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Director’s Statement
Acting was my first love. I have always been drawn to emotion — to the hidden inner worlds we all carry. Stepping into a character’s skin felt like a calling. I wanted to understand people, to represent them honestly, to feel everything they were too afraid to show. But as I moved deeper into my own life experiences, the need to tell stories from my own perspective became impossible to ignore.
That realization led me to study not only Theatre, but also Cinema at the University of Southern California. In a class called Intro to Screenwriting, something shifted. I wrote my first screenplay that summer and felt a kind of clarity I had never experienced before. I knew then that I could not wait for someone else to hand me the perfect role or the perfect opportunity — I had to create it myself. And in doing so, I found something even greater: I found my purpose. Writing became the place where I felt most connected to myself and to others. It allowed me to turn everything I had been carrying into something meaningful.
In truth, I had been writing long before that first script. Since I was a child, poetry was the space I turned to when I needed to process the world. It was never just a hobby. It was the place I went to feel safe, the place I went to feel deeply. My poems held everything I was not ready to speak out loud. Each one, in its own way, was a blueprint for the stories I would later bring to life.
Pine began as one of those poems. It was written during a heartbreak that felt like the end of everything. But looking back, that heartbreak gave me the beginning of something beautiful. While taking a semester off to act as a series regular on an upcoming Amazon Prime show, The Runarounds, I returned to that poem with fresh eyes. I knew it was time to turn it into a film.
This is my directorial debut. I made the decision not to appear in the film because I wanted to fully honor the vision behind the camera. I wanted to give myself over to the process, to lead with care and with conviction, and to prove that I have something to say. I believe we all do. Life is hard. Art gives it meaning. It turns private pain into shared understanding. It turns the most personal moments into something universal.
Thank you for watching Pine. This film is a piece of my heart. It is a story born from loss, shaped by love, and carried forward with purpose.
