Keira Knightley Is Sworn To Piracy

Knightley Takes Leading Role In 'Pirates Of The Caribbean'

(CBS)  The "swashbuckler" films, which hit a peak of popularity in the 1940s, are back today, with the release of a new Disney film entitled "Pirates Of The Caribbean, The Curse Of The Black Pearl."

In the high-seas adventure film, Johnny Depp plays a charming pirate and Keira Knightley plays the intrepid daughter of a local governor.

Knightley tells The Early Show co-anchor Hannah Storm being part of this huge Hollywood extravaganza, was a good experience. She says, “I can't complain. I got to get chased around by Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush.”

As Elizabeth Swann, Knightley gets kidnapped by pirates under a curse. Pirate Captain Barbossa, played by Rush, thinks that she is the missing piece to an unsolved mystery.

A large cache of gold was stolen from the Aztec Indians, and the Aztec deities cast a spell on the treasure. Now, the pirates who stole the gold are ghosts, who appear as skeletons in the moonlight and are doomed to remain as such until the gold is returned.

Elizabeth has a piece of this gold, which the living pirates want. Her childhood friend, Will Turner, played by Orlando Bloom, is trying to rescue her. While, Johnny Depp is the smooth-talking pirate, Captain Jack Sparrow, who gets his ship stolen. He and Orlando Bloom's character team up to try to save the beautiful damsel in distress and recover Depp's battleship.

The film is a blend of old-fashioned action sequences and modern special effects. In one scene, Captain Barbossa slowly transforms into a skeleton before Elizabeth’s eyes. But of course, Knightley says, when shooting the scene, she had no co-star; it was just her acting the whole scene out, with computer-generated graphics added later.

She says, “You do it once with the actor or the stunt man, and then they take the actor and stunt man away and you do it on your own. So you just pretend someone is standing in front of you. So whatever you see on the screen means that nobody was there, because they then had to put the computer generated thing in. That was just me on my own in the studio, feeling a bit stupid actually.”

But now that she has seen the film she says, “It is cool. None of us knew what the skeletons were going to look like. It is really incredible to see the finished product.”

And she says, “You can't really get much bigger than a Jerry Bruckheimer film.” She was 17 when the movie was filmed.

Earlier, she was in “Bend It Like Beckham,” a film that has had international appeal. Knightley says, “Everyone can identify with it. It's about following your dreams. There's nothing not to like in it.”

Keira Knightley's Filmography:

• 2004 - "King Arthur" - Guinevere
  
  
• 2003 - "Love Actually" - Juliet
  
  
• 2003 - "Pirates of the Caribbean" - Narrator
  
  
• 2003 - "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" - Elizabeth Swann
  
  
• 2002 - "Doctor Zhivago" -Lara Antipova - TV Series
  
  
• 2002 - "Pure" - Louise
  
  
• 2002 -"Thunderpants" - Music School Student
  
  
• 2002- "Bend It Like Beckham" -Juliette Paxton
  
  
• 2001 - "Deflation" - Jogger
  
  
• 2001 - "The Hole" -Frankie
  
  
• 2001 -"Princess of Thieves" - Gwyn -TV
  
  
• 1999 - "Oliver Twist" - Rose Fleming - TV
  
  
• 1999 - "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" - Sabé
  
  
• 1998 - "Coming Home" -Young Judith -TV
  
  
• 1996 - "Treasure Seekers" - The Princess -TV
  
  
• 1995 - "Innocent Lies" - Young Celia
  
  
• 1994 - "A Village Affair" - Natasha Jordan