Gregor “Gore” Verbinski (created March 16, 1964) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and musician. He’s famous for directing the very first three pictures of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie saga, “The Ring”, and “Rango”. His latest movie, “The Lone Ranger”, premiered in 2013. Verbinski won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in the year 2012 for his animated action comedy western “Rango”. Nevertheless, his version of the 1930s radio hero, The Lone Ranger for Disney, wasn’t, the job having been stuck in development hell for quite some time, experienced rewrites and budget cuts, and got controversy for the cast of Johnny Depp as the Native American Tonto. He’s been declared to produce and direct a remake of the movie Clue, on the basis of the board game. His future job is going to be an adaption of William Monahan’s novel Light House: A Trifle, which can be a story about an artist running from the Mafia who conceals in a lighthouse, in which kooky characters live. He’ll also direct Butterfly, a psychological thriller of a guy attempting to drive his wife mad.
I think "The Weather Man" is one of my favorite experiences just because when you work on a film that costs a lot less money you get to say, 'Hey, this movie isn't for you, and it's not for you either. And it's okay that you don't like it.' Because you don't spend $100 million and you don't need everybody to like your movie. And I think that's incredibly liberating. People talk about four quadrant movies all the time but those used to be accidents, like, 'Wow 12-year-olds are going and 26-year-olds are going!' Now it's an algorithm.
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Naomi's great. She's completely dedicated to her performance and not to her image. That process allows her to become Rachel in this movie and go to some darker areas that I think a lot of actors wouldn't feel comfortable doing. -- on Naomi Watts and her performance in "The Ring"
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I like horror movies and in fact I like them even more now after making one. I just think they're much more liberating because you don't really have to apply a very strict logic. You can experiment a lot more with sound and image. -- on making a horror film
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[on The Ring (2002)] We set the film in Seattle and we focused on creating this dark, sombre mood, a kind of coldness. And I felt I wanted to go with this kind of dream logic and focus on just a few main characters. So, in a way, it's quite clinical.
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I think that horror movies work best when they deal with some kind of contemporary issue. The thing I responded to with this movie was [the] actual moral ambiguity of the film, which is this kind of transferable nature of hatred. That you can hurt me and then I can find it justifiable to hurt somebody else, that I can transfer that. And that seems to be a very contemporary issue. And the idea that you can play a tape and die and be like, "I didn't do anything, why is it me? And there's a kind of powerless nature to that that I think is contemporary terror. And I think that that is something that's universal. -- on why the horror genre remains popular
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That opening is right out of the original movie, and it's kind of a problem and a solution, I think. When I first watched the movie, I thought, oh, boy. This movie really takes a tonal shift from straight-up teenage horror movie to kind of a more serious movie about a journalist. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that's what's wonderful about the perspective in the original. It kind of sets up the promise and almost comments on the genre right off the bat, and it gets rid of all the exposition in that genre, and then we're able to move on. So I grew from being nervous about it to actually trying celebrating it and enjoy it. -- on the opening scene of "The Ring"
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We didn't want to play to the sort of noir aspects of the genre. The language of horror is so steeped in clichés because it's just been reinvented so many times it's hard to set a shot and not feel like it's a shot that's in someone else's movie when you're making a horror film. So you kind of have to celebrate that but at the same time try to reinvent it where you can. [Cinematographer Bojan Bazelli] and I discussed the removal of shadows to try to keep the characters feeling like they're floating a little bit, in space. I find films like The Tenant, where there's a kind of nauseousness you get in the process of the movie, and a lot of that comes from the composition. In this case, we really emphasized lighting and the oppressive nature of the softer light, overcast skies and rain. It's not a movie that evolves into the light, it's a movie that ends where it begins. -- on trying to be original without ignoring genre conventions with "The Ring"
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Watching these images, how do they affect you? That was important to me. The tape is something that is promised throughout the movie, so I felt it was important that there was enough there that resonated. And yet, in our movie, they have to also serve as clues. So we had the burden of just creating something that felt abstract but then also had to work in a concrete fashion and also had to be justifiable from the story about the child. The tape had to sort of function on three levels. It had to be disturbing on its own, and it had to provide a series of clues, and then it had to also have some resonance to the author ... in the movie. I just started with images that I found horrific, and then we built the tape long and kept reducing and reducing and tried to avoid the temptation to make it narrative. It's amazing how when images fall together how quickly they start to tell a story even when you're trying not to. -- on the videotape in "The Ring"
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I think there's a lot of trying to keep what did work well, and I think as a director there's two answers to that question. One is, as a director, I wish I could make a movie once and then look at it and make it again. It's really nice to have Hideo Nakata's template. We talked about the movie. When I saw it, there were particular things I really enjoyed about it and things that I wanted to change. I think every director wants to change a movie after they've finished it. In terms of the popularity of the movie, I think it's inevitable to get persecuted for remaking a film that people love. I think there's pride of ownership. I felt that Wages of Fear is a great movie and I despised the remake, so I know what that's like. I kind of expect that, but we still had a great time making the movie, and it's a great story. -- on the challenges of making "The Ring"
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There were discussions very early on, because I think there's always a temptation for marquee value when you're making a movie, and movies cost money. But the star of this movie is the concept of this movie. ... I think Naomi is a great choice, because there isn't a lot of audience expectation for the plot. In movies in general, but horror movies in particular, you suffer if you're able to watch them from a more comfortable place. I think there's comfort in somebody you recognize and somebody you can distill and categorize into a character. And I think that that process of not immediately liking a character in a film, but slowly coming to terms with that character throughout the story, creates a proximity for the audience. If you achieve that, then you're able to access a different part of the brain. So horror movies are stories and psychological experiments at the same time. -- on casting Naomi Watts in "The Ring"
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They just sent me the tape - a really bad-quality tape, which was horrifying. I don't know if you've seen the original movie, but I loved it. And that tape came with the offer. -- on how "The Ring" came to him
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I just tried to keep what's great in the original movie and improve it where I could. -- on remaking "Ringu" with "The Ring"
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I think when you remake a movie you try not to mess it up. I think the original movie worked really well in certain places and there's part of it that's different. We're not dealing with the ESP aspect to the original movie or the volcano. Choices were made in this case to emphasize the more viral aspects of the tape. I think it's very important for me to try not to take away from what worked well in the original movie. ... There's something wonderful about an outside perspective on the horror genre, which has a real history in American cinema. And I think there was a wonderful minimalism to the original movie that I felt was very important to keep. -- on remaking "Ringu" with "The Ring"
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Fact
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His paternal grandparents, Pauline Jachimowicz and Benjamin Verbinski, were Polish immigrants.
In 2007, Forbes Magazine estimated his earnings for the year to be $37 million.
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His Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) holds many box office distinctions, such as: fastest film to reach $100M (in just two days), most tickets sold in a single day ($55.8M worth), and largest sum earned in seven days ($196M total and counting). The blockbuster sequel also reached $200M in eight days, tying the industry record.
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Was a 1987 graduate of the prestigious UCLA film school
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Ranked #79 on Premiere's 2004 annual Power 100 List. It is his first appearance on the list.
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Was brought in to take over the last 18 days of shooting on The Time Machine (2002), as director Simon Wells was suffering from "extreme exhaustion". Wells returned for post-production.
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Was guitarist in punk band, Little Kings.
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Was guitarist of punk band, The Daredevils, with Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion and Josh Freese of The Vandals.
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Creator of the Budweiser frogs.
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Winner of 4 Clio Awards and one Cannes advertising Silver Lion.
$110 Million
