Chris Pine loves ‘Poolman’ despite negative comments

Chris Pine in the movie “Poolman”

Vertical Entertainment/Group Courtesy Everett

This week, Chris Pine announced the development and release of his directorial debut Pullman It was “the best thing that ever happened to me” despite the film’s almost universally poor reviews.

“It forced me to double down on the joy,” Payne told host Josh Horowitz on Thursday’s episode of the show. Happy sad confused Podcast. “As an actor… it’s basically about playing, isn’t it? What we do is become children for hours a day and make believe,” he said, adding: “There’s a naughty quality to that that I never want to lose.”

Pullmanwhich debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, follows Pine as a down-on-his-luck Los Angeles pool technician who discovers a water theft in the 1974 spoof. Chinatown. The film was critically panned by critics Hollywood Reporter I write that the project “goes off the rails from the beginning and continues to hit bottom with painful momentum.”

The bad reviews became “a real moment for me to come back to Jesus, in terms of seeing how resilient I am,” Payne said this week.

He added that we weren’t “completely surprised” by the criticism, saying he didn’t intend to “make a kind of niche film,” but said it was difficult to reconcile creating a project “with a lot of joy behind it,” only to then be met with this body of not-so-joyful stuff.

“There was something about the cognitive dissonance,” he continued, referring to a favorite Latin phrase that translates to “strength grows from the wound.”

“I like this idea,” he said. “Yes, there is the hurt of the cut, and there is the hurt of the moment, but as scar tissue forms, and as the healing process occurs, you benefit from the growth and flexibility to stay in your being for what you are trying to achieve,” he says.

Payne says this lesson helped remind him that his satisfaction with the project was ultimately up to himself. “After the reviews in Toronto, I said, ‘I may have made a pile of crap,’” he recalls. “So I went back and watched it, and I felt like I loved this movie.”

Pullman It will now hit theaters on Friday.