Pirates Of The Caribbean 5 Directors Explain How They Pulled Off Guillotine Stunt

Warning: This article contains minor spoilers for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.

It turns out that one of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales' silliest stunts was actually surprisingly practical. Directors Joachin Ronning and Espen Sandberg recently explained the mechanics behind the film's guillotine scene to CinemaBlend, and it turns out that it was easier to produce than it seems.

The scene finds Jack about to pay the ultimate price for his villainous ways, with the pirate strapped into a new French invention– the guillotine– staring down into a basket full of severed heads. Luckily, his crew is on the way to rescue him (with the help of Brenton Thwaites' Henry), and the hero makes it out alive, but not without first swinging around repeatedly, with the guillotine getting *this close* to cutting off his precious head each time.

Ronning said that they actually built the guillotine and strapped Johnny Depp into it, swinging the actor around for real– "all day long," according to Sandberg. "It's one of the luxuries to have making a movie on this scale, the resources that you can come up with something and then like six months later they spend millions of dollars and build the thing," Ronning said.

While the scene was ridiculous, it was emblematic of the fun tone of the Pirates franchise, something which Ronning and Sandberg said was important to keep going. "The franchise has a lot of [practical action sequences], and also talking to Johnny Depp about his inspirations for the character and going back to the Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin of it all," Ronning said. "We really worked hard to take the action sequences and those kinds of funny set pieces to the next level."

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is out now. If you've already swum out to theaters to see the film, check out some of the big Easter eggs you may have missed.