Zoe Saldana Says Pirates Producer Jerry Bruckheimer Apologized After Her Bad Experience on Set
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Steve Granitz/FilmMagic, Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Zoe Saldana; Jerry Bruckheimer
Zoe Saldana is opening up about a positive encounter she had with Jerry Bruckheimer after her less-than-ideal experience on the set of 2003's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.
The 44-year-old actress recently told Entertainment Weekly that after making the film, which was one of her first, she "walked away not really having a good experience from it overall."
"I felt like I was lost in the trenches of it a great deal, and I just didn't feel like that was okay," the From Scratch actress said, in her interview published Tuesday.
But "years later," Saldana recalled, she met with producer Bruckheimer, 79, "who apologized that I had that experience, 'cause he really wants everyone to have a good experience on his projects."
"That really moved me — the fact that he remembered that I had mentioned that during press, I guess, or an engagement I had done years before and that he felt compelled to bring it up and to take accountability," the actress shared.
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Walt Disney/Courtesy Everett Collection Zoe Saldana (center) in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Saldana remembered working on the film, which would become the first of five in the hit Pirates franchise, as being her "first exposure to a major Hollywood mega movie, where there were just so many actors and so many producers and so many crew members."
"We were shooting in different locations, and the environments were not that agreeable, sometimes, to our shoot days," she told EW. "I was very young, and it was just a little too big for me, and the pace of it was a little too fast."
The movie came after Saldana starred in Center Stage (2000), Get Over It (2001), Snipes (2001) and 2002's Crossroads and Drumline.
She would, of course, go on to appear in many more big-budget projects — notably, the Star Trek reboot trilogy beginning in 2009, the Guardians of the Galaxy films and 2009's Avatar, as well as the latter's upcoming sequel Avatar: The Way of Water.
RELATED VIDEO: Zoe Saldana on Introducing Her Kids to Her Films: They're "Heavily Into Superheroes"
Last month, Saldana told PEOPLE that she was "gearing up" for the sequel to Avatar, in which she reprises her role of Neytiri, "by staying absolutely still."
"And just wanting Avatar 2: The Way of Water, wanting its reception to be similar to the first, where people are just taken for a ride," she said. "Where they get to learn, they get to live, they get to feel, but also they get to think a lot about who we are and what we are and where we are."
The upcoming film — the first in multiple planned sequels — "begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure," according to an official logline for the movie.
"Avatar really was… It was a special experience for many," Saldana told PEOPLE. "And I just hope that experience repeats itself."
Avatar: The Way of Water premieres in theaters Dec. 16.
