Swash in their buckles

WITHOUT Johnny Depp, one can safely say, there would be no Capt. Jack Sparrow and thus no multibillion-dollar “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise.

But one could also argue that, without Capt. Jack’s hair, or Capt. Jack’s hat, or Capt. Jack’s raccoon-like rings of kohl (not to mention Capt. Barbossa’s lace and Bootstrap Bill’s face), the films would not be nearly as successful.

In a period film, context is everything; add the adventure and outrageousness of “Pirates of the Caribbean” and context is king.

Four years ago, director Gore Verbinski assembled a team that included costume designer Penny Rose, chief hair stylist Martin Samuel and makeup effects creator Ve Neill. They all knew Depp -- Neill had worked with him as far back as “Edward Scissorhands,” Samuel on “Blow” -- and they knew he had in mind a rock-star pirate, a look and mien based on Keith Richards.

“I knew he wanted things hanging around his face,” says Samuel. “Braids and dreads and beads. And I also know Johnny always comes in at the last minute so, you know, I had to get started without him.”

Beyond that, Rose and Verbinski had latched onto the work of illustrator Howard Pyle to provide inspiration for how the pirates should look -- a sort of raggedy rococo with a palette of rich fabrics and colors that Rose created from sources as disparate as the flea markets of Paris and silk shops of Turkey.

“We started with the premise that this was a film about 18th century pirates,” says Rose. “All of it real, none of this, ‘Oh, can we make something here Prada.’ ”

Decisions were also informed by the pirates’ behavior. Capt. Jack, and Barbossa as well, would be wearing clothes they had plundered, and their wardrobes might change as they picked up new items -- belts or bags or scarves -- from various booty.

“The trinkets he kept in his hair were talismans,” Samuel says. “Charms he wore.”

As a former jewelry maker, Neill was able to contribute trade beads and other baubles she had collected over the years. Samuel scoured jewelry markets and antique shops.

By the time Depp arrived, a few days before shooting began on “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” they all had a basic sense of where his character would go.

“I wanted to put black around his eyes, kind of like the Bedouins do, to kill the reflection,” says Neill. “And he was so avant-garde, the performance was so out there, it really went with the character.”

When it came to choosing Capt. Jack’s hat, Rose was prepared for a marathon -- she had a half-dozen hats on the floor and more as backup, but Depp took one look at the leather tricorn, picked it up and said, “This is my hat,” and that was that.

“So none of the other pirates could wear a leather tricorn,” she says.

Straining creativity

OH, right, the other pirates. And the redcoats, the wenches and innkeepers. The cannibals and all those fishy denizens of “The Flying Dutchman” that showed up in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” and the “It’s a Small World” cast of pirates that will flood “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.” Because the pirate movie they were all making quickly became a trilogy, shot on heaving seas and disappearing spits of land, interrupted by hurricanes and peopled by a cast of multi-ethnic, multi-fantastic thousands, all of whom needed makeup, wigs, costumes and a lot of ingenious solutions.

“The boots kept filling with water,” Rose says of the high leather boots many of the pirates wear. “So we cut the soles off and had the actors wear scuba diving boots with the leather over them like spats.”

“When we did ‘Edward Scissorhands,’ ” Neil says, “I had made Johnny these contact lenses that were actually sunglasses because he was surrounded by white in several scenes and didn’t want to squint. So everyone with dark eyes -- Johnny, Orlando -- wore them. Keira’s [Knightley] eyes are too light, unfortunately, because some of the shoots on that white sand were brutal.”

Then there were the scars, hundreds of scars, wounds, bite marks and various bits of rotten skin. Neill and her staff, which ranged from 15 to 45 makeup artists depending on the shoot, made the molded adhesives daily, kept them in drawers with a big scar chart on a wall so they could figure out quickly who needed to be inflicted with what.

Samuel, meanwhile, was busy helping everyone keep their hair on. Literally. The Capt. Jack wig was his first priority -- at one point there were eight of them, and Samuel personally kept the braids and dreads and beads sewed on. “We lived in fear, in fear that one of the beads near his face would be lost and we wouldn’t have a replacement,” he says. “But none of them were.”

Entire wigs were lost regularly as stuntmen and actors went into the water. The sea -- the aqua glory of the Caribbean and local “ocean” of the Palmdale soundstage -- became everyone’s enemy.

“It was very long and very, very wet,” says Rose, summing up the experience of shooting the second and third films at one time. As with many of those who have worked on the trilogy, Rose, Samuel and Neill tell their stories with the delighted weariness of survivors. All that water was murder on the wigs, makeup and costumes, all of which had to be continually repaired and remade. And everywhere they went -- St. Vincent, the Bahamas, Dominica -- they had to schlep their entire departments, or send them on ahead.

“You would go to these places where there was no support for a 500-person crew,” Samuel says. “We carried 300 wigs just for background. The cannibals,” he adds with a tiny shudder, “it was very difficult to pull the cannibals together.”

They also had to keep up with their director, who all agree has more energy and creative ambition than any three people.

“And then in the middle of all this, Gore would decide something like, ‘I’m tired of all these redcoats, let’s have some bluecoats,’ ” says Rose. “So we’d have to conjure an entire navy out of nothing.”

By the end of the shoot, she says, the wardrobe department had worked its way through warehouses of fabric and trim, lace and braid down to shreds and a few buttons. The only thing that saved them was “that the pirates didn’t wash much so nothing had to be clean. And nothing had to be pressed. We would have died,” she adds with a laugh, “if anything had had to be pressed.”