Posted by: Kristy Sturdivant
I’ve always appreciated how some actors want to take their turn in directing or producing films as really it’s like any other job where surely you get a little bored doing just one part of a whole, so I think it’s great that James Franco wants to tackle directing films. What I’m shocked at is how ambitious his goals are, for someone who hasn’t been behind the camera much he sure is biting off a lot of tough material. Adaptations of books can be difficult, but doing adaptations of William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy? That seems like a tough thing for even a seasoned director, but that’s what James Franco wants to do and he’s already started working on it. In fact, he wants to start filming As I Lay Dying by Faulkner this summer, and next summer work on Blood Meridian by McCarthy and he wants to have them work together even though that’s not how they were originally intended. Now if you haven’t read either of these books, they tend to jump from narrator to narrator to give you the entirety of the story, and Franco is going to work with that. He says:
You can slip into the characters’ heads and give them their inner voice for a while, but it has to be more fluid because movies just work differently than books. Movies, in some ways because they deal in images, are more concrete. I want to be loyal to the book — my approach is to always be loyal in a lot a ways — but in order to be loyal I will have to change some things for the movie.
Franco has already done a test scene with LOST actor Mark Pelligrino and showed it to Scott Rudin (who currently has the rights) and he loved it so we’ll have to wait and see how this goes. I wish him luck, both of those authors are dry to read let alone adapt.
Source: Entertainment Weekly
