I highly recommend checking out the entire interview over at VeryAware.com

What was it like getting beat up by Elizabeth Banks and what was the rehearsal time?
Pine: “I will say through the majority of the film, Sam was getting beat up- physically or emotionally. That’s not to say some of it’s not righteously done since Sam perpetrated the biggest mistake and lie in the film. That he doesn’t tell Frankie the truth. That was a hard scene to do.”

How many takes was that?

Banks: “Not that many.”

Pine: “Alex, to his credit, realizing doing this for the first time, he covered the living daylights out of that scene. So there’d be masters – there’d be all sorts of coverage. I think the really big credit belongs to Liz because the revelation of the truth, she’s gotta hear that for the first time all day long. My job was as difficult to tell the truth but she has to listen and process that moment, which is extremely difficult to do well and to do truthfully. The credit belongs to her.”

Banks: “Thank you.”

Can you both talk about the moment you wanted to become an actor? Obviously, your father was in CHIPS. What was that like growing up?

Pine: “I never wanted to be an actor for a second in my life until maybe I was twenty. My father’s been an actor for 50 years. He came out to LA in 1964. He was under contract when they still had contracts at Universal. When you got paid to be an actor even when you weren’t working, which you can imagine is a stunningly awesome thing. My father has like 200 credits. He’s a rare breed. He’s a working blue collar actor. The man has made a living as an actor, put two kids through private school, and managed to do it when things were really bad and when things were really good. Obviously, the marker for a young child is when things were really bad. For me growing up, I was a child of someone who had a business that was sometimes really good and sometimes really bad. There wasn’t anything romantic…I wasn’t like Denzel Washington’s kid. That was not my family. I didn’t have no rose-colored glasses. I really found out later on because I enjoyed it and it was something I could do.”

Your characters are both on the brink. Have you guys both felt that way in acting? Were there any moments where you thought, ‘this just isn’t gonna work out and I’m ready to walk away?’

Pine: “100%. I’ve been very lucky. It took me about a year before I could quit my job working at the Grove.”

What were you doing at The Grove?

Pine: “I was a food runner and a host. And not a good food service representative at all. But yeah. There was a time when I cam back to LA and had just done a pilot. I really wanted to live on the Lower East Side and eat bread. Do the whole poverty stricken artist bit for awhile. In those moments where you don’t care and you walk into an audition… (snaps)”

Banks: “Totally. Totally.”

Pine: “It’s like landing like gangbusters. That’s what happened. I moved back to LA. I was going to move to New York. I had a place and was like, ‘Done!’ Do the poor artist thing. And started working and there you go.”

You can continue reading the article in its entirety over at The Associated Press

Chris Pine is boldly going where Capt. Kirk has never gone before. In his sibling drama “People Like Us,” he gets slapped around by his mom and pummeled by his sister.

The earthbound sibling drama is light-years from Pine’s role as forceful ladies man Kirk in “Star Trek. And it’s a departure for “People Like Us” director Alex Kurtzman and producer Roberto Orci, who moonlighted on the intimate screenplay for nearly eight years as they co-wrote such action epics as “Star Trek” and its upcoming sequel, the first two “Transformers” flicks, “Mission: Impossible III” and “Cowboys & Aliens.”

In very un-Kirk-man-like fashion, Pine gets a sharp slap to the face in his first scene with Michelle Pfeiffer, who plays his mother, angry that it took his father’s death for her self-absorbed son to finally come home for a visit.

After discovering his dad had a daughter with another woman, Pine’s Sam ends up getting the stuffing beaten out of him by his newfound half-sister, Frankie (Elizabeth Banks).
Pfeiffer and Banks put their all into it, recalls Pine, who unlike action man Kirk, had to stand there and take his lumps.

“Liz is a tornado when you unleash her,” Pine said in an interview alongside Kurtzman and Orci to promote “People Like Us,” which opens Friday.

As for taking a palm to the cheek from Pfeiffer, Pine remembers it coming in the first scene the two shot together.

“I recall very, like, method-y, whispering conversations between Alex and Michelle before the first take, and then she slapped the (crap) out of me,” Pine said. “There’s something to be said for it, because there really is no way to duplicate the shock of that.

“And similarly, the scene with Banks, there’s just no way. The way that they shot it, it was very kind of handheld, super-present, really in the room, fly-on-the-wall kind of stuff. There’s no way to mime that to make that real. It wasn’t going to be really violent, she never hit me in the face or anything. So you could let her go rip-riot with a certain amount of safety involved. That was important to capture, because Liz, Frankie, in that moment is rightfully, righteously angry at Sam.”

While promoting their new comedic drama “People Like Us,” Chris Pine and Elizabeth Banks faced off over their two franchises – “Star Trek” and “The Hunger Games.”

Make sure you check out the interview in full over at USAToday.com

The franchise shot the actor to fame in 2009 when he took on Captain Kirk. And years after filming it, its co-writer delivered just the kind of meaty, dialogue-driven role Pine had been on the hunt for.

Filming the first Star Trek, “I was so focused on not (screwing) up that I just had blinders on to everything and everyone on set who was not in my direct path,” says Pine, who recalls meeting the film’s co-writer Alex Kurtzman briefly.

But then Kurtzman “called me up really out of the blue at home,” says Pine, 31, and he sent over a script for People Like Us (out Friday), a film inspired by Kurtzman and writing partner Roberto Orci’s own lives.
The script was packed with emotional minefields: an absentee father who’s hidden his adult love child, Frankie (Elizabeth Banks), from his son, Sam (Pine). A narcissistic, secretive mother (Michelle Pfeiffer). And a payload in the form of $150,000, left in Sam’s hands for Frankie upon their father’s death.

Pine signed on to the Kurtzman-directed dramedy within days. “I love the character,” he says of Sam, his cocky, fast-talking salesman. “I thought he was flawed and funny and dark but in a really human kind of dark way.”

Sam, an “epic plate-spinning, super-adroit cocktail-party chatterer,” is challenged with ditching his honed salesman shtick and facing his boxed-up past.

For Pine, the beauty in this family was in its flaws.

“What I loved about (the film), which was on the page, is that there are no golden pink bow ties by the end of the film,” he says. As his character navigates the waters after his father’s death and confronts the women in his life, including his hard-edged mother, Lillian (Pfeiffer), and his girlfriend (Olivia Wilde), “they all kind of still hate one another, and Sam doesn’t fully get along with his mom, (but) he chooses to love her for all of her faults. He and Frankie, they were all just kind of entering the town of people — almost becoming human to be like, ‘I’m screwed up, are you?’ That was kind of the message of it I liked.”

I’ve added 121 photos of Chris at The Cinema Society Screening of ‘People Like Us’ in New York City, which took place last night.

A big thank you to DeA of Lea-Michele.com for the photos.

Gallery Link:
– 2012 > 06/25/2012 – The Cinema Society hosts a Screening of DreamWorks Studios “People Like Us”