LOS ANGELES — Pirate fun? Not for Gore Verbinski, the director of all three Pirates Of The Caribbean movies.

“Fatigue!” Verbinski says of his state of mind now, having shot the outdoor action scenes for both sequels at the same time in the Caribbean last year. “It is just physical exhaustion. When you shoot 200 days, there is a point where you are no longer the architect, you are the contractor.”

Dead Man’s Chest, which opens today, was then moved into the studio and finally into post-production, a process laden with special effects and intense work for Verbinski. In August, he is back at it for nine weeks of studio time on the still un-named Pirates 3, due for release next May.

Verbinski, whose early promise was demonstrated in the wacko comedy Mouse Hunt, is not the first to shoot two major sequels at the same time. Robert Zemeckis did it on Back To The Future. Peter Jackson accomplished an even more complicated task by shooting parts of all three of The Lord Of The Rings movies at the same time.

“I didn’t call Bob,” Verbinski says of the possibility of turning to Zemeckis. “But I did talk to Peter Jackson. He said, ‘Take your hiatuses whenever you can.’ We talked about physical exhaustion, about tactile (matters), emotional (challenges), crew morale, things that you don’t think about when you are conceptualizing something.

“You have to have a fantastic crew. They have to be motivated, day in and day out. They have to back up the next person. You just get run down. People get married, people pass away, people get divorced, people have children.”

The death was that of makeup artist Richard Snow. Other problems plagued the production, too, such as the increased level of hurricanes in the Caribbean in 2005.

“Everything was triage,” Verbinski says. “But it seems oddly normal: You’re shooting a movie in the Caribbean on a boat on rough water.”

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