by James Franco
One night at 2 a.m., we all lay in the dirt under bushes and waited to ambush the Japanese actor/soldiers. It was all set up. Captain Dye had told the advisor for the Japanese actors to send them toward our camp at a certain time. We lay in the dirt for two hours. Finally we heard them. The poor Japanese actors thought they were going to be sneaking into our camp, but as they crept by at the appointed time, we got ’em! We fired hundreds of blanks at them before they fled, defeated. We won the war game, even though it had been set up.
Then one of our guys was bitten on the neck by a spider. The spider bite was real. Australia has some of the most poisonous spiders and snakes in the world. He was sent to the hospital.
One night at midnight, Dale Dye took the whole company on a stealth raid on the Japanese camp. We took the wrong route and went by a cattle farm. I was at the front of the long column of actor/soldiers with Captain Dye and Benjamin Bratt. We were halted by a grunting man in the dark. He was about a hundred feet in front of us. It was hard to determine what he was saying, but the grunts had a thick Australian accent. Captain Dye whispered that I should hold the company back, and then approached the thickset, grunting man in the dark. The light from his farmhouse was orange in the haze. Then we saw that the farmer was holding a shotgun. His gun was real and, I’m sure, loaded. Then I could make out some words, something along the lines of “Get the fuck out of here.”
But Captain Dye was already trotting back to us, head ducked, in case there was any shotgun spray following him.
“Move Captain Prince, move!” whispered Dye. He always called me by my character name. In fact, we were not even allowed to mention that we were making a movie. We were in boot camp. I quickly gave the order to turn the company around and retreat. All seventy of us turned and ran. I had never seen Dale Dye scared, except for that time, his gooseneck stretched in panic, running from a potential firefight that he had entered with fake bullets.
When the boot camp was over, we had a little ceremony. I looked each actor/soldier in the eye and congratulated him. It was funny looking eye to eye with these guys. We had accomplished something, we were definitely better at pretending to be soldiers, and the movie would benefit from our training, but for whom were we pretending at this ceremony? We were still just actors, not trained killers. There was one guy, I’ll call him Chucky, who had asymmetrical eyes—we all do, just take a photo of one half of your face, and then duplicate it, and flip it, and put it together, and you’ll see a very different person. But Chucky’s asymmetry was pronounced. One eye was at least an inch below the other. I really noticed this when staring into them at the ceremony.
Chucky was just an extra, but he was a hard worker. He was a local. He didn’t say much, but during the boot camp and the shooting he proved himself to be someone that could be depended on to fill in for whatever was needed. He rode a motorcycle, and one evening after shooting, about two months into the shoot, he crashed and killed himself. We were shooting out in some cane fields, and there were many kangaroos in the area. Apparently one jumped out in front of Chucky, and Chucky, being a skilled motorcyclist, swerved around it. Right into an oncoming car.
I had already left the set by the time Chucky had his accident, but some of the other actors were still there. The car was on the side of the road; Chucky’s motorcycle was on its side, next to his body, and his head, still in the helmet, was on the other side of the road.
We had a memorial for Chucky. Before the funeral, Captain Dye met with the company—he still considered us a company—and called us all by our character names. He told us that he wanted us to wear our military costumes to the funeral. Captain Dye was used to ritual, and he knew how to put large numbers of young men through tough group experiences, to make them cohere as a unit. Our group was bonded by the mission of the film, so wearing the uniforms wasn’t as crazy an idea as it sounds. But nobody did it. Everyone wore his real-world clothes.
At the funeral, Chucky’s friends and family said nice things about him. They said the movie had been very important to him. He had been very into athletics and extreme sports such as skydiving and rock climbing, but the movie had opened up the idea of more possibilities. He had wanted to go to Hollywood.
In the final film, I don’t think you can even see Chucky. He is just another guy in green in the background. It is hard to make out individuals other than the main actors. In the film we go on the raid, massacre a bunch of evil Japanese guys, and save the POWs. The film took about a year and a half to edit, for no good reason that I could discern. Finally, in 2005, there was a big premiere in Washington, D.C. Harvey Weinstein, the original president of Miramax, was a friend of Hillary Clinton. She and John McCain both came to the premier and sat together. Weinstein introduced them as the future presidential candidates. I spoke to Hillary—she and Bill are big film aficionados, always renting DVDs out in Connecticut. McCain didn’t say much to me; he looked catatonic.
When it was released in theaters the next week, the movie was a bomb. It was the last Miramax release before Disney kicked the Weinstein brothers out of their own company. So there was no money put into the advertising. It’s not a bad movie. Looks nice, at least. And I read a lot of books in Australia. It’s not the worst movie I ever did, but I wish I could forget most of it.
TRADITION 9
We should remain unorganized, but we may create production companies in order to serve greater projects.
Power of the Image
POWER OF THE IMAGE. Power of information. Power of flow. The power of the image can create flow; it can attract and bring attention to whatever it wants. This is why celebrities are a big part of presidential elections. This is why celebrities get paid millions of dollars for their books. This is why companies want celebrities to endorse hair products.
Camera people, sound people, production designers: Get them to make your work look good. Sometimes the difference between a movie star and a soap opera actor is the lighting.
Of course there is the script, and the way it’s edited, and the subject matter. But if you shot The Godfather, shot for shot, on a soap opera soundstage, with soap actors, don’t you think it would seem silly?
Or, let’s say you shoot it on all the original sets they used with all the same actors they used, even Brando, but they lit it like a soap opera—it would change everything. The acting would suddenly look bad.
When I direct, I am often more interested in the technical sides of things. It’s hard for me to allow much time for lighting because I often find the payoff to be incommensurate with the time spent. But I like to think about framing and camera movement as much as I do the acting. The camera movement combined with the editing is the grammar of film.
The grammar of film is more complex than the grammar of text.
Within each shot are innumerable variables: Who has been cast, how those actors play their parts—do they use accents? Do they transform themselves physically? How are those actors presented in individual shots—close-ups? Tracking shots? Zooms? How are those shots edited together—jump cuts? Minimal cuts? Constant cutting? Tracking shots leading to static shots? Who and what are the scenes focused on? What is made primary? Are there filters used? Is there background music? Special effects? On and on.
Now, of course, there are some conventions. We are used to watching films on the big screen and television shows in the comfort of our homes. And of course movies all end up on the smaller screens as well.
There are conventions of duration, usually ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes for a film and thirty to sixty minutes for a television program.
There are actor types that are often used. This is a tricky thing to define, but there are certainly trends. Asian, Latino, Black, Middle Eastern, and Jewish actors generally get the shaft as far as the types of roles being offered. Oh yeah, and women too.
There are genre conventions. Action movies. Gangster movies. Cop shows. Vampires. Teen shows. Reality shows about the trashy little pockets of our country, trashy in an in
teresting way. These shows have some of the more original characters around.
There are conventions about material that is accepted: Violence is more acceptable than sex. Straight sex is much more acceptable than gay sex. In comedy you can get away with subject matter like masturbation, rape, and death much easier than in dramas where the material is used for its disturbing aspects.
Because film and acting are so technical, they can be learned like a science. Of course, on top of the technical aspects, or nested within them, are the artistic considerations. I’ve been on sets where I look around and see all these adults focused on putting something together, all these professionals, good at what they do, and what they’re making is the most puerile crap ever.
It makes you wonder why everyone does it. If so many people feel like they’re stuck doing material they hate, why do they all do it? And what is the way out? It seems like one way is to work with the great directors. Every actor says he wants to work with Scorsese, and I’m sure it’s the same for the below-the-line positions as well. But why are we all sitting around waiting for Scorsese? Why not be your own Scorsese? And even if you can’t make movies like him, the power of creation is enough. If you work on your own projects, the projects you believe in, then you have the power of making a Scorsese film.
I hate the guys who are held up like gods because they make big movies. This is the whole reason for this testimony. To show that they are not born into those positions. We are all capable of making something. You can be the director and actor of your own life.
But you usually need to collaborate. That’s the catch. It’s hard to create a great life without other actors, without people helping with the visual aspects, and the audio aspects, without a good soundtrack. It can be done—look at 127 Hours—but still, being alone for so long? That’s no kind of life.
In life we all want to get along; in art we want to be defiant. In design we want pleasing things; in art we want pieces that become tools to pry underneath the surface, to rip through the façade.
You want the crew to be amicable, especially if you’re making something disturbing. Every kind of subject should be fun to make; the participants should enjoy doing it. Bergman acknowledged that he made films about tough subjects, but it was not masochistic because he was transforming the material into art, the painful parts were purged by the art.
I used to spend tons of energy and time getting emotionally prepared on set, but now I can turn it on much faster. If you believe in the scene you don’t need to emotionally prepare much: The situation will present itself to you as reality, and you will react. It just requires the imagination to take you there.
Think about how few crying scenes there are in any given film. Think about how many scenes there are with your clothes off. We often spend so much time preparing for these kinds of scenes (emotional self-torture, time in the gym) for so little payoff.
Be an acting animal. Breathe acting so that you don’t have to think about it much. Let the material shape you, let the imaginary circumstances shape you. Let the character be born. Don’t put too much of your own spin on it, let it arise naturally from everything around you.
And if you’re the lead of a film—or a supporting character—know how to ride the production so it does half of the work for you. Meaning, you don’t need to show some things through the character if the set, or lighting, or special effects are doing much of the work for you.
TRADITION 10
We should have no opinions on outside issues, hence the public life remains public and the private life is private.
From the Foreword to the Second Edition
FRIDAY, 1 A.M.
During this time I listened to a lot of Motown. There was a song in the Ryan Gosling/Michelle Williams movie Blue Valentine that was supposed to be their song. It was this obscure Motown song by someone called Penny and the Cents, or something like that. They used the song in the film because no one else used it as their song because it was so obscure. But after it was put it in the film, it became known.
What does fame get one?
The picture of me sleeping with my mouth open next to a bunch of attentive students says a thousand words. But it says the wrong words, or it says the words that TMZ wants it to say. It doesn’t say: This photo was taken at 10 p.m. during an optional guest lecture by William Kentridge, hosted by the graduate art school. James wasn’t even in the Columbia art department but he went to their visiting artist lectures anyway, even though he was in four other graduate programs at the time and working on the film Howl and hosting Saturday Night Live, and a bunch of other things. Like many students do, he fell asleep in class.
But beside fame, what does putting on a persona get one?
We all have masks. Often, I like to write about young people, because it’s a time when they are still sculpting their masks.
When we get older, after years of use, the masks meld with our faces. Yes, there are little tweaks here and there, but the mask is reinforced by response. We wear the mask and people respond to the mask and the mask becomes us, the outside response from others nails it down tight.
James used to try to buy all the new albums. He had over 500,000 songs on iTunes. It was a bit of an addiction. Just click “$9.99 Buy,” and then “you might also like these Genius Recommendations.” But the drive crashed and he has never recovered his half a million dollars worth of music.
I like when the press presents me as dumb. It sure takes the pressure off.
Natalie Portman went to Harvard. She’s even mentioned in The Social Network. She is tied to Harvard. It gives her a lot of intellectual capital in the press. But in person, she doesn’t act like an intellectual.
But she is smart; she spends more time listening than talking.
This is the testimony of someone who wears masks for a living. Whenever he wears a mask in front of the camera and thousands of people see it, it remains with him a little bit.
Is there a veridic self underneath?
Or are the surfaces what rule?
Some people, mostly creative people, don’t like scholars because they look at art from the outside but know nothing about the actual making of art.
Facebook.
I think it’s nice to have a mix of everything. Some critical writing is better than fiction. Most critical writing is better than fiction.
Twitter.
Google.
Instagram.
James would listen to Motown because it meant he didn’t need to keep up on the next big thing. There was an established body of work that he could explore without worrying about keeping up with its expansion.
After he lost his iTunes music, James just plugged “You and Me” by Penny and the Quarters—the Quarters not the Cents—into Pandora and got a bunch of other obscure Motown songs.
Perez Hilton.
B____ slowly kisses her way along my stomach. I’m used to it. Sometimes twice a day. Sometimes four in a day.
The Atlantic Wire.
On the show Entourage, the main character played by Adrian Grenier does things to the extreme. I want to think that it’s over the top, but actually, it might be less extreme than what actually happens in Hollywood.
Gawker.
Once, when someone asked Elvis about the Vietnam War, he said, “I’m just an entertainer.”
Kenneth Anger.
I hate the idea of not being able to talk about something if I want to.
Lindsay Lohan.
There is nothing tinnier than obvious fake laughter, when one person in the crowd is laughing louder than the rest, to be heard above the rest, as if she is saying, “I’m in on the jokes, and I appreciate James. I’m his ultimate fan!”
Paris Hilton.
But sometimes I think that the politicians have no more right to be politicians than I do. Ronald Reagan? Arnold Schwarzenegger? You just need the right advisors.
Anne Hathaway.
Sarah Palin. Okay, she was dumb, we get it. But we’re all actors now, ar
en’t we? Some actors are smarter than others.
Christian Bale.
I met B______ in Morningside Heights, near Columbia. She was working the desk in the student exhibition hall, reading Kafka. She had a cool demeanor, but it was more like she couldn’t get her words out so easily, so she covered everything with an icy smile.
Some people smell when you bend them over.
Ryan Phillippe.
During breaks, M______ and I would meet sometimes in the _______ building. She made it easy. Third floor, one of the empty rooms. I’d hold the door shut because there was no lock.
I’d spend at least one of my twice-weekly nights up at Columbia with B_____. She lived on Amsterdam, in some old church property that Lucien Carr lived in, Ginsberg’s buddy when he was at Columbia, the one that killed their other buddy. Young Kerouac helped him hide the murder weapon and then they went to see a film.
At 1 a.m. I’d finish writing and walk from Dodge Hall, where Berryman, Trilling, and Van Doren all had been—I think—across the boulevard and up the hill to her old building and to her room with the mattress on the floor and the art theory books stacked around.
The boys—Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Carr—used to have arguments about Thomas Wolfe in these parts. Night of the Wolfians, they called it.