You liked it before, so Disney is back with the first of two pricey sequels to its surprise hit Pirates of the Caribbean. Swanning around Hollywood, Donald Clarke rubs shoulders with a number of big names from the film. Which is all very exciting. Still, the question on the assembled hacks' lips is 'Where's the Deppster?'

It's like being in an inappropriately glamorous adaptation of Samuel Beckett's most famous play. The world's cinema writers have gathered together in groups to listen to the cast and crew of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest tell us why that sequel, rather than, say, Superman Returns or Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties, will provide the best comfort food for those in mourning for the World Cup.

We are arranged in rows in a suite at LA's Beverly Wilshire Hotel - so posh Warren Beatty lived here for several years - anxiously watching the door to see who will be joining us next.

Here's Gore Verbinski, the film's director, looking and sounding as tired as a man might after devoting the last year to directing not one, but two, follow-ups to the 2003 romp, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. "The disadvantages to doing two films are the physical exhaustion and fatigue," he mumbles. "You try to make a movie where you see light at the end of the tunnel. When you are shooting two there is just so much further to go." The Chinese lady behind me asks him about working with the great actor Chow Yun-Fat on Pirates 3.

Later we get to meet Naomie Harris, who plays a cackling witch in the picture. Jerry Bruckheimer, Pirates' famously tidy-bearded producer, has turned up to have a word. Bill Nighy and Tom Hollander, who, being English, play the bad guys, are also knocking about. Everybody is very nice. Everybody is very polite. But each time the doors open there is a slight exhalation of disappointment. Nice to see you, but we are really Waiting for Johnny.

Johnny Depp's outrageously fruity (and Oscar nominated) turn as Captain Jack Sparrow, a pirate with a thirst for booze and a propensity towards dental caries, helped the first Pirates become a surprise hit three years ago. Based on one of the corniest rides at Disney World, the flick bravely attempted to reinvigorate a genre that had been out of favour for some half a century. To everyone's surprise, the public flocked to Verbinski's comic swashbuckler.

"Nobody believed in the first film," the director agrees. "We were off the radar. This time the stockholders are counting on us. Somebody showed me a quarterly report for Disney and Jack Sparrow was on the cover."

Bruckheimer, previously the producer of Top Gun and Pearl Harbor, invited Verbinski to throw everything at the twin sequels. Dead Man's Chest, whose shoot hopped across a series of islands in the Caribbean, reveals that, some years before the events depicted in the previous film, Jack Sparrow made an ill-advised Faustian pact with a squid-faced version of the legendary Davy Jones. In his attempts to retrieve his soul, Jack causes Orlando Bloom's callow hero to be enslaved by the bipedal cephalopod and permits himself to be captured by a tribe of deranged cannibals.

Meanwhile, as plucky damsels will in such things, Keira Knightly dresses up as a lad to go to sea. Elsewhere, Stellan Skarsgård growls as Bloom's undead father and Tom Hollander smirks as the embodiment of British imperialism. The film lasts two and a half hours.

The door to the suite opens and Johnny Depp doesn't emerge. It's Jerry Bruckheimer. Did anybody at Disney question the picture's length?

"Yeah, sure, every movie is too long," the producer replies in his characteristic deadened monotone. "If it's a two-hour movie it's too long. If it's a 90-minute movie, it's too long. I have never been to a movie that's too short. But we have an awful lot of plot to get across. The audiences do get a bit restless, but once Davy Jones hits the screen people are riveted. And it is worth the price of admission to see Bill Nighy play that part."

The Chinese woman asks what it was like working with Chow Yun-Fat. A Spanish lady asks what it was like working with Johnny Depp.

Not since the days of David O Selznick has a producer managed to stamp a personal hallmark on his oeuvre the way Bruckheimer has upon his own brash entertainments. The Rock, Con Air and Days of Thunder are often identified as Bruckheimer flicks first and only secondly as the work of their directors. This leads us to believe that he exerts more control than mortal producers. Is this so, I wonder.

"I think it depends on the project and the people you are working with," he says with predictable tact. "Everyone contributes. The film is like a piece of clay and we all have our hands in it."

Yeah. But surely he, erm, grabs the clay more forcefully than other producers. "We don't tell people what to do. That is not how we work."

No help there. What about the notion of making two sequels back-to-back? Bruckheimer and Verbinski have already explained the advantages of this strategy: you don't have to get the cast back together again; you don't have to rebuild sets. But there must be risks too. Since The Lord of the Rings began this strategy of shooting a series of huge films in one go, pundits have been waiting for some producer to take a bath. What if, heaven forbid, Dead Man's Chest underperforms?

"Every time you risk failure. I don't care if it's a $5 million movie or a $150 million movie. Basically it's to do with the talent involved. We are going to have failures, but we just hope it's not this one."

Does Bruckheimer have some figure in his head, which, if achieved on the opening weekend, will suggest they have got away with it? "We opened to 40-something million on the last one. If we can better that I'd be thrilled. You just don't know."

The first Pirates of the Caribbean film was, in some respects, an uncharacteristic Disney release. The Mouse House rarely allows such degrees of horror and violence into its own pictures and tends to launch such vessels under the banner of its Touchstone brand.

"You take chances," Bruckheimer says. "They asked us to make a pirates film and they wanted it to be G or PG. We just made the best movie we could and, when Disney saw it, they said it was great and they said: this will be the first Disney PG-13 film. And it was."

The doors open again and a good-looking man comes in. Hooray! Sadly, it is Orlando Bloom rather than Johnny Depp.

"What was it like working with Johnny Depp?" somebody asks.

"Weird. He's a strange man. Peculiar," Bloom laughs. "No. He is a fantastic guy and great actor. He is really brave with his choices. There were a lot of questions about the role he was turning in and he stuck to his guns and I really admire that."

Bloom has a divisive effect on audiences. Few other actors have such an enthusiastic fan-base of teenage girls. Most everybody else, however, finds him somewhat bland. Somebody in the press pack dares to suggest that his last two films - Ridley Scott's overblown Kingdom of Heaven and Cameron Crowe's truly frightful Elizabethtown - might have been something of a disappointment. The questioner is not a teenage girl. "I loved both those films," Bloom says, without visibly bristling. "Look. To work with those two great directors in the space of a year was just amazing. I wouldn't change anything."

Orlando comes across as a lovely fellow. So much so that everybody forgives him for not being Johnny Depp.

Naomie Harris, the English star of 28 Days Later and A Cock and Bull Story, is equally pleasant and, when asked, quite happy to tell us what it was like working with the man who plays Jack Sparrow: "He's such a lovely guy. He's such a team player. He's so supportive and he's really nice to look at. He is a fantastic actor as well. It encourages you as a performer to push yourself."

Even given the proselytising of John the Baptist, Jesus Christ did not receive a build-up like Mr Depp is getting today. As lunch looms, we have entertained six members of the cast and crew and every one has been asked to say something nice about the actor. And, to be fair, though Depp is not technically the lead, his performance does drive the Pirates films. Adopting a slurred drawl he picked up from Keith Richards (who will take a cameo in the third film) Johnny has produced a subversive rogue for the ages. His dodging and diving adds a cynical flavour you rarely get from Disney's family films.

The door opens. There's nobody else on our list, so this must be him. It's not.

It transpires that Depp, a notoriously cavalier timekeeper, is not actually in the building. The body of journalists begins muttering in many tongues. Agreeable as everybody has been, a Pirates junket without Jack Sparrow would be like Christmas telly without The Great Escape. A rumour begins circulating that Johnny, who is married to the French singer Vanessa Paradis, must be watching the World Cup game between France and Spain. What gives?

Then suddenly - sometime before the French secure their victory - it is announced that Depp is ascending the stairs. He shuffles into the room, nodding to the assembled masses.

"Were you watching the game?" somebody asks him.

"No. But I heard it's still one-one," he says. "I was just talking to a journalist whose half-Spanish and half-French and he is going to get drunk either way." It would be satisfying to relate that, after all the rave notices, Johnny Depp turned out to be a dreadful oik. But he is, sad to relate, charming, patient and articulate. His skin tanned the colour of Nutella, his arms festooned with tattoos, he looks at least 10 years younger than the 43 it says on his passport.

So what about Orlando's earlier gag about him being decidedly strange? "Oh, I think we're all weirdos," he drawls. "Every single one of us in this room has our idiosyncrasies, our ticks that border on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I wouldn't say that I was necessarily the most peculiar. I may wear my weirdo badge a little more often than normal, but, hey, I think Orlando is pretty strange as well."

That self-declared strangeness comes through in most of Depp's performances. Though Jack Sparrow may be as odd as he gets, he brought eccentricity to JM Barrie in Finding Neverland and the titular antihero of Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Does he never yearn to play it straight?

"I have toyed with the idea of playing it straight," he ponders. "But, like I say, I really believe we are all out of our minds at some level. We try to deny that. Nobody wants to be seen as mad or weird, so we put on the suit and tie. But it will catch up with you. I played around with playing parts straight like, I guess, Donnie Brasco. But there are a lot of people who do that job really well. They have that covered. Maybe, I will just try and give them something different."

And on he goes. Everybody is content now. Depp answers themed questions about pirates and rum. He muses on his unlikely Oscar nomination. And then, as we knew he would have to, he explains what it was like working with Chow Yun-Fat.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest opens next Thursday