Captain Blood (1935 film) range of interest. However, after watching the filming, with a dynamic new star, Errol Flynn in a heroic role, alongside Olivia de Havilland, who had her debut in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", he changed his mind. After he accepted, however, he learned that he needed to compose more than an hour of symphonic music in only three weeks. The short time frame forced him to include about ten percent of the score using portions of symphonic poems by Franz Liszt. Not willing to take credit for the entire film score, he insisted that his credit be only for "musical arrangement".
Captain Blood (1935 film) after the actor turned down the offer, the studio focused on 19-year-old Olivia de Havilland, who had starred in three previous films that same year, including "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for director Max Reinhardt. Most of the film was shot on a sound stage in the summer of 1935. Some exterior scenes, such as the sword fight between Rathbone and Flynn, were shot on location at Laguna Beach, California standing in for a Caribbean shore (specifically, the fictional island of Virgen Magra, which translates from Spanish as "lean [as in meat] virgin"). The final battle sequence between Blood's pirate crew