Chris Pine’s nautical disaster movie is a blast from the past
Chris Pine charts a course to the ’50s for The Finest Hours
• Chris Pine reprises his Captain Kirk role in the third Star Trek film out this summer. He also plays Wonder Woman’s love interest in the superhero flick currently shooting.
However, the 35-year-old’s keeping it real portraying 1950s Coast Guard Captain Bernie Webber in his latest movie, The Finest Hours.
The movie is a classic rescue story but Pine has a basic motivation for doing it.
“I like to have a job,” he says promoting The Finest Hours. “I am in the point zero, zero, zero, one percentile of actors who work steadily, thank God, and it is not false humility. I’m really happy just to work.”
Based on the 2009 book by Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias, The Finest Hours chronicles the true story of Webber’s 1952 Coast Guard rescue mission during a dangerous winter storm off the Cape Cod coast.
Co- starring are Ben Foster, Casey Affleck, Eric Bana and Holliday Grainger but it is Pine’s stoic, by-the-book Webber who leads the way as he and his three- man crew aboard a 36- foot lifeboat head out on a treacherous mission to save oil tanker crewmen whose ship has been cut in half.
A period piece survival adventure is not the usual Hollywood fare these days, but Pine was attached to the production from the beginning because he thought it would work on the big screen.
“It reminded me a lot of a film I did called Unstoppable,” says Pine referring to his 2010 runaway train action thriller with Denzel Washington.
Indeed, The Finest Hours is a straightforward story “driven by a really strong romance and ordinary men doing extraordinary things.”
Certainly, the script was solid enough, and Pine’s boxoffice clout strong enough, for the movie to get the go ahead. To underscore the essence of the period, Pine and director Craig Gillespie decided to film in the East Coast area where the 1952 incident took place.
The cast and crew started shooting around Quincy, Mass. in 2014. Some of the scenes were even shot at the actual 1950s Coast Guard station near Chatham, Mass.
Unfortunately, Webber died in 2009, so Pine counted on the book, and relatives recollections for references. The actor also read Webber’s first- hand account of the event and listened to a newspaper interview tape.
The tape, especially, revealed a modest and matterof- fact Webber quietly recalling the rescuse mission considered the most heroic in U. S. Coast Guard history.
“My most immediate relationship to Bernie was less about the location and more about this audio recording I had of him,” Pine says. “That’s where I felt kind of closest to who the man may have been.”
For all the emotional impact of the story, the actors who played the rescuers and rescuees weren’t prepared for the physical demands; 14- hour days and nights trying to survive filming in massive tanks filled with freezing water.
They suffered for their acting art, although Pine agrees the cast should’ve asked to have the water heated up.
“It strangely never occurred to me,” he says. “I don’t know why.”
Maybe he used the harsh environment to inform his performance, particularly on board the lifeboat when he argues with his first mate played by Foster.
“That’s not my deal as an actor,” Pine says. “It’s action and cut, and then let’s talk about Waylon Jennings or who we’re playing on the boom box that day ( on set). And, I just like Ben too much.”
But compared to Wonder Woman or the Star Trek movies, did The Finest Hours put him in a different head space?
“No, everything is just make believe,” says Pine. “They’re just different versions of make believe.
“But I love ( The Finest Hours) 1950s. I love the style of the clothes. I love how the women looked. I love the dances, the music, the amber of the lights and the cars.”
In the meantime there are his next fantasy turns. His Captain Kirk exists in a familiar Star Trek sci-fi future.
But the Wonder Woman film places Pine in a World War I past as the actor plays pilot Steve Trevor, the love interest of Wonder Woman (played by Gal Gadot).
“Steve Trevor is not Bernie ( Webber),” Pine says. “He’s roguish, and he’s cynical, and he’s a realist who’s seen the awful, brutish nature of modern civilization and he is a worldly guy.
“And it’s going to be a great, fun film with some incredibly deep, interesting, and morally relevant themes,” he predicts.
“Patty (Jenkins) is just directing the daylights out of it. It’s shot beautifully. It feels so wonderfully period but also has this wonderful pop sensibility.”
The Finest Hours opens Jan. 29.