benSuperdetka (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ben_superdetka) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} ohnotheydidnt,@ 2009-11-06 17:32:00 |
|
| Entry tags: | james franco |
James Franco @ Yale
“I love you!” screamed a girl seated in the buzzing crowd when James Franco made his way to the small stage in Linsly-Chittenden Hall Thursday afternoon.
The giggling din grew even louder as Yale’s own paparazzi — students armed with camera phones and digital cameras — snapped away before Franco’s talk began. Approximately 80 percent of the audience was female.
More than a thousand students vied for 180 seats at Thursday’s Berkeley College Master’s Tea, co-sponsored by the Yale Film Society, to see Franco — the star of such box office successes as “Milk,” “Pineapple Express” and “Spider-Man.” The lucky few were selected in a lottery.
Yale Film Society president Taylour Chang ’11 called the event “a good opportunity to catch Franco on the cusp of doing much more than just acting.” Indeed, though he is best known as an actor, Franco spoke Thursday about his newer roles as a director, screenwriter and student.
Franco, who visited Yale last April to sit in on Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare lecture, is currently enrolled in both the film program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Master of Fine Arts program in writing at Columbia University.
“I enjoy film, but I’ve been doing it for 12 years now,” Franco said. “I went back to school because, for me, acting wasn’t enough.”
Franco admitted that he sometimes feels a bit “schizophrenic” straddling the worlds of school and stardom. But he added that the workshops in creative writing courses have forced him to improve his screenwriting abilities and, in turn, his acting.
“The accountability enforced by having peers read my writing has been very valuable,” Franco said.
Franco’s love for literature and the English classes he took as an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles continue to affect his work on and off screen and, now, from behind the camera, Franco said.
“All the shorts I’m directing [at Tisch] are based on poetry that I’ve read and adapted,” he said. A number of these short films were screened Thursday night at the Loria Center, followed by a question-and-answer session with the actor.
Several times throughout the tea the crowd erupted into laughter — partly at the star’s dry humor but also at fawning students in the audience.
One student in the audience — a fan of Franco’s work on the television series “Freaks and Geeks” — said the tea was “totally worth missing section for.”
Franco quieted the room’s laughter and talked fondly about his experiences on the late nineties TV show, but he also admitted that the other shows of his early career — including a series called “Pacific Blue,” which he affectionately dubbed “Baywatch on Bikes” — were regrettable at best.
Franco did not shy away from discussing his failures Thursday and said his encounters with poor directing and ill-fitting roles have taught him how to be a conscientious actor.
But collaborating with producer Judd Apatow on “Pinapple Express,” Franco said, was one instance of a working dynamic between director and actor in which he felt “incredibly free.” Franco then answered questions about his acclaimed portrayal of a gay character in last year’s “Milk,” a project he said he pursued because of his love for both the film’s director, Gus Van Sant, and actor Sean Penn. Franco said working on ‘Milk’ inspired him to direct with “an anti-normative approach towards film.”
Franco cited James Dean, Marlon Brando and directors like the Belgian Dardenne brothers as professional inspirations, in addition to his “love affair with books.”
In turn, Berkeley College Master Marvin Chun, who hosted the tea, said he was impressed with Franco’s intellectual sophistication.
“Today is the most thrilling day of my mastership,” Chun said with an grin. “Only at Yale can a lowly, know-nothing psychology professor share a stage with an international superstar.”
Franco remained after the tea to take photos with fans and sign autographs.
source
James Franco is sitting in the Berkley College Master's house, a cup of tea in his hand, talking about New Historicism and literary critic Stephen Greenblatt.
With his scruffy hair, his wide, toothy smile and his perfect bone structure it's enough to make anyone intimidated. Surely someone should not be this intelligent and this pretty.
As he talks about Greeenblatt and Harold Bloom (and how Bloom doesn't like Greenblatt's theory), he's dressed like a type of hipster scholar, wearing an old-man sweater and a plaid shirt. He sometimes closes his eyes when he talks, analyzing his words as they come out.
Scene sat down with Franco (accompanied by Berkley Master Marvin Chun and two Yale undergrads) before his Master's Tea to talk about his visits to Yale (fangirls get excited — he might be coming here for his doctorate!), awkward bathroom encounters with creepers in the Columbia library and the overuse of the song "Paper Planes".
Q: So you were spotted on campus last year in Harold Bloom's seminar? What brought you here? How was that?A: I'm applying to Ph.D. programs next year so I came out to see what the program was like, and he's like a celebrity in academia, so I wrote him, I wrote Harold, an e-mail, and he wrote me back, "Please come." I think that particular class was on "Antony and Cleopatra" and "Cariolanus." As far as I could recall, and he even said this in the class, he was touching on a lot of the similar points that he covered in his book "The Invention of the Human". It was great to have it live. I was actually here last week. So I've spent a lot of time here.
Q: Why do you keep coming back?
A: Just coincidence. At some point I'm supposed to get together with Michael Warner, the [chair] of the [English] Department to talk about going to school.
Q: You are pressing your master's of fine arts at Columbia. What is it like going to school when you are a celebrity?
A: It sounds like you want a little bit of juicy stuff. Well I had a little incident last night at Columbia that was unpleasant. For the most part the programs I'm in are pretty small. There are about 30 to 40 people in each of my programs. So I know it's not awkward. And I have friends in the programs and all of that. It feels normal to me. It's when I take classes outside of the programs or go to the library where I'm mixing with people that I don't know or don't see in class everyday that I get some weird reactions. Columbia has a great library, the Butler Library, and I don't think I can go in there anymore. Because last night I went in, I went into the restroom and this guy was in there and he's like kind of mumbling like "you're James Franco, right?" I'm like "yeah, how's it going?" Basically, he didn't get angry, he said he was annoyed with me that I came to the library and that there are girls in the library. He didn't express himself. I think what he mean was that he thought I came to the library to meet young girls and he said it wasn't fair. And I tried to apologize for any disruption my presence had, but he was still annoyed. So I left and I went to the writing building, which is a little more private, but I have to sit there along in the dark.
Q: Last year you were in "Milk," but you were nominated for a Golden Globe for "Pineapple Express"? How do you balance between James Franco the Judd Apatow-crew guy and James Franco the Oscar-bait actor? Also, by the way I'm a huge "Freaks and Geeks" fan.A: OK, good. I guess I'm just interested in both things. I've fortunately been given opportunities to pursue both at the same time. The Judd Apatow comedies I think are a pretty new thing. It was hard to find a comedy, you know "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" is slightly over the top but people that surround "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" are fairly grounded characters. I think there's a real attempt to ground the characters in people of today, in the youth of today. Before — nothing against these movies — like Jim Carrey movies or Adam Sandler movies generally are about extreme characters in extreme situations and high concept. And once that happened it was, I think it opened opportunities for an actor like me. I'm not going to compete with Jim Carrey and do a character with wacky faces or that kind of stuff. If it's more grounded character in silly situations then it was something maybe I could do and it would be something that I would be interested in. I've been offered comedies before, romantic comedies and stuff like that, and you know a lot of them were just silly so I wasn't interested. There was something about these that they were trying to do new things in comedy that also interested me.
Q: Based on its appearance in the "Pineapple Express" trailer do you think "Paper Planes" is overplayed?A: Is it overplayed? Do they still play it? Really? I thought it was such an amazing marriage between trailer and a song. Because the song's not even in the movie.
Q: Yeah, I realized that when I went to see the movie.
A: But I thought tonally they were a perfect match. And they probably played the promo a lot. So, yeah. If they are still playing it maybe we contributed to its being overplayed.
Q: You're starring as Allen Ginsberg? How did that come about? Was the role inspired by your studies at all?A: We already shot it and it's likely that it will premiere at Sundance. It was directed and written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman who are documentary filmmakers normally ad they are incredible. In the documentary world they are like gods. I was introduced to them because they made the Harvey Milk documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk" in the mid-'80s that won the Oscar. They were around when we were preparing for Milk. Halfway through Milk Gus [Van Sant, the director of Milk] presented me with their script, Gus was the executive producer, and said that Rob and Jeffrey want you to play Allen Ginsberg. I was like "Allen Ginsberg? I don't think I'm the right person. Although I love their work." And he's like "It's a young Allen Ginsberg". It only goes up until 1958 when his poem 'Howl' was put on trial" It started to make a little bit more sense. Everybody usually pictures the older, larger, balder and bearded Allen Ginsberg, but when he was younger he was thin and had hair and pretty much the same coloring that I do. So that made more sense and then the script and the project was so unusual I thought if you're going to do a movie about Ginsberg this is probably the way to do it.
[Franco laughs as a security guard arrives to escort him to his Master's Tea in LC.]
Q: So one last quick question. I've been reading it on the Internet: "General Hospital?"
A: Yeah we can talk about that. I shot my first day.
Q: Why was there a decision to do that? Are you a soap fan?
A: No. (laughs) I never watched a soap before.
source
Sorry about the pic, fixed it.
