http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/movies/12ryzik.html?hpwThe New Season Film
The (Extremely) Creative Ferment
of James FrancoJames Franco as Allen Ginsberg in “Howl,” which is set for release on Sept. 24. By MELENA RYZIK
Published: September 8, 2010
VANCOUVER, British Columbia JAMES FRANCO has prepared for this interview. Overprepared, perhaps, but that wouldn’t be anything new; he loves research. Sitting in his hotel room here last month, where he’s filming the prequel to “Planet of the Apes,” he’d read my Twitter feed and watched some videos I’ve done about music and movies.
“It’s almost as if we’re in a relationship,” Mr. Franco said, crinkling his eyebrows, “where, like, I’m the actor and you’re the director.” He paused, uncrinkled. “And it’s weird because usually when I pick the film or a television show or whatever, I know who the director is going to be, I know what they’ve done in the past, and I choose if I want to work with them. But in this situation I don’t really choose, so I guess the least I can do is find out who you are.” He quoted my Twitter posts back to me for the rest of the day, even though he said he doesn’t use the site himself.
Which is also weird, because Mr. Franco, 32, loves referential commentary and the confluence of media. Lately he has embarked on a quest to be an artist rather than a celebrity, exhibiting his paintings and video installations at galleries and studying for advanced degrees at various colleges, writing short stories and composing poetry, appearing as a menacing artiste named Franco on ABC’s “General Hospital” while still flirting in big-budget movies like “Eat Pray Love.” His cross-cultural meandering has sparked water-cooler chatter on blogs and in print, sometimes with the help of Mr. Franco himself, who has written about it, adding another layer to the post-modern riddle of his shifting persona.
Meta? Or does he, like most Hollywood heartthrobs, just like talking about himself? “I used to not like it,” he said. But a few years ago, at the premiere for “Spider-Man 3” in London — around the time Mr. Franco was having second thoughts about the direction of his career — he discussed interviews with the young British painter
Nigel Cooke. “He said, ‘I love it, I can talk about my work all day,’ ” Mr. Franco recalled. “And then it kind of clicked.
James Franco as an agitated Harry Osborn in "Spider-Man 3."“There’s a certain kind of thought and preparation that goes into his work. I envied that. And so now that I’m engaged with a lot of other things that I’m interested in, I don’t mind talking. It also feels less like I’m just selling a studio’s product and more like I can just have discussions about things that I enjoy.”
Good thing too. In “Howl,” the next movie he is discussing, not selling, Mr. Franco plays the young
Allen Ginsberg; for most of his screen time he is giving an interview to an unseen interlocutor. The film, the first feature from the documentarians
Jeffrey Friedman and
Rob Epstein (“The Celluloid Closet”), is less a biopic than a triptych, moving among the Ginsberg interview, the 1957 obscenity trial that followed the publication of “Howl,” and the reading of the poem in a smoky cafe, interspersed with bright, fanciful animation. It opened this year’s Sundance Film Festival and will be released on Sept. 24.
Mr. Franco met the two filmmakers on the set of “Milk” — its director,
Gus Van Sant, is an executive producer of “Howl” — and signed up even before it was financed. “It was a huge boost and gave us a lot of credibility,” Mr. Friedman said of enlisting Mr. Franco.
As the filmmakers raised money, Mr. Franco was able to prepare with his usual gusto: watching interviews, reading biographies, talking to experts, wearing the nerdy Ginsberg glasses (still available at Moscot in New York). His take — that the young poet was an eager communicator even as he was just discovering what he wanted to say — applies to his own path. And it’s clear on screen, where Mr. Franco vibrates with intellectual energy while recognizably laconic in his delivery. “I have joked that he’s a 21st-century beatnik,” Mr. Epstein said of Mr. Franco, “but he really does have that sensibility. He’s really interested and excited about experimentation and exploring the possibilities of how one can be an artist.”
While preparing for “Howl” Mr. Franco was enrolled in master’s programs at
New York University (for film) and
Columbia University and
Brooklyn College (for writing). For months he would walk to class listening to Ginsberg read “Howl” on his iPod. “I’d have the little book with me, and I’d listen to him, and I’d just read along with him to just ingrain that voice in my head,” he said. Mr. Franco has made three short films about poems for school and is at work on a feature about
Hart Crane that he will adapt (from
Paul L. Mariani’s biography), direct and star in. And he is in his fifth semester in yet another graduate program, for poetry, at
Warren Wilson College near Asheville, N.C.
As hard as I work in film," Mr. Franco said, "it's my day job."Debra Allbery, the director of that program, where students work remotely except for 10 days on campus each semester, declined to talk about Mr. Franco’s writing specifically. “This is a place where he can come be an apprentice like everybody else,” she said. “We worked very hard to protect him here.” But she allowed that he managed to fit in. “As far as the commitment, the focus, the dedication, the skill, he’s right in line,” she said.
Academic overload is not what actors are known for, but Mr. Franco has gone beyond that as well; he is creatively outstretched. His New York gallery debut, “The Dangerous Book Four Boys,” is on view at the
Clocktower Gallery in Lower Manhattan. His first book, “Palo Alto,” a story collection set in his California hometown, will be out in October from Scribner.
After that comes “127 Hours,”
Danny Boyle’s dramatization of the true story of
Aron Ralston, the hiker forced to amputate his own arm after being trapped in a Utah canyon; Mr. Franco again spends much of his screen time alone. This month he begins a Ph.D. program at Yale, for English.
“I shouldn’t say I’m doing so many things, because it starts to sound ridiculous after a while,” Mr. Franco said, rightly. Then he described a few other projects.
In the weeks this summer he spent in Vancouver filming “Caesar: Rise of the Apes” — a title whose campiness drove him to an eye roll — he spent his off time holed up in the hotel, shooting short videos for Sundance or editing those and his other projects with an assistant. He sneaked out only to see “Inception” and “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.” “I like how they get away with making everything about sex, but not having it,” he said of the “Twilight” series. Romantic coyness suits him.
In person Mr. Franco is casual but intense, sharply charismatic. He closes his eyes in thought and grins at his ideas as he describes them, as if he’s in the midst of a particularly fulfilling internal dialogue. The poetry projects and his book are the least influenced by his celebrity, he said, though he knows people will view them through that prism. “As hard as I work in film, it’s my day job,” he said. “Those are, I don’t know, pure expression.”
Some of his hyperproductivity is no doubt the result of his upbringing. His parents’ interests included painting, software development, educational reform and children’s books. “I guess you could say that we have a very strange, artsy family,” said
Dave Franco, the youngest of the three Franco siblings, and also an actor. (
Tom, the middle brother, is a sculptor.) And James has always been industrious.
“I would write scenes for ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ and Franco would come over and help work on them and read them,’ said
Seth Rogen, his co-star on that cult TV show and later in the pot comedy “Pineapple Express.” “I remember at the time thinking it was crazy that he would do that.” Early on, Mr. Franco made a painting for Mr. Rogen — a really dark one, Mr. Rogen recalled. “It had the words ‘cancer’ and ‘death’ written on it. He was going through a phase, it was kind of reminiscent of Basquiat.” Mr. Rogen requested a “happier, more colorful” painting, and Mr. Franco obliged. (“I realized later that was maybe a really insulting thing to ask an artist,” Mr. Rogen said.)
Mr. Franco with Seth Rogen playing lazy stoners in "Pineapple Express."Mr. Franco’s transition from leading man to intellectual does not surprise Mr. Rogen. “If anything, it was really weird that he was ever pursuing the straight-ahead movie star path,” he said. “Knowing him, it just seemed like the last thing in the world that he would be happy doing.”
By his own admission Mr. Franco is happier as an artist now, even if his efforts so far have not been wholly critically successful. A short story published in
Esquire received withering responses; his art show also drew uneven reviews. In
The New York Times,
Roberta Smith called it “a confusing mix of the clueless and the halfway promising,” though she added that it made her rethink her own art biases.
Mr. Franco was pleased with this critique. He is open about still developing his ideas, even if they sometimes appear before a skeptical public. “All I can do,” he said, “is put the work in.” He’s an ambitious student, not a superhuman.
“Any movie that I’ve ever seen with him, I can’t remember him staying awake through,” Dave Franco said.