Bad reviews? Bah, says Chris Pine, who is ignoring the brickbats thrown at his directorial debut, Poolman.
“It’s forced me to double down on joy,” Pine told host Josh Horowitz on Thursday’s Happy Sad Confused podcast. “As an actor… fundamentally it’s about play, right? What we do is essentially become children for hours a day and make believe.” He added, “There’s an impish quality to it that I don’t ever want to lose.”
Poolman shows Pine as a down-on-his luck pool technician in Los Angeles who discovers a water heist. It was, to be kind, not well-received.
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Pine said the bad reviews became “a real come to Jesus moment for me, in terms of seeing how resilient I am.”
Moreover, he wasn’t particularly surprised by them. He did allow that it was hard to reconcile having made a project “with so much joy behind it, to then be met with this fuselage of not-so-joyous stuff.”
“The cognitive dissonance there was quite something,” he said.
“Yes, there’s the hurt of the cut, there’s the hurt of the moment, but as the scar tissue forms, as the healing process happens, you do benefit from the growth and resilience in sitting in your being of what you’re trying to say.”
Pine says he still believes, no matter what others say. “After the reviews in Toronto, I was like, maybe I did just make a pile of shit,” he recalled. “So I went back and watched it, and I was like, I fucking love this film.”
Poolman is in theaters on Friday
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