Experience: Whatever it takes

How James Franco learned to finance his ambitious literary adaptations

James Franco has worn many hats. With a true passion for film-making, he ventured into acting and has since gone on to direct several films. Time and again, he has proven his mettle for comic as well as serious roles. However, Franco has lately taken upon directing ambitious literary adaptations.

With William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God already under his belt, Franco continues his streak with his latest, an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, which follows a group of farm workers who organise a strike in the 1930s. The project, which stars Nat Wolff, Selena Gomez, Robert Duvall and Franco himself, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September.

Franco shared he read Steinbeck’s books as a teenager but it was about two years ago when he did Of Mice and Men on Broadway that got him thinking about doing more Steinbeck. “I wanted to do Battle because when I reread it, I thought it was perfect,” The Hollywood Reporter quoted him as saying. “It has a similar setting to where I grew up and it has similar characters and similar circumstances — ranch hands and people working on ranches and farms and a lot of migrant workers.” Franco found the conflict to be topical. “That people without rights or without power should be compensated for their work is still a very important issue.”



What remains interesting is how he manages to finance his literary adaptations. The 127 Hours star said, “It’s something that we had to figure out.” He recalled a story about how, 10 years into his acting year, he went to NYU for film school and wanted to adapt a Faulkner short story, which they ended up budgeting out at half a million dollars. “It’s one thing to try and shell out a Faulkner adaptation as a feature but for a short film, nobody’s going to buy it. Since film school, I’ve become a little smarter now about how to manage a budget that’s more responsible.”

Franco’s next project, The Masterpiece, is based on the making of the infamously bad 2003 film The Room by Tommy Wiseau. “The Tommy who made The Room is not who Tommy is anymore,” he said.

The actor cited Wiseau’s will to make his film in the face of constant rejection from Hollywood as a reason to admire him. “He got it done against the odds. But I think the success stalled him in some way. He hasn’t really made a feature film since then because Tommy made The Room in a very honest way.”

Although Wiseau has retroactively called his film a ‘black comedy,’ the audience and critics generally consider it a poorly made drama and it has often been called the ‘Citizen Kane of bad movies’.

Franco said, “Tommy has now sort of accepted that and is happy that people are laughing. In his mind, it’s sort of like they’re not laughing at him, they’re now laughing with him.”

Published in The Express Tribune, November 4^th, 2016.

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