Zoe Saldana; Jerry Bruckheimer.Photo: Steve Granitz/FilmMagic, Rodin Eckenroth/Getty

Zoe Saldana, Jerry Bruckheimer

Zoe Saldanais opening up about a positive encounter she had withJerry Bruckheimerafter her less-than-ideal experience on the set of 2003’sPirates 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,” theFrom Scratchactress said, in her interview published Tuesday.

But “years later,” Saldana recalled, she met with producerBruckheimer, 79, “who apologizedthat 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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Zoe Saldana (center) inPirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl(2003).Walt Disney/Courtesy Everett Collection

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, Kevin R. McNally, Zoe Saldana, 2003

Saldana remembered working on the film, which would become the first of five in the hitPiratesfranchise, 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 inCenter Stage(2000),Get Over It(2001),Snipes(2001) and 2002’sCrossroadsandDrumline.

She would, of course, go on to appear in many more big-budget projects — notably, theStar Trekreboot trilogy beginning in 2009, theGuardians of the Galaxyfilms and 2009’sAvatar, as well as the latter’s upcoming sequelAvatar: The Way of Water.

RELATED VIDEO: Zoe Saldana on Introducing Her Kids to Her Films: They’re “Heavily Into Superheroes”

“And just wantingAvatar 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 toan official logline for the movie.

“Avatarreally was… It was a special experience for many,” Saldana told PEOPLE. “And I just hope that experience repeats itself.”

Avatar: The Way of Waterpremieres in theaters Dec. 16.

source: people.com