Johnny Depp baffled by Pirates of the Caribbean plot

"It was like, 'What?'" That's Johnny Depp on the plotline of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, soon to launch the fourth in what's currently planned to be a mere six-film collection. (But don't be too surprised if this ship o' gold remains afloat long after we mortals have shuffled off to Davy Jones' locker, or somesuch.) In an interview with EW, Depp owned that he (like you) found the labyrinthine (yet totally meaningless!) plotting of the first three Pirates films bewildering:

"They had to invent a trilogy out of nowhere... It was plot driven and complicated. I remember talking to [director Gore Verbinski] at certain points during production of 2 or 3, and saying: 'I don’t really know what this means.' He said, 'Neither do I, but let's just shoot it.' This guy is this guy's dad, and this guy was in love with this broad. It was like, 'What?'"

Luckily for our mildly subversive yet still extremely profitable hero, the Pirates movies actually require him to be kind of amiably befuddled. Apparently, the fourth film drops almost all plot continuity with the earlier clusterfucks stories, which sounds like a good call. Depp explains, "I felt if we were going to do a 4, that more than anything we owed the audience a fresh start, without all the complicated mathematics of 1 colliding with 2 and 2 colliding with 3... I felt like it was important to eliminate as many complications as possible." (Even that explanation's kind of confusing, actually.) The interview also reveals that Depp didn't actually see the second or third movies, for which we don't exactly blame him. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides comes out May 20.