Veteran animator Lord chooses a pirate’s life
Like so many Hollywood types, director Peter Lord has an entourage, only being British and the co-founder of Aardman Animations, his isn’t the usual group of assistants and hangers-on. Accompanying Lord as he travels around promoting his new feature “The Pirates! Band of Misfits,” are three of the film’s stars: Charles Darwin’s monkey manservant, the pirate band’s feathered mascot Polly, and the Pirate Captain himself, one of about 30 Pirate Captain figures made for the labor intensive, stopaction adventure comedy.
“There’s so much to him,” Lord says of his lead character during a whistle-stop in San Francisco.” I sympathize with him very much. You can’t help but want to look after him. I found him slightly vulnerable, despite the bluster and the vanity. He’s vain, he’s quite selfish, he’s got lots of bad habits, but there’s no malice in him at all.”
A loose adaptation of Gideon Defoe’s 2004 novel, “The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists,” the movie follows the Pirate Captain (voiced by Hugh Grant) and his loyal crew as he focuses all of his energy on winning the Pirate of the Year award, a prize that ever eludes him. A chance meeting with a sketchy Charles Darwin (David Tennant), himself obsessed with winning the Royal Society’s Scientist of the Year contest, leads them all to London, lair of the lethal, buccaneer-hating Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton).
This is Lord’s first directing gig since 2000’s “Chicken Run.” He has kept himself busy since the turn of the century as a producer, but he would rather direct. It was a matter of waiting for the right opportunity to present itself before he could step back behind the camera again. When he read Defoe’s book, it appealed to the pirateloving kid in him.
“I was a big fan of the classic Disney ‘Treasure Island’ film from way back,” says the 58-yearold Bristol, England native. “I loved ‘Treasure Island,’ the book. I liked swashbuckling, generally, as far as you can when you’re 9 years old. I liked swashbuckling, but I never had a cutlass. Luckily, I’ve fixed that.