Keith Richards

Johnny Depp spent months observing how Keith Richards shuffled through hotel rooms before creating Jack Sparrow. He wasn't looking for a guitar lesson, but for a physical rhythm, that miraculous balance between alcohol-soaked wreckage and British street elegance. When in 2007 Disney signed the guitarist for an astronomical fee to play the captain's father in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, executives feared he might not even be able to stand up in front of the cameras.

Richards arrived on set dressed as an 18th-century pirate, sipping from a metal flask and delivering his lines with the ease of someone who has spent half his life testifying before British judges. Director Gore Verbinski had to mark the lines on the ship's wood with chalk so he wouldn't drift out of focus during the long takes.

And the move paid off perfectly.

Because cinema had been chasing him for decades, long before Hollywood decided to package him for family audiences. In 1968, Jean-Luc Godard went to London's Olympic Studios to shoot Sympathy for the Devil, capturing Richards' agonizing process as he searched for the exact rhythm of a track that shifted from acoustic ballad to Afro-Cuban beat. Godard was filming political manifestos, but what holds the film together is the craftsmanship and stubbornness of a musician repeating a chord cycle until exhaustion.

The censored documentary and outside perspectives

Four years later, the band hired Swiss photographer Robert Frank to document the American concerts of 1972. The result was Cocksucker Blues, a testimony so raw, explicit and decadent that the band members themselves went to court to ban its public screening. The court ruling stipulated that the film could only be shown in art-house theaters four times a year, with the director physically present in the projection booth.

In that film, Richards is seen tossing television sets off the balcony of a Los Angeles hotel without changing his expression. But beyond the excess and the dark legend of drugs, the close-ups in Frank reveal a man deeply absorbed in the wood of his instrument, isolated from the noise around him generated by his entourage.

The chaos around him never disrupted his rhythm.

Martin Scorsese and the Setlist Nightmare

Filming Richards live is a technical trap for any obsessive director. In 2006, Martin Scorsese installed sixteen 35-millimeter cameras at the Beacon Theatre in New York to record two concerts that would become the footage for Shine a Light, released in 2008. The filmmaker drew up hundreds of pages of precise instructions for lighting every guitar solo.

Richards upended the production plan in the first ten minutes of the concert by switching instruments on the fly and changing the setlist without warning the camera operators. Scorsese, drenched in sweat behind the video monitors, had to order the crew to abandon the script and chase the musician's movements handheld. The film worked precisely because of that physical tension between the director's discipline and the guitarist's anarchy.

In 2015, documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville explored a different angle in Keith Richards: Under the Influence. Neville sat him down in front of old rural blues records released by Chess Records and recorded his reflections on Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry, sidestepping the usual questions about police arrests. So the definitive portrait that emerges on screen is not that of a miraculous drug user, but of an archivist with arthritis-ravaged joints who still knows how to make the guitar neck shine.

Five strings and a Fender amplifier

All of that attitude in front of the camera stems from a physical decision he made in 1969 while staying at the Nellcôte mansion in the south of France. He removed the sixth string from his electric guitar, a Fender Telecaster nicknamed Micawber, and tuned the rest of the strings to open G. That change eliminated the muddy bass that clouded the sound mixes and freed his left hand to build complex chords using just two fingers.

In 2023, he recorded the tracks for the album Hackney Diamonds at Henson Studios in Los Angeles, alongside producer Andrew Watt. During those sessions, Richards used a 1957 Fender Twin Tweed amplifier with two 6L6 tubes plugged directly into a Neve analog console, forgoing digital pedals entirely and keeping a fixed distance of five centimeters between the Shure microphone and the speaker cloth.