The actor says that she felt acting in big-budget films felt overwhelming for her at first

Zoe Saldana has credited Steven Spielberg with "restoring her faith" in the film industry after she had a "bad experience" on Pirates of the Caribbean.

The Avatar actor appeared in 2003 blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl -- directed by Gore Verbinski -- and she had a tough time on set which almost caused her to "tip overboard."

"I knew with that experience the kind of people that I wanted to work with," Saldana said, speaking during a Screen Talk at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 12.

"The crew and the cast, they're 99 percent of the time super marvelous. But if the studio and the producers and the director, they're not leading with kindness and awareness and consideration, then that big of a production can become a really bad experience and you may tip overboard. And I kind of did," she added.

Her next project was The Terminal. Saldana said working with Spielberg eight months after finishing Pirates helped her get back on track.

"I worked with Steven Spielberg eight months later, and he restored my faith that big can also be great," she said.

Saldana added she felt "so good and so safe" and revealed the director would play music between scenes to help everyone feel "synchronized and on the same page."

"[He said], 'In order for you to know where you are, you have to know where you came from,' " the Guess Who actor recalled some wise advice the director gave her.

Saldana previously opened up about her time on the Pirates franchise in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, revealing the "pace" of the big budget production was "a little too fast" for her.

"It was my first exposure to a major Hollywood mega movie, where there were just so many actors and so many producers and so many crew members," she explained. "We were shooting in different locations, and the environments were not that agreeable, sometimes, to our shoot days. I was very young, and it was just a little too big for me, and the pace of it was a little too fast."

"I walked away not really having a good experience from it overall," she added. "I felt like I was lost in the trenches of it a great deal, and I just didn't feel like that was okay."