Johnny Depp Q&A: I Wish I Spaced 'Pirates of the Caribbean' Movies .

Johnny Depp opens up to the new Hollywood Reporter magazine on his hands-on role behind the scenes of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (On Stranger Tides hits theaters May 20) and why he admires the principles of the plunderers.

It's been four days since the third Pirates. What happened?

Had I had a little more control at the wheel early on, I would have separated them out more.

One of the reasons On Stranger Tides took this number of meter was to truly focusing on what we could do to establish it interesting and new and smart and not just rehash the same old jokes.

Was it proper to take the former two back-to-back?

The back and 3rd parts were tacked on, in a way. It wasn't initially written as a trilogy, so the writers had to obtain the math to unite all three - and in doing that, there were subplots and sub-subplots, and it got confusing and a bit complicated. I said, "Look, let's get it real elementary and to the point."

Is that why you worked so nearly with the writers? And when did you all start?

I was doing Public Enemies at the sentence we had our initial talk. And so we would sit low and go: "What do you mean of this? What do you conceive of that?" And I'd make my two cents in. I can't help myself! Just in price of the character, there are bits and bobs that occur as you are passing through the story meetings, or as recent as when the camera's about to roll.

Did you continue researching real-life pirates?

I'm always doing research. It's a lifelong fascination. In a weird way, pirates had an ethic that was infinitely more consonant than [that of] the administration and the British military. For example, when you became a pirate, even if you were just press-ganged and chucked on ship, there were equal shares; you got a certain number of rations of rum each day. In the British military, they could be awful: "You'll do this, and you won't like it, and it'll be tough."

Speaking of tough, what was the toughest part of the shoot?

I had a short bit of a physical ailment. I must get done something to my support during a stunt and ended up with this bad sciatic situation. It was this horrible, grinding electricity going through me. I kept shooting; there was no choice. I'd just limp on set. It was monstrous, man - so ugly that I actually started to wish it! It was bad, and I had it a full three weeks to a month. But I got used to it and variety of missed it when it was gone.

Would that give you mean twice about a fifth Pirates? A book is in the works.

I've seen nothing yet. It boils down to story, script and filmmaker. But it's not something where I would say, "Let's take it next month to get it out by Christmas 2012." We should hold off for a bit. They should be special, just like they're special to me.