Chris Pine "hadn't thought about directing" until the COVID-19 pandemic.
The 43-year-old actor has made his name in movies like 'Wonder Woman' and the 'Star Trek' reboot film series but decided to direct, write and star in the new movie 'Poolman' - which follows an LA pool cleaner as he is approached by a femme fatale to help uncover corruption in a shady business deal - whilst the world was in lockdown.
He told MovieFone: "I've never thought about directing, and the stars aligned because of COVID, really. I had an idea for a pool man named Darren Barrenman that shot around in my brain for two years. Then COVID hit and I was bored and going through a lot of stuff personally. I decided to make it happen, and I tried to hire a writer, but he didn't really work out, so I decided to write it with my writing partner. Then as I was writing it, I was thinking about it visually, so then it just felt like what I had to do."
The 'Wish' star decided to follow the age-old advice of "writing what you know" so came up with a story that follows failed actors and directors in Hollywood because that was the world he grew up in and described the film as his "ode" to the ones who never made it big.
He said: "They say write about what you know, so I wrote about Los Angeles and about actors and failed actors and directors and failed directors. It was just the world that I grew up in in Los Angeles, which was kind of one foot on the “Boulevard of Dreams” and one foot in the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” So, I know this adjacent Hollywood that people know that's the deep Valley, that's actors trying to make a buck, who aren't getting hired. This is my ode less to Los Angeles in many ways, and my ode to them, the people that come to this city and want to be famous and to have their stories heard, and don't. I'm also a big preservation buff and a lover of Los Angeles architecture of old and not of what we're doing now. I'm a lover of what we call the red trolley car system back in the day, which if you've seen ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ you know how that story went. This is my ode to a time in Los Angeles that I love and to a version of Los Angeles that I'm familiar with."
