James Franco Reveals The Drive Behind His Renaissance Man Status [Interview]
As writers, some of our best work comes out of our solitary moments. For actor-director-writer-perpetual student James Franco, he’s the first to admit that during the first ten years of his career he spent most of his time on the set of multimillion dollar productions, unintentionally isolating himself, and cracking open the greats like Faulkner, Proust, and the beat poets. These artists prepared him for the next ten years of his career as a conventional centerfold-turned-fascinating renaissance man.
It’s no surprise that when it comes to his work as a storyteller, some of the themes circle around the familiarity of isolation and the universal desire to connect. For some of Franco’s projects, the desire to be loved and to love exists in the monstrosity of his characters and the situations they find themselves in. These days Franco is more fascinated by the collaboration process that goes into making niche independent films that are on the fringe of his pop culture status.
His latest project — one of several — is Child of God. Debuting at the New York Film Festival, the film is an adaptation of the complex novel by Cormac McCarthy. A trio of isolation stories for Franco, his latest focuses on Lester Ballard, a gangly, lost soul brilliantly played by Scott Haze in a performance that can only be described as a captivating tour-de-force. With a voyeuristic hand, Franco both isolates his character and invites his audience to witness the spiraling behavior of an animalistic man as he kills, rapes, and practices necrophilia in a maddening effort to reconcile a lifetime of rejection.
During a roundtable interview at The Tribeca Grand Hotel, James Franco was open to discussing is never-ending list of projects, the art of collaboration, and the “child of God” in all of us.
On Child of God’s title and relating to the grisly material:
James Franco: Obviously Child of God is a very ironic title. For me the point was that even though his actions are so disgusting and atrocious, and wrong, they’re coming from a place that’s very human. I brought this idea up to the author Cormac McCarthy – that here is a guy who’s thrust out of civilized society, and he wants what we all want, which is to connect to another person, but he can’t. He resorts to extreme means to do that, and in that sense it guided the way I made the movie. This is not a movie that thrives on necrophilia as a thriller, or a gross out movie that’s banking on the disgusting nature of his actions. It’s a character study using his extreme actions to talk about the more universal things. For me the title goes back to that – of course we don’t condone what he does, but in a fictional frame work he’s a monster through which we can see a bit of ourselves in.
The drive behind adapting complex novels
Franco: That was something I discovered. All directors or artists are different and they should be. I just saw an interview with Robert Altman and he talks about the same thing. His process is not Stanley Kubrick’s process and he wouldn’t want it to be. When I went to film school one of the things that these MFA programs teach you is to find your own voice. Before film school I had written original screenplays and I just found that I somehow just wasn’t quite pushing myself as far as I thought I could. As soon as I started adapting things like Frank Bidart’s work with “Herbert White” I had such respect [for the material]. Then I had Michael Shannon in the lead role and I thought, “My gosh, I have this source text that I have such respect for. I have Michael Shannon who I have such respect for, so I better not let them down. I better do everything I can to make the adaptation good. So I don’t embarrass myself.” It makes me a better director when I’m working with a source text that I really respect.
On collaborating through adapting works
Franco: I come to really like collaboration, and even though I talked to Cormac, it wasn’t a close collaboration, but in a sense it was because when you adapt a book you’re reading the book in a different way. It’s an act of translation. You really have to say, “Well what did he mean here? What is he going through? Do I need that in the movie? Is that going to help me tell the story? Am I in line with him here? Do I have to be in line with him here?” All of those questions are questions of collaboration. That is what excites me as a creator.
Creating “shorthand” with frequent collaborators like Seth Rogen, Mila Kunis and leading man Scott Haze
Franco: It’s my favorite. The first thing you hear from directors when they work with actors a lot is like, “Okay there’s this shorthand and you don’t have to say much,” but when I hear that it kind of sounds like, “Okay, what? You guys save time so you don’t have to talk?” But it’s not that. It’s something that Danny Boyle said to me. If as a director you insist on your way too hard then you might just get exactly what you asked for, and no more. Movies work best when they’re collaborative. I want to go into a movie and discover things. I want these different elements to come together and find magic there. When you have people that you’ve worked with before, it means that the actors understand what kind of director you are. You’re already on that path with them, so all the energy can be spent exploring that character.
On deciding what project to explore and when
Franco: You listen to the music. I wouldn’t necessarily adapt all the books that I love. There are books that I love that you get a tingle, or a feeling like, “Oh I can do something with this. I want to engage with this and adapt it.” There are other things that factor into that “music” where it’s like “Does it provide some sort of technical or structural challenge?” We just did The Sound and The Fury, and it’s structurally very all over the place. There’s a lot of things that we had to figure out that pulled me in new directions as a filmmaker. I do like a challenge that forces me to make a movie in a way that I haven’t made one before.
Child of God opens limited in NY and LA on August 1.
[Images via Bing]
