A feral shout rings through phone receivers scattered throughout the states.
“CAN ANYONE HEAR ME? IS THIS A COLD CONFERENCE CALL? HO-HO-HO,” actor, producer and director Casey Affleck trailed on.
“Come on, take this seriously,” a barely-composed male voice belonging to actor Chris Pine incited.
“Back on track,” a female voice, possibly their agent, whipped.
The two had just retired from a red-carpet premiere in Boston, Massachusetts for their latest co-starring performance in Disney’s “The Finest Hours.”
Set in 1952, director Craig Gillespie’s epic retelling of a United States Coast Guard recovery mission on a halved T-2 oil-tanker tells Pine and Affleck’s separate stories. The film ultimately conjoins the two storylines of a survival and a rescue.
Based on a true story, the CGI-packed action thriller docked in theaters on Friday.
The two stars settled themselves for 20 minutes for questions from a number of college-media outlets in a conference call Thursday evening.
Q: What drew you, Casey, to this project?
Casey Affleck: You know, um, there are a lot of things actually to this. One was that it was filmed in Massachusetts, which I just got [another] project to see. [Also,] I get to come home and work here. And another, I felt like it was a movie where I like what [Disney is] doing. I feel like they make a great effort to make movies that have a strong message and a good story, good characters. This one is particularly exciting but it also, uh, supports the characters and their core values of Disney. And I, you know, I might sound old-fashioned and hokey but um, it’s kind of refreshing to see a movie like that.
Q: Both of your characters are faced with not only overcoming a fatal storm, but also their personal struggles as well. How can you relate to your character and their determination in the role like that portraying when filming?
Chris Pine: In our own tiny way, being in the film business is hard enough and there’s a lot of luck involved in it obviously. You face an incredibly amount of rejection. Also, you know, I assume, just by being alive, people feel not a part of the group or not liked or that they don’t have friends, don’t have as many friends as they want or, um, feeling out of place. And I certainly saw that in Bernie. So even though I’ll never know what it’s really like to be a Coast Guardsman, or really never know what it’s like to go up against 70-foot waves and zero visibility and what it’s like to rescue men off a split oil tanker, there are certain kind of general human emotions and feelings that you can attach to and bring your own experience to.
Q: Did you learn or take away anything from the experience of playing your respective characters?
CP: What I liked about Bernie is that he’s a simple guy and I don’t mean that derogatorily. He’s just a good solid man who goes about business not seeking any sort of pat on the back. It’s just because he wants to do right and he knows that’s the only way he can function really. And I learned a lot from him. I think about that, about how there’s purity in wanting to do your job well and to serve other people because, uh, you don’t need – you don’t need much more than that.
Oftentimes in our business, it’s all about, stuff that’s completely opposite from that which is, you know, getting your picture taken and twittering and all that kind of shit that I just think takes away from those good old fashioned values.
CA: Yeah my character had a journey. I really didn’t learn anything from the guy. I didn’t, because, you know, there wasn’t a whole lot of information about him so he’s more or less, just a piece of fiction of the screenwriters who did a really good job creating a character that fit into the story. I didn’t have that same opportunity to kind of study his life. I just had to sort of make some stuff up. — Deck was edited at 10:42 p.m. 2/1/2016