He's hosting the Oscar ceremony and up for the best actor gong. Just don't ask James Franco what he makes of the competition...
James Franco pulls up outside a cafe in New York in the back of a black 4x4. He has come straight from Yale, where he is studying for a PhD, and is dressed like a student, or like someone in character as a student. On the way into class this morning he received a phone call informing him he had been nominated in the best actor category at the Oscars, for his lead in 127 Hours, and all day he's been juggling Byron and press. The car idles in the freezing New York air; eventually the driver gets out and opens the door for him.
Like Jake Gyllenhaal and Ethan Hawke before him, Franco is a golden boy who also inspires certain eye-rolls. He is carrying a copy of the Norton Anthology Of English Renaissance Drama (2,400 pages) and over the course of the interview will lower his voice to a sepulchral whisper when he wants to say something important about art. He is a very good actor; in Danny Boyle's film, with its slender script, the entire weight of the production rests on Franco's range of facial expressions. Playing the poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl, a small gem of a film produced by Gus Van Sant, he is effortlessly good. In person, at 32, he is slight and boyish, but on screen this comes off as the lightness of touch of an actor with substance.
Franco's biggest competition in his category at the Oscars is Colin Firth. Has he seen The King's Speech?
"Mmmm-hmmm."
And?
"It's nice." A pause. "It's very well made."
Ha. What's his reservation?
"I know I'm biased, but I don't think it's cutting edge. It's a success story. Is he going to make the speech? You know he's going to get it. He has a little coach, like Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid, and he gets through it and makes the speech. It's pretty safe."
Franco says he didn't have trouble concentrating in class this morning – he is used to compartmentalising and switching between disciplines. Before Yale, he was enrolled in four different creative writing courses; Palo Alto, a book of short stories, was the end result. For his PhD dissertation, he wants to write something about cross-disciplinary media; how "different mediums can be blended together, or what the boundary lines between them are, what works better in one medium or another". Howl, the title of which is taken from Ginsberg's famous poem that in 1957 became the subject of the obscenity trial recreated in the film, is a good example of this, combining animation, drama and Franco's recitation of the entire poem. It is moving and weirdly thrilling, with Franco demonstrating his winning combination of earnest and goofy.
Nothing has won him as much attention, however, as the scene in 127 Hours in which, playing hiker Aron Ralston who got trapped under a boulder in Utah in 2003, he has to cut his own arm off. It was reported that people in early screenings passed out and, says Franco, his paleness in the scene wasn't all down to acting. (At high school, he once fainted during a blood donation.) Actually, he says, quite a lot of the film wasn't really acting. Thanks to new camera technology, Boyle was able to shoot uninterrupted for up to 20 minutes at a time, while Franco struggled to free himself. "I mean, short of actually cutting my arm off, I did everything Aron Ralston did to try to escape. So I would spend three, four, five minutes trying to do something, and getting really frustrated when it doesn't work, and getting exhausted and actually bruising myself. And the acting just falls away."
It must have looked an uninspiring prospect on the page; a man trapped under a boulder for 90 minutes, with almost no dialogue. But when Franco got the script, he asked himself the questions he always asks before saying yes to a project: "Can I attempt to make something very unusual? OK. Is it a great story? Great. That's really all you can control. I thought, if…" here he drops to the whisper… "if done right, this approach will bring the audience very close to the character's experience. Because, kind of like writing, show don't tell. If the behaviour is compelling and expressive, I thought, it'll bring the audience very, very close and they'll feel more. Just like when you're writing fiction: you can go far away and have an objective view, and if you write closer to the character's experience and voice, you feel closer to the character."
If it wasn't for his writing and studying, says Franco, he wouldn't be able to enjoy being an actor. That's what it was like in his 20s, when he felt under huge pressure to prove himself, or rather, to prove to his parents he hadn't made a mistake by dropping out of college and taking acting lessons. He grew up in California and was enrolled at UCLA for an English degree when he decided to change direction. In protest, his parents, who had met in college, withdrew all funding.
"It's not like they were mad at me, but basically they said, 'You can make this decision, we're not going to disown you, we're still going to love you, but it has to be something you do on your own, and you'll have to start supporting yourself.'"
It had its upside, he says. "Because what it did is remove me from needing their approval or anyone else's approval for what I did. And it's kind of the same with everything now. The ironic thing is my mother is now an actor – has gone to acting class for three years and has just been in this film I directed. My brother's an actor, too. Everyone's getting in on the act." He smiles. I think that's what's known as getting the last laugh.
There was a problematic period, however, when Franco says he felt constantly guilty about his life. He got his first break in 1999 in the TV show Freaks And Geeks, and then in a TV biopic of James Dean, for which he won a Golden Globe. But, "I would pull away from a celebratory moment, or a few moments of fun with friends; I would deprive myself of it because I'd be putting the energy into acting. I was compensating for having left school, so I thought I had to really prove myself as an actor. And that wasn't helping my acting in the end because I was overthinking things and overworking things and doing too much on my own, and the key element for me in acting is relaxing."
The way he talks about it, going to college is like eating kale so he can have a guilt-free dessert: "Now that I have school, I'm able to enjoy things when they're good." It "balances" his life out, he says. "It really is like an anchor; something I can put my energy into and get very solid results."
He gets frustrated by the way his education is written about: "Going to school is not a performance. I'm not asking critics to comment on it. It's like they're equating it to reviewing Howl, or something; deciding to go to Yale – what's he trying to show us? I'm not trying to show you anything, I'm trying to go to school."
I imagine Yale enjoys the extra press, and Franco is the subject of mostly fawning commentary, whether or not it annoys him, and which has, perhaps, led to his confidence in areas outside of acting. There's a question of why someone as good as Franco at what he does best would choose to spend time doing something he is less good at. In his short story Just Before The Black, for example, the protagonist, a suicidal drug addict, observes that "the building is beige, but the shadows make it shadow-colour". You get the idea.
Most of the stories in his collection are first person which, he says, comes naturally to him as an actor: the process of getting into character. He has produced art installations, too, in New York and LA – combinations of video, drawing and sculpture, which the New York Times called "a confusing mix of the clueless and the halfway promising". He considers his guest appearance on the cheesy soap opera General Hospital "performance art". (It's an overwrought post-modern joke based on the fact the character is a multimedia artist called "Franco".) He has been helped in these endeavours by Gucci, for whom he once modelled, and which now sponsors much of his artistic output. "It's incredible. They're just like patrons of my work or something."
Unusually for Hollywood, Franco is sanguine over speculation about his sexuality. He has a girlfriend, but has joked, after all the gay roles he has played (including Sean Penn's boyfriend in Milk), "maybe I'm just gay". Watching Howl, which is also a love story, you wonder if playing the gay Ginsberg is something only a demonstrably straight actor could risk.
"It's possible," says Franco. "I remember when Brokeback Mountain was being cast, people saying, 'Gosh, I wouldn't want to do that. A gay cowboy?' And I still get it – that's the bloggers' favourite topic, how many gay roles I've played. So it's territory where people pretend they're OK with it, but based on the amount of coverage that a straight person taking one of those roles gets, it shows that there's still a big bias. It's easier for a straight actor to play a gay role than it is maybe for an out gay person to play it; my sense is that a gay actor still feels he or she, if they came out, would be typecast and couldn't play straight roles after that. I don't know the ins and outs of Rupert Everett's story, but he certainly claims that happened to him."
It is Franco's year so far; as well as being nominated for an Oscar he will be presenting the awards, with Anne Hathaway. In the summer, he wants to direct an adaptation of William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying, in which he hopes to persuade Joaquin Phoenix to appear. And he has a new art project on the go. He can't talk about it now, but it's going to show in Europe. He leans in; details to come, he whispers.
• Howl is out on general release.
No comments:
Post a Comment