Chris Pine

Rick Rubin

Tetragrammaton.

Chris Pine

Lot was taught about getting somewhere, not a lot about why or what you should do when you get there, or the meaning and import of that, but not a whole lot about sitting in it, whatever it is. After growing up with ambition, how is success different than you imagined it? It's a great question, and I've been asked to give the commencement speech of my alma mater for years, and I've always turned it down because I'm kind of terrified, firstly knowing the kind of amount of time that I'd want to spend thinking and doing it right and all of that. But also, there's so much good advice and there's so much bad advice, but really, at the end of the day, what you're setting with are your choices, and you're gonna have to live by them. And it's your feeling in the moment of what that choice feels like in your soul.

I've contemplated the title of it. I know the title of it, which is beware ambition, because ambition is a wonderful thing. But I think when you're a child, you take so much on of what your parents and society and cultures told you, the shoulds, not a lot is invested into. Well, what is it making you feel like? Is it making you feel like doing this thing?

So I think to your question specifically, certainly now I'm 40, turning 44 this year, and in that midlife space, really investigating the source of my ambition, the fuel that is fueling that fire. Is it a healthy fuel? Is it a fuel that serves me? And that has been quite profound, I think. Tell me about your parents a little bit.

My parents have been together for 50, almost 60 years. Been married for 56, maybe. My mother grew up here in Beverly Hills. Her mother was a film actress in the thirties and forties, and my grandfather was a lawyer. She was from Corpus Christi, Texas, a full redhead beauty.

And my grandfather was a ukrainian son of jewish tailors. So she grew up in the fifties in Beverly Hills, which is a very particular time in the golden age of Hollywood, I guess, growing up around all these sons and daughters of and whatnot. My father grew up in Scarsdale, super wasp. His full name was Granville Whitelaw Pine, and he went to small liberal arts college in Ohio. And his parents wanted him to become a doctor, and that didn't work out, and he decided to come out to LA and become an actor.

Rick Rubin

Did he ever talk to you about that decision? Very briefly. I remember that only really in. I played sports. I played baseball and loved sports, went to college and realized that wasn't going to really be happening.

Chris Pine

And then found acting as a way really for validation more than anything. And I did a play and enjoyed it. And I remember them coming backstage and sounds hyperbolic, but literally, my mother looked at me and she's like, are you sure you don't want to become a lawyer? And I think she was very serious, and I said, pretty sure, and that was that. And then they supported me.

Rick Rubin

Is it validation from outside or inside? Describe the feeling of validation outside, for sure. The sense of audience or parents? Audience for sure. Audience.

Chris Pine

I don't think I ever really doubted it parentally. I was always told, we love you and you can do anything and all of that. No, I think it was very much for my peer community. Her brothers and sisters, sister, eight years. She was an actress, too, very briefly, and then worked in production for many years, and now as a psychotherapist.

And my mother became a psychotherapist as well. That's interesting. What was it like having a mom psychotherapist? Well, it was a very particular time. When I was about 13, my mother, who'd quit acting, I was born more or less, I was born in, did something in 84, and that was pretty much it.

My father was struggling finding work, and there was a stock market or a real estate crash in 87 or 88, which was really devastating. My mother, who had been a stay at home mom, ended up having to go back to school. She worked four jobs. My father was working extra jobs. Her going back to school and becoming a psychotherapist really did come from wanting to do it, obviously, but really came from this very trying moment where we needed to get jobs, like we needed to have something to get some income in.

I remember that part of my life being mostly one of sort of frantic busyness. Did you feel a sense of fear from them? Oh, my God, yeah. That kind of static electricity in the air and fights behind closed doors and all that kind of stuff. Did they speak about it, or was it more just in the air?

I think my memory of it is more in the air and certainly going through puberty than when puberty is hard enough. And then having that low level for a sensitive kit was definitely, definitely something many years of. When did you realize you were sensitive? I had a tremendous amount of social anxiety growing up. I think the loudness of the situation could really affect me.

Music on top of conversations on top of small talk on top of the visual field that I was trying to incorporate. You could get overwhelmed. Oh, super easily. Still can. I mean, a lot of work and pharmaceuticals have helped that, but I still can.

I mean, I even find in my space at home, I've created a nest, I guess, is the best way to describe it. The lighting is very particular. It's of the amber scale. There are not many lights on at night. If there's music, it's jazz, it's bebop, because it's really the only thing I can have that feels comforting.

I can't listen, usually to music with words in a massive way because that's happening. I have got to be engaged with it. I can't read and do other things. I also, quite honestly, find it hard. It's one of the reasons why I reached out to you to have the conversation, because I like your.

You're an interlocutor of a type. That makes me feel grounded, because often in conversations, there's very little or degrees of relationality, like what is actually being heard and listened to, to them be reflected back. The soul cycling, so to speak, feels firm and like a ballast. I even find being disrupted in conversations where I don't feel, where there is more static, or I'm sensing that you're not actually present, or you're looking to wait for the response, or I think you actually were just speaking about that in your book. That also is enough to kind of dethrone me.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. It feels like it's not a real moment. It's not really happening. Yes, it feels like it's not happening. Or my response to that is one much more frustration than anything else that, please get me out of here.

Chris Pine

Because I'm also adept enough to kind of. I can do that dance, but it also feels that much more exhausting as I get older to do the dance. And it's an empty dance. It's not. It doesn't seem like it's good for anyone involved.

No. And it also kind of highlights to me how much of our lives, or how much of my life I just picked up my life has involved that sort of thing, you know, and that. Yes. Much more. As I get older, I seek relationalness, or whatever the fucking word is.

Rick Rubin

Depth. I wonder if that's related to the feeling of the audience, of being seen. Yeah. I often think, like, witnessing and being witnessed is like. It's one of the fundamentals of being human, certainly being an artist, but I think really more being human of, like, because we are in these shells and we are ultimately alone in that regard, in our subjectivity.

Chris Pine

So the idea of being witnessed exactly as one wants, I don't know if that's even possible. But certainly, I feel like we search for it, right? We want to be reflected back, like, oh, you see me. I've had that experience where I'll see something and not be sure that I'm seeing what I'm seeing. What do you mean?

Rick Rubin

I used to live in town. I woke up in the middle of the night one night. I heard sounds, and my house where I was living, was on a hill, and it looked out over the city, but everything outside of the window was low down, like I was looking more at the sky. And it was a really misty night. We couldn't really see.

And there were all these lights in space, and I couldn't figure out what was happening. I couldn't figure it out. It's like. It can't be that you were looking at stars. No.

Chris Pine

Cause it was close, but it definitely wasn't. It was something not stars and not lights from the sun. It was not stars. It was not lights from the city, and it wasn't where there was any place for there to be lights. How close in space?

Rick Rubin

Couldn't tell. Cause it's when you see lights without any reference. Hard to know. I've seen UFO's. Have you?

Oh, yeah. Tell me. Seen ghosts. I've seen UFO's. I saw it was New Year's Day, or just struck New Year's, and I'd gone outside, and I was in outside of Joshua Tree, and I looked up at the sky.

Chris Pine

A light zoomed in, wiggled off. Can't explain it. Yeah. Now, if you were with someone and they didn't see it, I would have. Been just as stoked.

Yeah. I've had experiences with ghosts where it's. Like, okay, this definitely tell me about a ghost experience. This is happening. I'm shooting a movie in 2006, when I was in New Mexico.

It was in Santa Fe, to be exact. Shooting at a hotel. And we're staying at the hotel. I wake up in the middle of the night. It's 03:00 a.m.

I'm lying on my side, and I look towards the door, and a woman with no face and her hair is on fire is moving towards my bed. Now, what I saw wasn't a shape like you. It was basically energy outlined in the darkness, say, like a light blue violet energy in the darkness in the space coming towards me. And I knew exactly immediately what it was. It was like an abstract painting of what I just described, but I knew.

Rick Rubin

Exactly what it was like, without a doubt. I woke up terrified. So my perception perceived, and I understood my emotional side of me knew immediately, too, that she wasn't violent. She was pissed, frustrated, tired, that she had to do this fucking dance over and over and over again. She wasn't gonna hurt me, but she was fucking pissed off.

Did it have to do with the place you were in? I wake up the next morning, I go to the makeup trailer. You know, hi, how are you? How did you sleep? And I said, I fucking didn't sleep at all.

Chris Pine

You know, I have a story. And my costar said, I have a story. I was like, please tell me. You know, I bet you there's nothing on mine. It's like, all right, it's 03:00 a.m.

I woke up lying on my side, looked towards the door. Woman with no face, and her hair's on fire is coming towards my bed. The same exact thing. That's unbelievable. It's unbelievable.

Rick Rubin

That's unbelievable. So my mind is blown. And of course, my makeup artist, he's not only a makeup artist, but a wiccan priest. So he gives me. He says, you're going to have to go into your room and take this and just say, out spirit.

Chris Pine

Out. And talk to the spirit, which I've now actually done. Every time I go into a space that I don't know, sage, I'll do really anything. Sage Palo Santo incense, if I have it, but I'll talk to the room. Ever since that moment, it turns out we were at this hotel on top of a hill that was an actual, in fact, indian burial ground, and there were ghosts all over the place.

You went into the restaurant. There were five ghosts in the restaurant that came out at different times. They were named. Many, many years later, I see my co star. We're at a concert, and I said, man, I get so much mileage out of this ghost story.

It's fucking incredible. He's like, me and me too. I never told you the coda to the story. Like, oh, fuck, tell me. He's like, I'm in the bathroom.

I'm taking his shit. And I'm looking towards this door. Cause the door to the bathroom is looking towards the front door where this woman came from. Keeping my eye on this fucking door. Keeping my eye on this fucking door.

Keeping my eye on this fucking door. All of a sudden, out of my right ear, I hear this sound. I'm like, in that moment, I knew exactly what was happening. And he turns to look down at the toilet roll, and the toilet roll is going like this and unspooling. Wow.

So what this always makes you think is like, I know for a fact this shit happened. Not only do I know it happened, I got corroborated by someone that I didn't even share the story with. So I'm, like, doubly confirmed this shit is happening. It feels like something that we should be talking about all the time. It's like science.

Great. Have you heard about this thing or our experiences? Two rational, logical human beings definitely saw some shit that is unexplainable, and yet we don't. One of my, I guess, living principles is to be in awe, right? To constantly try to lean into awe, to lean into not rigidness.

To lean into soft lines, to lean into questions. And that was a great moment for me to be like, I have no fucking idea what's going on, but something's going on that is way bigger than me, that we're not even as human beings, and scientists and doctors, astrophysicists and whatnot haven't even scraped the surface up. So in some ways, it was very freeing. It's like, okay, cool. Yeah.

Rick Rubin

There's so much we don't know. So much we don't know. I don't have to rely on faith alone to say, to get me out of, you know, I guess before that, I could have easily said I was some sort of an atheist. Walk me through your saging practice. You get to a new hotel room.

What do you. I travel with a bag of sage or sweetgrass or incense, and it's not all the time, but if I feel like it's a room that I immediately just don't have a vibe with, I'll light it and just be like, hey, spirits, what's going on? You're still trapped here. I wish you well in your journey. Wherever you're going.

Chris Pine

I mean you no harm. I'm here as a guest. Tell me the Los Angeles you grew up in. The LA I grew up in was the eighties and the, you know, the nineties, I would say. It felt very small to me.

I grew up and went to a very small private school, so it felt very insulated, I would say artist, Hollywood centric universe. Where I grew up around a lot of people in the business and around the dinner table. That's what was discussed. You know, my dad's day at work and with whom he worked and what interviews he went on. He never calls auditions, he calls them interviews.

He's one of my favorite Robert Pine isms. Elegant, you know? So la, I remember Dodger games with my dad. I remember him taking me to CB's television city to meet Mickey Mantle, because he knew Pat Sajak, and Mickey Mantle was on Pat Sajak. I remember a lot of it was baseball.

So I remember the 1988 World Series and my dad taking me on the field to meet Kirk Gibson and Steve Sachs and Fernando Valenzuel and all these cats that were like my idols. Emila Sorta. I remember the forum and Lakers games. I remember Lake Arrowhead. I remember Henry's tacos, Jerry's deli when I was sick, bowling.

I remember I thought it was in the valley. I remember thinking, hangs out of park in Northfield, these, like, mystical places of all these old homes. Did you live in the valley? Oh, yeah. Deep Valley, kid.

Lived in Studio City and then lived in North Hollywood. Let's talk about pool, man. Let's talk about it. Did you know you wanted direct? First of all, no.

Well, I'll start with the reason why I reached out to you. Firstly, your book and how you speak about art and the artistic process. And secondly, kind of my layman's knowledge of you and your kind of the spiritual framework from which you approach everything, life and your work and stuff, resonated deeply with mine. And you talk about in your book, you have to follow these signs from this. Whatever the fuck is happening out there that's bigger.

It's just, you just listen to it and don't question it so much. You just kind of allow it to come through. I was making a film, and I was doing a bit. I was joking around with a friend, and I came up with fool man and Darren Baron, which is the main character's name. And there was something about sound of it that made me laugh.

There was something about those glimmers of a pool man in an apartment complex that delighted me. Delight is really, I think, a word I keep on coming back to. It's hard to describe what delight is, other than it's not a laugh, it's not particularly joy. It's like a carbonated fizzle at the back of your brain stem that just lifts the sides of your mouth, just kind of a bootic smile in a way. Right?

And really, the entirety of the process has been trying to stay as true to that initial delight and giggle as much as I desperately can and following that instinctual level of what delights me, which can be super cerebral and defer and deflect with intellectualism, intellectuality and thoughts and whatever you want to call it. So to try to, like, dive into heart chakra and just kind of turn off the thought or just kind of as delicately matrix my way through it, listen, as much as it can serve, which can be so difficult or has been for me. So that was the genesis of the project. And then, like many things in my life, I feel like it snowballed into me, directing and writing it.

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Chris Pine

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Rick Rubin

Did you know you were pool man from the beginning? Not necessarily. In envisioning and ideating on it, I cast myself in it to kind of bring it through, so to speak. But it became ever, ever more obvious that, like, at some point I was just going to do the whole thing. It felt inevitable.

Chris Pine

It felt holistic. It's like, yes, of course. Is this the first feature you've directed? Yes. How was the experience?

Blissful. That's great. Tremendously blissful. Was it advantageous all the years of acting that you've done? Yeah, I would imagine a lot of, you know, I would imagine in your business, too, there's a lot of rigmarole that is just the daily of when do you show up and you talk to an ad?

What are those guys doing? That by being on a set for so many years, you've taken care of so much of the practical, and you actually have a lot at your disposal in terms of faculty and facility and knowledge that you display. Really kind of without. You're just playing a different position. Yeah.

You're playing a different position that you. But the game is the same game, ultimately. Yes, and completely, unbelievably different, because it's another thing coming into something where you're the helm of it which is you're learning a lot of the intricacies and the minutia and the stuff that you don't have to, as an actor, as a hired hand, so to speak have to worry about really learning about what the fuck is the sound department doing. What are their daily tasks and what are their worries and what are their concerns. I also learn more than I ever would have if I hadn't done it.

Rick Rubin

How similar or different is the finished film to what you imagined when you had the script done? It's much different insofar as my original script incorporated. There were dance sequences, there were music videos, there were animated origami sequences. It was really lynchian and like in its scope. And then having to make whatever it was, a seven and a half million dollar film, it shrunk down considerably.

Chris Pine

But the beating heart of it is the same. And the beating heart of it is really joy. Uncynical, unfettered, uncool joy. And trying, I think if I'm analyzing it, it came about during a time when I really needed to access that little boy at play. You know, I think you also talk about that in your book.

The idea, the playfulness, the impishness of being a kid where everything's at your disposal. Sad, happy, joy, pain felt in its entirety at level 100 without a wink. That was really important to me and I still get that every time I watch it. As someone deep at the hard work of playing trying to capture that spirit without being too worried about anything else. If the film had a lineage, what would be all of the predecessors you could name that led to this film.

Definitely starts with the kind of archetype of the innocent. And that goes back to, I don't know, the first in cinematic history, but certainly Buster Keaton, certainly Chaplin in there. It all began when I rewatched being there and had this really emotional experience watching being there. So definitely Peter Sellers in that I watched this incredible film by Alice Rocker called happy is Lazaro which again, is the story of the innocent and the cynical world. And what happens to the cynical world?

There's a bit of Fisher King in there. There's a bit of the neuroses and family dynamics of maybe a David or Russell. I've always been inspired by the visual sensibility of a Wes Anderson. Things as far out as Bertolucci's the Conformist. These are all things that I was like watching, especially during COVID when I was going to film school for the first time.

I took it as an opportunity to start watching all the things I should have watched at some point in my life. So they were all thrown in there for sure. Definitely. Like, what's up, doc? There's screwball comedy in it.

And it just came out as it came out. And I don't really have any rhyme or reason for, like, the voice that came out and how these people spoke and all of it, but how it came out. Tell me about the writing process. The writing process was a lot about learning about how to write, learning structure and story, and watching films that appealed to me. Watching films that I thought narratively from a structural standpoint made sense.

And really ultimately, as it got into the writing of it, it was just a process of following, as I said before, joy and delight, whatever made my heart flutter and like, oh, that's fun. That makes me happy. That makes me happy. That makes me happy. So really, the process, though, frustrating at times, every time I sat down, you know, my brain wanted to go in a direction.

I led it. And some of that remained in, potentially to the deficit of the linear story. But I had to make a decision along the line of what I wanted to appeal to. And I asked myself, you know, we could go left here and do the thing that should be done at this point in the story. And I was like, I much rather have Danny DeVito have a two minute monologue about something that this sort of has to do with it and more, because I just want to see Danny DeVito talk.

Rick Rubin

I think there's something about a series of moments that hold your attention that might trump the straight storytelling. I think there are arguments on both sides. I think, you know, like, as, like Campbell showed us is like there are certain things that have existed for millennia that just exist for a certain reason. There's certain archetypes, there's certain hero journeys, the reluctant hero and all that. And I totally agree.

Chris Pine

There's a certain algorithm, seemingly, to the storytelling process that, if adhered to and done well, can achieve a certain goal of moving an audience. And whether you call it just like, willful manipulation or conscious manipulation on all sides, so be it. And I think there's another level of filmmaking that I guess falls more into the poetic or the tone poem. You know, like, I think about this moment in brave new world that Malick did with Colin Farrell, and they hit the new world. And I remember bursting into tears as Malick is shooting this world for the first time.

And it's Malick doing Malick. It's crows gliding across water. Tree of life is a perfect example also of that, or lynch or Kislowski, is another favorite of mine. I've been watching a lot of where there's something else going on, something much older and much more feeling oriented that is almost impossible to describe. It's like what I've heard, that maybe this is apocryphal, but Hans Zimmer does with music where there's music that you're not hearing, it's subliminal or whatever, in order to access parts of us that, again, talking about science, the metaphysics of being that we're not really quite sure of.

And even in the ridiculousness of my film, there was always a mind of mine trying to kind of play around in that world of going back to Ashby. How is it after this very quiet film, he has a moment of the lead character walking on water and a weird masonic temple rite happening to the left. And somehow I found it to be the most moving and profound thing I'd ever seen. At that point, you had the character first. Yeah.

Rick Rubin

Then do you have other characters? Do you have a scene? Do you have a story arc? Tell me the order of the events. From my limited one time experience.

Chris Pine

It began as the title of the film and the character name. And then I started seeing what the character looked like. And it was only until I was in Joshua Tree at this cafe, and I saw this dirtbag hippie rock climber. I was like, okay. And I was like, immediately knew he was a dirtbag, seventies rock climber.

I was like, done. Mm hmm. So that took care of that. And then I started seeing him around this pool, and, like, what? Then I started writing a short story, basically about this guy around the pool, Taichi Bruce Lee.

Rick Rubin

Did you know it was gonna bleed to more than that? Or at that time, did you think, I'm writing a short story? No. At that point, we were gonna write it, and I was like, how the fuck? My writing partner is much more of a structuralist structure.

Chris Pine

Bums me out because I. I'm the kid in the sandbox, and I need the kindergarten teacher. It's great. I kind of just want to get in the sand and play now. Now.

So to alleviate my anxiety and frustration, I was like, fuck it. I just started writing five, six, seven pages of whatever was coming out. In that process of writing, are you saying lines out loud and then writing them down, or is it all happening in your head? It's like vomiting. It's like, God, I don't want to fucking puke.

And you're, like, kind of holding off, and you're in your bed and you're like, you know it's going to happen. You know what's going to happen. Finally you do. That's kind of what the first part of the process of writing was like. Stopped up, stopped up.

And then the moment it had to come out, I just started writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, and then read it out loud to my partner. And he's like, what about that? What about that? And that would be good. And then we start placing and moving and placing, moving.

But that opening thing that I wrote became most of the script that we wrote. Reads more in some ways, like a. Because as a reader of many scripts, I like someone who acknowledges the fact that I'm sitting down to read for an hour and a half something. I would rather experience that with great action, as if I were reading a short story. I, Chris, prefer that experience.

Unless the minimalism is a part of the spirit animal of that thing, then that's fine. But I don't like someone that diminishes that hour and a half for me as a reader. So I wrote. I just kind of got verbose and really painted the picture of what it was like in this little parking lot in this valley backwash, sixties apartment complex with this guy in a trailer and what he was doing. And then these things came out like.

And then it starts building the same. It was more a series of images than it was anything else to start. Yes, I would say 100% was. Visual colors kind of immediately came to me. I'm attracted deeply to, like, kodachrome and that era, although I knew this wasn't right for that.

But I wanted basically kodachrome and tighter clover, as if it were bleached out by the sun. So it wasn't kind of the pale khakis of Chinatown, which I'm, like, hesitant to even talk about anymore because it seems to have been run away with itself. But it felt more like a MGM studio film that had been, like, left out in the sun for a long time. And was that first short story version the story of the movie? No, no, no.

It was literally just the first scene. Just how do we. How do we encounter this man immediately? So it was the first scene you wrote, and it is the first scene in the movie. It was a much kind of denser and longer thing, which I would have been happy shooting, but kind of the strictures of the format.

We condensed it a bit, but it was meeting him in this little diorama of an existence. And this man who took his pool cleaning like he was a ballet dancer, like he was at the dojo, and what that would have been like, and what books was he reading and what music was he listening to? Before any, I wrote six pages of just him being before, just character development, filling out the little crevices of this guy in hopes of. By doing that, I could figure out what he was about and how he spoke. But it was all outward.

Rick Rubin

You never describe what he was feeling. You're painting a picture that's very right, Rick. Very, very, very right. So it starts with the picture. For me, this one was very.

Chris Pine

It started from the external. It started with, again, as I said, the name of the film, what he did, occupation, the name of the character. That brought me into the physicality of this guy. The physicality of the guy dropped me into the emotion. And I should say, while we're doing that, I also knew that it was a pool man.

A story about a character who follows a water mystery. I knew that component. Describe the water mystery. The water mystery is something that is obviously part and parcel of what it means to be an angeleno. And it's the William Mulholland of it all.

And it is indeed what Chinatown was about in our case. It's about hanging out with these characters and getting on the wavelength of this dude. But it's essentially about a future present Los Angeles that is encountering a major drought with all of its concomitant realities. Meaning, like, how are they gonna get fucking water? Which is probably, I don't know, in that future state.

Only to find that there is something happening within the bounds of Los Angeles that could both save and destroy it is, in fact, because of these corrupt politicians and the shady real estate guy being destroyed right now. But that is what's happening in the outside world. But if you fall into the stories, I hope people do, what you'll find is that this whole world that you're experiencing is really deeply in the lens of this character of Darren Berman. This kind of Los Angeles is this time and place is. And that this is much more about the journey of this man.

You know, the pool being the seed of the soul, the water being the seat of the soul. He's tending to his soul only to find that there's disruption and darkness within it. He has to go search out what that is in order to become whole. And thus he goes on this journey that is both important and not the same time.

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Chris Pine

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Rick Rubin

Who were the next characters to appear in the story from a writing perspective? My surrogate parents, my best friends. This character, Jack Denisoft, played by Danny DeVito, and Diane Esplanade, played by Annette Bening. And I loved this idea of a boy man whose best friends were essentially this elderly couple who, they all come from mysterious backgrounds. I mean, Darren, his backstory developed over a long time, but essentially, you know, he's an abandoned kid that was adopted essentially by these people at some time during his life, I think probably in his early twenties.

Chris Pine

And he's just this eccentric character that loves water, that came to clean their pool and just ended up staying. Jack, Danny's character reminds me of this kid's father that I grew up with who was a horror movie director that had a great film that came out and then ended up moving away from Hollywood. But this type of character attracted me because it's kind of the people I grew up with, which are actors not in the, they are adjacent to the Hollywood dream. They dip their toes in and touched it. But it's not like they're riding the fucking rivers of great wealth and fame and this idea that he wants back in.

You know, meantime, he's bought this apartment complex to try to make whatever money he can, and he married his ingenue, Diane Esplanade, who had to go back to school and become a psychotherapist. Definitely an ode to my mom and the fact that she's also, yeah, his jungian analyst. That was the trio that initially attracted. When you end up with Danny DeVito as the actor, how different is that than the guy you were writing? The first scene that really came to me is this scene when they're packing up in the beginning of the film and getting ready to go to city council.

Darren, the character I play, Jack Denisoft, Danny and Diane, Annette. Danny is telling the story about how this japanese restaurant is not actually serving japanese food. They're giving you. They're giving you frozen pieces of meat to defrost food. And it's this conversation I had with my father over COVID.

He, in fact, had this experience at a japanese restaurant. I remember going over to their house and listening to my father tell the story. And it was the longest story about Emile I think I've ever had with an ending that he kind of stuck the landing, but he kind of didn't stick the landing. So the first thing that came out with them was that scene, which is apropos of absolutely nothing, but somehow you. Get to learn about the character.

Yeah. Just this guy's obsessed with detail that might not matter. Sure. I mean, again, it's like I was attracted to it because it reminded me so much of my mother and my father and how they interact and how my father can go in these things, that there are stories, and my mother. But my mother loves it.

My mother loves the kind of the thing, the bits. It's all about these bits. It's all about these little things. And it was one of those moments in the storytelling process, like, I know I'm gonna have to kill some babies. This is a baby that just delights me such to no end that if no one were to get it, at least forever, I can have Danny saying the word sashimi.

And that just gave me great. Did your parents bicker? Well, my parents, certainly, they've gone through myriad sort of evolution of their relationship at certain times, bickering, arguing. What they've gotten to now is this really lovely. They've been together 60 years.

They're not many things to fight over. So what they do is they do this play act fighting that mimics the bickering at a certain intensity that they would have had, which now is more because they delight each other in the thing. Like, they're gonna go into the thing where buzz. Oh, stop it. You don't really mean that.

You know, that whole thing. Am I that old? Being into it? You know, and that's kind of the thing. Do you remember the first time you got to watch the movie with an audience?

Rick Rubin

Tell me about that experience. Well, it gets to really, the fundamental reason why I'm here is because I wanted to talk to you, some sort of doctor, art therapist, because I really have to say, I had all the kind of wonderful, crazy experiences with independent filmmaking. I had a billionaire that wanted to give me the money. He never ended up existing. I got financed, and then they wanted me to shoot digital, and I had to fight for film and the et cetera, blah, blah, blah.

Chris Pine

And then I lost an actor's son, Dave. You know, all the fun little stuff like that. All great griffs for the memoir millimeter. And yeah, it was frustrating along the way. We never had any money in the distance that.

But ultimately it was a fucking gas. Ultimately, I was in flow state for such an extended period of time, working on stuff that was fundamentally important to me, which was, how about this one time, Chris, you just follow your heart, follow your gut, follow your instinct. And then I finished it in December of, what is it? 24 23, 22. And pretty immediately, I went into a state of grief.

One, the state of grief of having been so creatively fulfilled and engaged like a drug that being taken out, there's a certain amount of, like, physical and emotional upheaval. But secondly, I kind of deeply knew that I was setting myself up for a pretty hard road, and one that I think I ultimately probably chose for myself. There was no part of me that wanted to make, like, a non commercial film. I thought just by following what had kind of delighted me, it would equally delight a large audience. And then after having a situation where no one wanted to take the film, those festivals kind of alerted me to something, to feedback, alerted me to something.

We showed it to an audience in Sherman Oaks, and, I mean, so in a test screening, you can, if you want, which I did. Sit with an audience watching your film, which is an illuminating experience, to say the least. Roundly disliked, like roundly, just like walkouts. Thought people did not like it. But there was one dude, we called him front row Joe.

His name was Joe. And he sat in the front row in the talk back after that. Got it. You know, that really got it. He mentioned inherent vice.

Inherent vice was another kind of touchdown. Anyway, he totally got it. We always talked about front row Joe. He became kind of like our patron saint of lovers of the film. It was simultaneously a brutal experience and it was an ultimately super beneficial experience because I had eight weeks of editing, which is not a lot of time, and I was really down to the wire.

And it just taught me some great things about getting raw and real with your piece and just gripping it down to what it needs to be. And it ultimately became a much better film. So what would you say changed from the first screening till now? Well, we have some voiceovers in it, which were always a helpful spot to help guide an audience. Those became clarified and we tried myriad different.

The problem was that we only had one death screen. It would have been nice, actually. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened otherwise, but it's fine. And then there are these sequences in the film that are these meditations where he. In which Darren, the main character, has these moments with this tree that's kind of stalking his meditations and his dreams.

Well, due to certain financial constraints, that area of the tree moment was always nebulous, because I just. I couldn't afford what I wanted to shoot. I only found that out sometime during filming. So we had to get really creative. Discovering what precisely those things were from a sonic visual, an emotional standpoint.

And how they evolved over the course of the film were clarified immensely there. And there were sequences. There was a moment in this Chinatown chase sequence that was different, that we changed out. There was a whole relationship with Bruce Lee that was taken out. There was an Alan Watts voiceover.

There was a lot of shit happening in my. There's already a lot of shit happening in my film. So what I can gather from people having seen it in Toronto is many people still don't understand the film. So thank God we, like, stripped it down to, really, the essential bigness of it, so to speak. But what's been really difficult, I will say, is after it came out in Toronto, and I haven't read the reviews, but it was roundly kind of dismissed.

And that cognitive dissonance of, I think what your book really gets to is. This is the path we walk. Right. It's like, can't control that. Can't control it, yeah.

And how do you walk down your path, whatever that path is? I would say unaffected, although unaffected to me, sounds like. Like you're speaking about a sociopath or someone. That to authentically not give a fuck what anyone else thinks doesn't strike me as something that is aspirational. It strikes me as something that is, in some ways, probably non social.

But to not give a fuck to the healthy extent that you can just ride your wave, walk your path. Yeah. So that's been a real trip. And then spending some time since that moment in September to think about how to reintroduce, you know, this earnest, happy little bird of a film back into the world, you know, knowing full well that it may not be witnessed in the same way as I would like. It's been a trip.

Different than acting. Way different than acting. Acting is like, at this point, I'm so inured to. You can hide behind so much. Writers, directors, editors, studios, campaigns, lighting, music.

This is the closest one gets to being a singer songwriter or comedian or whatever. There are so many cases of great films that come out and are either ignored or not well received in the beginning, and then over time, they take on a life of this, their own, it'd be. But. And I've been thinking about that, too. I'm not saying that's gonna happen, but I'm saying it's interesting.

Rick Rubin

It's like there isn't any rule. Like, the game doesn't end when the picture comes out. Well, I think that's true. And I also think that pieces of art are often viewed in their wholeness as a separate entity from the creative life, let's say, of the individual. There's no, like, soft edges to a Picasso painting.

Chris Pine

It is just that painting. Right. Which is fair. I'm not saying I have the same experience, too. I listen to a song.

I listen to a song. Does it affect me? Does not affect me. It's kind of black and white, yet the kind of ocean that that thing comes from is broad, ongoing, came from somewhere. This thing is also a part of an evolution.

One of my favorite quotes is this Teddy Roosevelt quote about the man in the arena, which I'm sure you know. Right? And at the end he says, well, and if he fails, at least he fails. But while daring greatly, so that his place will never be with his plate into me. Souls that have no.

Neither victory nor defeat. But this idea of failure, like, what does failure mean? There's a failure in terms of the eyes of the world. But if you stayed true to. Yeah, if you made the thing you want, there is no failure.

There's no such thing as failure. I think the desire to make these things comes from this human urge to self express and say, this is how I see the world. This is my experience. This is what makes me laugh. This is what makes me happy.

Rick Rubin

This is what entertains me. My next question for you is about inspiration. What do you do when you feel inspirationally bereft? It's just a matter of time until you feel inspired again. You talked about liking that feeling of awe.

Awe and inspiration are very closely linked. Interesting. Is there a way to, like, move the coals around? I think I would have to know more about how you do what you do to answer that. Like one of my favorite quotes.

Chris Pine

It's better than Latin. I forgot it. But vigor grows from the wound. Vigor grows from the wound. I love that.

We were talking about ballasts. We're talking about what roots you were talking. I think what a blessing that experience was to much easier would it have been to have something come out and everybody's like, man, that is just, like, a really, like, really getting at all those ego parts of you that are just waiting to bask in it. Much better than to have the opposite. To really take a step back and go, okay, what do I need to leave this experience joyful and happy?

What do I need? Well, the joyful and happy comes from you signing off on the movie. I finished this. Now I'm sending it out into the world. Whatever happens doesn't matter.

Rick Rubin

You did it. How many years have you been working on it? Four. Four and a half, maybe. And would you say in the four and a half years it's been all consuming?

Chris Pine

I would say it's been a snowball into all consuming. It began an idea. Caromed went off caromed. And those things became shorter and shorter until it was all that. Yeah.

So I'm missing the missing flow state. I'm missing, like, disappearing into something. Do you feel like, what am I supposed to do now? 100% kind of with my life, quite frankly, I've had some pretty monumental, pivotal, existential moments in my life, and this one I've never quite encountered before. The first time you've ever made something in this way.

Rick Rubin

It's a big difference. It's a big difference. And also a kind of revelatory one, in that the completeness of artistic imprimatur on this is so complete. It's so satisfying, deeply. It's the only thing I can actually point to in my entire career to be like, no, this is the.

Chris Pine

All of me. Yeah. What you're describing is the success. Yeah. Yeah.

Rick Rubin

That is the success. Yeah, yeah. Nothing else after that means any more than what you're describing. No, I know, but you've been working. For how many years?

Chris Pine

Yeah, 22 years. This is the peak creative output that you've had. Yeah, that's it. You've done it, right. Yeah.

Rick Rubin

And now it's like, what's the next mountain? And it doesn't have to be the same mountain. And it could be. I've never played this kind of role before, and this is a director I love, and I'm gonna get to do that and not have to think so much about all the aspects, or I wanna start writing something else, or I wanna pick a script that I didn't write and do it as a director. And you have a lot of choices, and you don't have to make a choice, so much as engage in everything and see where you're drawn.

Chris Pine

Right. That's that part of the process you talk about. There's no way to make it a goal. You know, you can't set a goal of. Now, I want to do this.

Rick Rubin

You don't. I guess you could, but that is so very weirdly happened. Yeah, I don't think that's the way I think. It's more like. I mean, in Vedic, they call it charm.

Chris Pine

It's like, where's the charm? Where's that leading you to? Yeah. And really being open, pay attention and take advantage and enjoy whatever sense of openness there is where you're not totally focused on making this thing now. Right.

Rick Rubin

It's like, this is the exhale, the making. It was the inhale, and now you get to exhale and experience that. And now fucking. I've been exhaling for a year, and that's where I'm like, yeah, firstly, to have the luxury to rest a year, to be aware of that, but the whole time having that static electrical background of, like, kind of, well, what now? And also, it doesn't have to be anything big.

The next thing could be something really small. Get it, dude. But it's like, I'm like, it could. Be a little theater piece that you get to do in front of 50 people, and that'll feel good. Like, whatever it is.

LMNT

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Rick Rubin

Have you done any or much theater? Tell me about that. What's the difference? It's been a long time. I did the UFC kids that I met.

Chris Pine

I told you about the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Before that, I'd done pretty much the majority of my work in theater at university and then did some musical and a play out here in LA. And then did two plays at the Geffen, this Neil Butte play, and this Beau Williman play. And then I did the lieutenant of Innishmore at the taper, which is the big theater out here. And that was twelve years ago.

So it's been. It's been a while. Fun. Do you like it? I used to love it.

I mean, it was. It was the high of being able to have the closest that I could get to what I've always been jealous of musicians to get on stage, to have that connection with the live audiences. There's really nothing like, you don't get it in film, certainly, you know, you get maybe a taste of it if you go see a film of yours in theaters and you get to see the audience interact with. With it. But there is certainly a separation from the immediacy and the potency of that live experience.

To find something that you're gonna play with eight shows a week for three, four or five months is. I just haven't found something that has engaged me in a way that makes me want to go back in that way. When acting, how much does what you do change depending on who you're acting with? I think in the best of circumstances, all the time. Yeah.

It is being relational on the deepest level. Now there are certain tricks or there are certain realities of the construction and craftsmanship of a film, by which I mean your co star in an off camera moment could have given you a fantastic moment to play off of, but, you know, because on their coverage, they didn't achieve the same thing. You reacting in such a way probably won't make it in the cut. I'm just, you know, thinking from a mathematical component, you are modulating and you're cutting it in your own mind. Can you think like that when you're working?

Rick Rubin

It seems like that would get in the way. I mean, look, I come, I'm a different than, I'm sure someone who's like a deep method or whatever, who has to like, be in the thing the whole time. But I think the more you do it, the more you have greater. Multitasking is the wrong word, the more things you can jump. You know what'll work, you know what can work.

Chris Pine

So I can do both things at all. I can be absolutely right here with you. And also bring into context, there is a boom guy that smells. Yeah. And there is a director that I don't like.

And all of those things can exist at the same time. And me be fully present. The blessing of having done it for a while, I think for me at least especially, is that being able to do that and kind of getting great joy out of it too. And nimble enough that you can play with anything given at you at once. And also knowing, too, that having come from theaters, that our craft is a business of editing.

So that I may, as a performer, want to achieve this three page scene in perfection for my own gratification. But in reality, I can say, you know what? I'm going to stop. And can you just move to a little bit to the left? Thanks, man.

Is that good for you? Sound and whatever, so you can. You're like. You're at your easel. Yeah.

And you are painting the way that you want to paint when that camera's on you. How many different directors have you worked with over the course of your career? I don't know. A dozen, 15? How different are they?

Hugely. I would say what you do is in many ways probably akin to that of a director. I mean, I don't ever sat in on a session, but I think that's right. Some actors love to be left alone. And I think there's some actors that really don't give a fuck about who's directing them.

They have about. This is their bandwidth of what they want to do, and they will achieve it. And there are many actors that have been very successful, I think, doing that because they protect their performance. Because they know that once it's out of their hands, it goes into an editing bay with God knows how many people that have their hands touched on it. I've never been that way.

And I, for better or for worse, love being directed. So I love coming with cans of paint, being like, what do you want me to paint, man? You want me to. I'll go, happy, sad, red, white, blue, you can, whatever, give me a line reading. Because I'm like, I'm playing.

I'm actually playing. There's like, anything can happen. What do you want me to do? And I think that probably ultimately does me a disservice. If it gets in the hands of an editor who I wouldn't have picked or trusted to do the job or whatever.

I'm probably making micro changes on the fly. Given what I think the director's capable of or what I think is going to happen down the line. But the greatest directors that I love, just from a human standpoint, the directors that I certainly don't like, from a human standpoint, the directors that I deeply trust, very few who I think can push me and actually have can put aside whatever they're going through and need and really be with me in that moment. That's the most energizing for me that I feel someone's putting on the wetsuit and diving in with me and it's. Like there with me after a take.

Rick Rubin

What's the range of suggestions? God, it can be anything from as simple and basic, as fast or louder, funnier to a line reading, which I'm totally open to if I don't feel like I'm understanding the direction to essentially garbanly gook. That I think is probably the director's desire to communicate on an actor level, which they probably took from a book, which I don't totally understand.

Chris Pine

Really engaging with me on the practicals. Remember, you just came from your mom's. Your mom told you the car was stolen, remember? And you're fucking did this and that. Remember, don't do this quite yet.

Because in act 320 pages down the road, remember, we're gonna have that moment. So we wanna all myriad sorts of things that's interesting to strictly visual stuff. Like in the big movies, it's the hero moment, which usually is like, there's a camera pushing in on you and you're thinking about something. And from a leading man role, there's certain things that you're gonna have to help carry the audience with you. So the audience has got to see that you are.

I want to go left, but I gotta go right. And I know if I go right, I'm gonna fucking hit a shitstorm. I'm gonna do it anyway. And there's musical beats to that nonverbal moment. Tell a whole story and then sometimes they'll come and try to give me direction.

Most directors want to be kind and want to try to tell you in a way that is not do this, do that. And sometimes I go, just show me the monitor and playback. Yeah, yeah. And I go to the playback and I'm like, oh, you want me to fucking look down and then look up? I got it.

Rick Rubin

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, sometimes it's really easy. It's sometimes very, very easy, which for some actors, I think would maybe take umbrage at the ones and twos of it. But for me, I'm like, oh, you want me to do it? You want me to go up with a line?

Chris Pine

So, like, I think you should go there instead of. I think you should go there. Yeah, I got you. Okay. What do you do during the downtime on the set?

If I can handle it, I'll read a lot Duolingo has become a best friend of mine. Will study languages just because I can, you know, not think about it too much and feel like I'm doing something. Learning full. Yeah. God, there's just so much downtime.

It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. The little bit of time I've been around movie sets where you do something like, okay, we need to just reset something and it's 5 hours. It's unbelievable. That was another one of the great joys of making this film is we had no time, we had no money, and I was doing everything.

So it was like the closest. My little knowledge of the busters and the charlies of the world is like that's how they rolled, they wrote, directed, and we're in everything. So, yeah. Talking about like the future of where I could find inspiration. Wherever the inspiration comes.

What I do know is how do you go back from that? Yeah, I don't know how you go back to money. Certainly trying to make a living, for sure. Would you feel the same way if you weren't in it? I have no idea.

Araming off your question, the question about the downtime is like I can make my art for 12 hours straight. Like hours. Forgetting about everything, the bliss of that. Because what is flow state if not a way to forget about the deep truth that we're all just dying a little bit every moment you get to be alive, fully engaged. I don't surf, but I imagine in the barrel.

That's it. Did you say you're more comfortable in front of the camera or in outside life? It's funny, I think there was a moment where I was neither comfortable in or out. I think it took me a steady practice in my thirties to achieve deep comfort on and off. And they came together, would you say?

Yes, very much so. You think it's because you worked on yourself and as you. Well, this is the great thing about. I think about what all art is, is the better, more interesting human you become. The better, more interesting your art becomes.

And vice versa, and vice versa. And vice versa, and vice versa and over and over. It is the end spectrum of it is deep narcissism. And this, you know, this solipsism where it's all about you all of the time and everybody's thinking about you can lead to really unhealthy, toxic shit is really quite incredible. We are in the art form of becoming more fully realized.

That's the bag, I think, at its best. But getting back to something I said before in my early thirties, I woke up one day, rich and successful and deeply miserable. And I knew, really instinctually that I either had to quit or reframe things. And so I just put as my North Star joy. I'm just seeking joy.

Rick Rubin

Did you figure this out yourself? Did you do it through therapy? I figured it out myself, but then engaged in. I mean, I've been in and out of therapy for 25 years and then came across a really wonderful, creative, spiritual teacher who comes from a jungian background, deeply jungian background, and works with dreams. I've been working with her for 15 years in that practice, which, again, holistically involves the entirety of your being in whatever you're doing so that it becomes inevitable that this thing, whatever it is that you're working on is the only thing that you could be working on at this point was deeply meaningful to me.

Chris Pine

That released a lot of rigidity from the process. How important is body language when you're acting? A friend of mine was telling me this story about Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. This, again, could be apocryphal, but I love it on the set of the edge and they're out in the wilderness in Alaska, and they're setting up a shot and they're like, anthony, we're gonna have you stand over here. And he's like, oh, no, no.

When he picked the largest mountain and he stood himself right below it because he knew in the master that would be the power shot. It's always very important to remember that we're in a visual art form that is about the architecture of the shot. You are a component in the architecture of the shot, the mise en scene. It is a painting or a photograph, so to speak, to be aware of how of your part in that story, in that character's job. Yeah, it could be.

But you as your own kind of independent artist. Yeah. It's very good to remember that. That's amazing. I would have never thought about that.

I never would have thought about that. So cool. Again, it depends on what you're doing. There are certain roles as, like, a leading man, which I've been cast as, that. It's this very delicate balance of creating character but also being diffuse enough where you occupy space, but not so much so that you're detracting from the story, that you as the lead, your primary purpose is to be strong enough to carry the story.

So you have to be in front of it and behind it just enough. That sounds way more complicated, perhaps, than one would imagine. Or maybe not to overshadow too fine a point on it. You can make a bunch of choices that may or may not serve the story. Like, there's Christian Bale in American Hustle.

He is the star of the thing, but he's also very much playing a character. All of that characterological work is super duper important to that story. Then there's, like, Kevin Costner in Field of dreams. If Kevin Costner is doing a whole bit and he wanted to have a fat suit with a thing and do a bunch of character stuff, may or may not have worked, but it also would have detracted from the point this of the story. You're watching that, and you're experiencing, as Harrison Ford does it, you're experiencing the character, but you're also experiencing person, the star within that.

There are a bunch of different decisions you can make. You know, like in Star Trek, there were certain ways that I would, like, sit in the captain's chair that were odes to Shatner. There was a whole meta thing in. Oh, that's cool, that's fun. But those are very little things that, above and beyond that, I'm not.

There are no twitches, and there's no accent work, and there's no particular ways to walk, unless I think it's like, deeply serving the thing. Like a thing. I did hell or high waters, a whole different thing, because there were components to that character that I think demanded in order to tell that story well, that I do certain things with my body, but very rarely in my acting experience, because I've done deep work that way.

LMNT

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Rick Rubin

When you decide to take a roll, do you ever give the character qualities, like this guy that I'm gonna play listens to country music, for example, even if it's not in the script? I used to do that stuff very, like, write back stories in this whole thing, I found for me that it felt like work. Now that obviously sounds like a lazy actor, but I found for my animal, that play is where I excel. I'm very adept at moving and shaking on the spot. You want to do it away and want me to read that monologue, I'll do it.

Chris Pine

You want me to do it all in my eyes? Fine. You want to change that word? Fine. You want to cut it?

You want to add this? Totally cool. Do you ever add lib lines? All the time. What motivates it?

Because I'm having so much fun. Usually. It's usually from having an immense amount of either feeling super free and in the body and in the moment. And sometimes, honestly, I would say more often than not, it doesn't work. Or more often than not, it goes against the grain of what the director wants.

Sometimes it's because the director is really adamant that you say the lines, whereas I disagree and think it works better this way. They're all different forms of it. And then more common is like, I just disagree with that beat, that little couplet that you have at the end. I don't think you need it. I really don't think you need it.

And I think, honestly, it paints a finer point in a moment that whatever I don't need, I can say it without it or. Yeah, you know, you mentioned earlier the camera's zooming in on you. You have to tell a story without saying any words. Are you thinking something? Oh, for sure.

Rick Rubin

Are you thinking the story or your story? This is another great. One of the first things I ever did. I watched this great old actor, incredible actor. He's having this moment.

Chris Pine

He's searching. He's searching for the lines. He's looking off and doing that. I was like, what I. For the take, what the fuck was going on?

It's like I was thinking about my laundry. I was like, what? I was thinking about my laundry. It's one of the greatest lessons I ever heard. This whole idea that you, as the actor, must go through the thing, I think is a fallacy born from the mid century methods.

If it is effective and achieves the thing for the camera, for the moment, for the audience, the ultimate goal is the audience. So whether you're thinking of a banana or your dead mother, it doesn't matter so long as it works. So to answer your question, for me, various and assorted things. I mean, anything from being as technical of like, look there, to look there, to look there, to really think about what's happening in the character thing, but not, and every actor knows it. The one that you were most deeply in.

Sucked. That's interesting. Or can. It can often not work at all. And you could be like, fuck, man.

I felt every moment of it. But whatever works, works. All that matters is what's on camera. Because a lot of it's a magic trick. It's maybe more meaningful to you.

Rick Rubin

It also has to do with the music. It feels like the way the score tells the story when you're not moving. Does a lot think about that with the old movies? A lot. I watched this old Howard Hawks movie called Only Angels have wings, from 1939, during a period where there was a lot of, like, score in a lot of these films.

Chris Pine

Just everywhere. Score over entire swaths of music. And apparently, according to this book, I was reading a lot of the Warner Brothers films, too. Because for whatever reason, old man war really loved the score. Man, did it make me lean in.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. So, yeah. Score. The absence of score. Silences filled moments.

Chris Pine

Obviously, like what Hans Zimmer has done with the Nolan films. That's a whole beast unto itself. Huge. And it goes again to this idea that we're in this deeply collaborative art form. Where it could have absolutely worked in the moment, on the day.

But what with, who knows, lighting, sound, you then have to do ADR. And for whatever reason, the ADR doesn't work as well as you wanted. And it's not mixed as well as you'd wanted. Who knows? Have you ever done improv?

Yes. I love it. What's that like? Well, in fact, I just saw these guys the other day who do this thing called improv, Shakespeare, which is undeniably one of the most spectacular things I've ever seen. It's incredible.

And, you know, talking about the aliveness of it, you always kind of feel like you're on the edge of a rope, that you're climbing over some big crevasse. But having seen the Shakespeare troupe do it, you were saying before, you're like, doesn't matter how big or small, what your next inspiration is. Follow it. And one of the things I was thinking, I was like, I think I'm gonna get my. All my boys together and get a weekly improv together because it's so much fun.

Rick Rubin

That sounds great. Much fun. And with the small, personal ideas, you'd never know where they lead, ever. Sometimes the small things turn into something really big and important. Or like, it's like this lily pad will lead to that, and who knows the why and wherefores of it?

Chris Pine

I mean, really, what I've been thinking of mostly is I am a lover of, like, old Hollywood. And there's a part of me that wishes the studio system never changed. And you revisited on set by the, you know, the Harry Cones and the fucking Xanax. And, you know, I romanticize all of that stuff. The fun thing about stuff like TikTok and all these things that I engage in is that there's an immediacy to the art form that titillates me that I'm so desperate to get in that sandbox again.

It's like, why not just grab a camera, come up with a four page story and just go shoot it? That's a great idea. I mean, did you watch tv growing up? Yeah. I have memories of drinking cranberry cocktails, eating Stouffer's Mac and cheese, watching either dark wound duck gummy bears and the animated stuff.

For watching the. At Magnum PI. The. At Magnum PI. Magnum ti was great.

Rick Rubin

I also love the Rockford files, I have to say. Oh, my God, what else? Different strokes. I was huge into murder, she wrote, was big in my house. I love murder, she wrote.

Chris Pine

When peaks had come out in like 91, I remember trying to sneak in after my parents put me to bed to watch that. Remember watching Entertainment Tonight while we ate dinner. My parents would sit me down in front of the tv on Saturdays. And I watched this guy in KTLA. He's an old movie actor.

And he would do an old movie series, like, all day on Saturday or Sunday. And I'd watch all of these Elvis movies and I'd watch all of these. And my parents were off book on every. And they still are on everybody. So they would remark on whatever character actor that was and what else he'd been in.

Wow. Who's the costume designer? And weren't they under contract there? And so it was always like, how. Do you think the film and television business have changed since your dad's time till now?

Incredibly so it already changed basically, in the early nineties. You know, my father made his living, really, as a guest star actor. At a certain point, with having been in the business for a while, you build up your quote, as anyone does. So you could make an incredible living as a middle class, upper middle class living as a guest star actor. And I don't know what the quote is now, but it's like 5000 a week or something.

You could make 20,000. And then you're making residuals on top of that first run of residuals. The same amount of money that you made the first time you made it onward with decreases down the road, but still. And then at a certain point, what happened is that they stopped paying, so your quote didn't matter, they'd only pay you minimum, they wouldn't even pay you scale plus ten, scale plus ten, being in our business, 10% for the agent fees, you would actually make the figure, call it $5,000. So that business got wiped out.

It's what's been happening for the past, I don't know, close to 30 years, which is the kind of the hurt and the pinch and the squeeze has happened to the middle class of actors. I guess you can see it all across the board in terms of, in most different industries, and I'm probably part of the problem, because what's happened is that the people at the top get paid extraordinarily well. I think it probably happened around the time that Jim Carrey got the $20 million fee for cable guy or something, things just started to really wildly change financially in our business, that's been a big change, but from the start of it, my father came out to Los Angeles and was under contract at Universal, where my grandmother was under contract, ironically. Amazing. So you got paid a weekly stipend to go to acting class, singing class, ride horseback dancing, elocution, and then you got to go audition for Gunsmoke, virginian and stuff.

And that stopped, I think, in 68 or 69 maybe. I think it's pretty cool that I have a connection to, really, an older. History, and really, that history was the original system. It's not like. And then there was the thing before it.

Rick Rubin

It's like, that was it. That was it. He was at the crux time, right? As the old studios were falling apart. Yeah, and the era of, like, the director centric, that's easy.

Chris Pine

Writer, aging, bull. That's like. Yeah, that was Scorsese. I read that when it came out, and I was listening to it again now. What a great book.

Rick Rubin

How many captain kirks have there been? I'm not off book on this, but I want to say 1234, there's an original cabinet, Curt before Shatner, is that true? I think that's amazing. I didn't know that in the pilot. I may be wrong, okay, but then there was him, and then, what's next?

Chris Pine

Me. You were next. You were second. I was second, and then Paul, who does it now for CB's, and then I think they're apparently writing another movie for, not our cast, for new casts. We might have yet another one.

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Chris Pine

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Rick Rubin

When you play a character who's as familiar as Captain Kirk, how much does it need to be the captain Kirk that you grew up watching? I was kind of buttressed from that because I never really watched it growing up, and I wasn't a big Sci-Fi idol except for Star wars. So when I got it, I knew him as a cultural icon rather than as, like, a television actor on a television show. So I guess I thought of from a practical level, like, it would have been ridiculous to ask me to play a character of William Shatner. Just didn't make much sense.

Chris Pine

I guess, in some regards, this was the origin story of what the original show was, but it just seemed kind of ludicrous. Now that having been said, there's certain spock stuff that is very spock. So inevitably, you're kind of going to be Leonard Nimboy. And Carl Urban, who played McCoy, was a huge Star Trek fan. But I really had fun.

Like, JJ wanted me to pepper in some shatterisms, and I did, and they were great fun because it's like, yeah, Cheddar's a delicious human being. He's just, like a guy that's eating up everything in front of him. So it's fun to, like, do those little things, but I think I felt more pressure about the whole experience of it all and just, like, trying to lead my first thing in a ginormous film than I did, particularly about the shatner of it all. And I felt really, I trusted JJ a great deal, so if he wanted a bit more flavor, he would tell me, and if he didn't, I felt, like, confident that it would work. Yeah.

Rick Rubin

Fun working with JJ. Oh, my God, JJ. JJ's like, you know him. Yeah, yeah. He reminds me a lot of Tony Scott, what Tony Scott was, which is these like elfin, like cinema lovers that are just bursting with so much joy and curiosity and engagement with what they're doing.

Chris Pine

It's like they're always captaining the party. Yeah, he's always alive. Like, look what we're doing. This is so incredible, what we're doing. So he's a great mc of creativity, I feel.

Rick Rubin

Can you think of anything you believe now? You didn't believe when you were younger. I guess, that there is no equation for joy. You thought when you were younger, you thought there was one. Yeah.

Chris Pine

If x, then y. Right. You know, with meditation is like a great example of that. It's the ultimate paradox of it, I think. You engage with the process of it.

Rick Rubin

Yeah. You develop the practice of meditation. There's nothing. The beginning, ostensibly to achieve things. Peace, inner peace, inner quiet, a relationship with the spiritual, all these things.

Chris Pine

But in practice, it doesn't get you any of that. It's actually just a more. You are cultivating a more consistent sitting in the now, whatever that now is. Yes. When did you first learn meditation 27.

Rick Rubin

And what was the style? Tm. And then I did multiple forms, a lot of deep breathing practice, a lot of it. That wim Hof. I tried Wim Hof.

Chris Pine

Wim Hof actually gave me more anxiety than it did anything else. Sorts of visualizations and stuff like that. And then I refound TM and the vedic form, which basically is just the same thing without the TM copyright, about four years ago, and have been doing that consistently. I see. Raja yoga.

Rick Rubin

Is that what you'd call it? No, it's this thing led by this guy, Tom Knowles. Tom was Maharishi's right hand for 30 some odd years and then split with the organization over bureaucratic stuff, basically. And it's the same exact thing. Understood?

Chris Pine

Yeah. What inspired you to learn when you were 27? You know, I'd heard about it and around. I'd always struggled with anxiety and depression, intermixed and, you know, I tried deep breathing, which was super helpful, but then wanted to cultivate something else. How would you describe your spiritual life?

I would describe it as deeply curious about the awesome unknown. I mean, everything from discussing meditation and the benefits, getting a bit more into the vedic study and understanding that worldview and gets into some fascinating quantum stuff. In terms of a God, I would say I put faith in the existence of something meaningful, large, ultimately loving the rest of it. I don't know. When did you grow the beard?

I've been growing it, knowing that I was going to have to do some media rest. Stuff for my film. I'm in love with it, and I just drive me crazy. If your new project involves a character without a beard, would you just happily shave it off? It seems that I'm not wanting to go back to work.

Okay, so that's cool. Yeah, I don't. You're not wanting to go back to work, but you're also clearly antsy about what's next. It's like my fucking crucible. Tell me about it.

I've talked to my therapist all the time. I reframed it the other day. It's almost like addiction in the sense that I'm looking for a way to escape. It's a great way to escape. It's creativity, but it's nonetheless looking for an outlet.

Forget about now. So this pickle that I'm in is. I know, an important one. It's getting my household, like, paying attention to that static and making relationship with that static and asking the static what the static's about. And asking the static, if we do this party, what are we looking for?

So I've had a real doozy with that dance.

Turn around, ramos temporal close.

Chris Pine

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Episode Chapters

1: Early Ambitions and Family Influence

2: Midlife Reflections and Philosophical Insights

3: Personal Struggles with Anxiety and Creating Comfort

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