series of Pirates! books by Gideon Defoe.
The movie is due for release in March next year, so there’s still over ten months hard work in store. Ten months may sound a long way off to many people, but to me it’s scarily close. There’s still a small mountain of work to be done, and a huge team of people working on it. Having said that, I do have a great sense that we’ve achieved the hardest parts of the job, which I’ve been working on for over four years already. Luckily for me, I have a really awful memory, and so I can’t accurately recall when I actually started on THE PIRATES! - but it was long, long ago.
So first off, just to recall how it started. At Aardman, we often look at books to see if they have potential to be developed into movies or TV series. Occasionally we hold meetings where possible projects are discussed. On the table –literally – are picture books, novels, comics, scripts, treatments – and cups of tea, obviously. We are British after all.
Anyway at one of these meetings, I picked up a copy of The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists, and read a few pages, and laughed out loud several times.
Basically I thought ‘wow’ (or maybe ‘crikey’ - - I do say ‘crikey’ sometimes) ‘this is terrific, I’d love to do something based on this book, in this world.’ I’d seldom seen anything so distinctively funny and playful. You could immediately see that the world, the characters, the situations, and the tone added up to something joyous and special. I thought: ‘I’m going to do that.’ And four-and-a-bit years later, he we are doing it. And it’s looking brilliant.
Result! Ahaaaaaarh! Sorry.
-Peter Lord
