Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1522417
ctor Chris Pine made his directo- rial debut in Poolman, an inde- pendent feature about native LA resident Darren Barrenman (played by Pine), who spends his days looking after the pool of the Tahitian Tiki apartment block and fighting City Hall to make his hometown a better place to live. A tip from a femme fatale (DeWanda Wise) alerts Darren to the truth behind a shady local business deal, leading him to enlist the help of his friends to take on a corrupt politician and a greedy land developer. His not-so-subtle investigation reveals a hidden truth about both his beloved city and himself. The apartment complex is home to a number of quirky characters, including Diane Esplinade (Annette Bening), who is both Darren's neighbor and therapist. Jack Denisoff (Danny DeVito) is Diane's partner, an out-of-work director who thinks he's been blacklisted from the industry, while Susan Kerkovich (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a former actress turned yoga instructor, is Darren's current girlfriend. Pine, who is known for his on-screen work in features and streamers (Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman 1984, Outlaw King, Hell or High Water, Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond), co-wrote Poolman with Ian Gotler. Here, she shares with Post his experience in front of and behind the camera, and what he learned as a first- time director. Chris, you decided to take on an independent film with a couple of past Oscar nominees, shooting film, appearing on-camera and working as a first-time director. What could you have done to make it harder on yourself? "Indeed…Maybe by having green-screen visuals or something? I mean, even the minimal amount of visual effects we had were so painstaking. I learned so much. I've been in this business for almost 25 years. I grew up in the business. I've never learned more about what it takes to make a film than I did in the two years that it took to put this film together." So now you're familiar with every aspect of the filmmaking process? "Yeah. I had to actually really talk to Peter Devlin, my sound mixer, to really understand what he was dealing with, and his issues, and to understand from a production-design standpoint, can we shoot practically? Can we shoot at the location? Can we build in the location? What is it going to cost to transport the build? It was and endless the amount of information I was getting all the time. It was really profoundly illuminating." I understand that producer Patty Jenkins was very supportive of the idea of doing this film. What advice did she share? "Well, all the directors said, obviously, 'Come prepared.' So one of the first things I did is, I went through my script and even before I had locations, I just shot listed the whole thing…Really, what I leaned on her for, and what became more difficult is, the more people you have in a scene that you have to cover, the more difficult it is. My most difficult day turned out to be one of my quickest days, just by virtue of our schedule. It was shooting the city council. To really map out that day — how you're going to map out coverage — is like math! You have to make your board with all your little triangles and how you're going to move. I also had these flow charts of shooting that only made sense to me. It was quite wild, but that's shooting multi- ple people on a big day." You chose to shoot on film. What was the dailies and development timeline you were working under? "Shooting film was a make-or-break for me. I wasn't going to shoot digital and I lost funding because of that…I prefer film. I prefer the experience of being on-set with film…FotoKem was fantastic. We were shooting in LA, so Burbank's right there, so we didn't have much turnaround time. We had a pretty great dailies sys- tem. I stopped watching dailies after the fourth day. My DP (Matthew Jensen) was obviously watching dailies all the time. Matt and I have known each other for like seven years. He knew what I wanted. We talked endlessly before we started. The person I leaned on most [was the] script supervisor, who famously have the hard- est job because they have to tell actors, when they're in major flow state, to re- member to pick up the fork in a scene. It's really annoying, but Julia Schachter, who's my script supervisor, just did Everything Everywhere All at Once, so she was an absolute fucking ninja. I would end up leaning on her for coverage of a scene… And in terms of performance, I basically just trusted myself." There are a couple of scenes with Jack, Diane and Darren that are very dialogue intensive. Did you shoot that multi-cam, or did that come together in the edit? "We didn't have time and I didn't have enough money to shoot multiple cam- eras...I mostly had one camera. It was all scripted, and it was scripted to sound like a chaotic version of if (David) Lynch had a baby with David O'Russell. Very difficult! I think Peter Devlin was one of my first hires. He's an Oscar-winning sound mixer that worked on Star Trek — the first one. I've known him for almost 20 years. He came on-board for this little film. He's one of the best at his job in the entire world, so I was totally covered on that front." Stacey Schroeder was your editor. "Schroeder is like one of the absolute loves of my life. She is so calm and facile, and so quick with what she can do. The scene in particular — we call it the 'first therapy scene,' when it's the only therapy scene now. A lot of that is editing. Some of that's ADR to punch up certain the- matic moments. The first cut of that was really long and didn't have the pop, so we went back in and really chopped it up to maintain a kinetic feel that I wanted." You were editing at Warner Bros. on Avid systems. How often were you able to check in on editorial, if at all? "I think we had Stacey the whole time. I never got a chance to check in with her other than, like, you know, carrier pigeon. It was like, 'How's the scene looking? [Did] we miss anything? She would say, 'It'd be great to get an insert.' So our last day we had the Olympic triathlon of insert shooting, which Patty ended up shooting. (She was) super, super, super helpful. Between Julia Schachter and Stacey Schroeder, I felt completely taken care of." POOLMAN BY MARC LOFTUS FIRST-TIME DIRECTOR CHRIS PINE WORKS BOTH SIDES OF THE CAMERA A FILMMAKING www.postmagazine.com 12 POST MAY/JUNE 2024