There is simply no limit to what interests him. “I don’t like being bound,” he told BuzzFeed at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Getty Images / Gareth Cattermole
TORONTO — James Franco has three movies playing at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, and considering Jonah Hill called his project philosophy "One for them, five for no one" during the Comedy Central roast of Franco, the range is quite interesting.
There's a commercial romance drama co-starring Mila Kunis and Liam Neeson called Third Person, which should be an audience pleaser; another, based on Franco's book Palo Alto, which stars bright young actors and was directed by Gia Coppola; and the third is an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Child of God that Franco directed, which centers on a serial killer-necrophiliac living in the backwoods of a rural Tennessee town in the 1960s.
The actor-director-screenwriter-producer-author-artist-student-professor (really, there aren't enough hyphens to fully facilitate a proper title for Franco's résumé) has heard the criticism, but he's not all that concerned with mainstream perception of his more esoteric endeavors, as one of his three films at TIFF proves.
Despite strong early reviews, Child of God will not be an easy sell, but Franco doesn't mind the challenge. In fact, he loves playing the game.
"I don't like being bound. I don't like being bound by a certain discipline, meaning acting isn't going to allow me to express all I want to do, so I direct and do other things," Franco told BuzzFeed. "And I also don't like being bound by mediums or distribution outlets, meaning there are certain expectations for commercial cinema, so if I want to make a video piece or an art piece or film piece that isn't so worried about narrative and wants to emphasize something else, then I'll find a different outlet... It is a matter of categorizing and it is a strategy, not in the sense of putting anything over on someone, it's more about I have these interests. Where is the audience for this project? Where is the audience for this project? And maybe it's one of the reasons why it seems like I'm all over the place, but it's really just kind of giving each project its due, and also enabling me to continue with each of them.
"If I want to do something like Birdshit that has sort of a narrative, but really, it's more about the dance and the projections and presentation, PS1 [the Museum of Modern Art art institution in New York City] is the perfect place for that," he continued, speaking of the performance art/dance piece he helped put on in April. "If I took that to Laemmle's [the Los Angeles art house chain] or the AMC, people would say, 'Fuck you, James!' If I take it to PS1, expectations are different and I can play with the form more."
Understanding that difference in audience — and thus return on investment — is a crucial aspect of keeping his ambitions sustainable. When Franco took his BDSM movie Kink to the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, he knew it would get attention, which allowed it to play at other, smaller festivals around the world. Because it was produced on a low budget, much like Child of God, the movie could survive in that more niche world.
"Knowing Child of God is a movie with a very difficult subject matter, I'm going to figure out a way to do it," Franco explained. "A lot of people have tried; Tim Blake Nelson told me way back when, Sean Penn tried to make this and Tim was going to direct it and Sean was going to produce it, and they didn't. And part of that is the money. So what I've figured out is how to make it good, but for a responsible budget, so that I don't have to go and appeal to Avengers-sized audiences. I can appeal to the art house audience, and that will be enough."
Yes, Child of God certainly will be an art house entrant, but it also has more mainstream roots. Though, given his public profile, it's almost hilariously on-the-nose that Franco would make a movie about a serial killer-necrophiliac, it's not his idea, and he's not even stealing it from the avant-garde. The film, which is based on the 1973 Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, was well-reviewed upon its recent premiere in Venice.
And if anything, Franco had to work to make the book more palatable to an audience, given the horrors on the page that detail the life of Lester Ballard, a troubled, backwoods-drifting loner, who's shunned by society and mentally off-balanced. He finds company with big stuffed animals and, eventually, dead young women; it is a disturbing sight, but one that tugs at some odd compassion in a viewer.
Though Franco remained incredibly faithful to the source material, he did have to do some cutting in translating the novel to the screen.
"There were other murders in the book and different kinds of things that I felt like, if you actually watched those things on screen too much, it's going to really turn the audience's sympathy away from this character," Franco said. "What I think is most powerful about the book is that you're able to read this and not see him as a monster; that you follow him, and not that you condone his acts, but you follow him and you go on the journey with him. And that's what we needed with this movie... It's building to this character saying, 'Oh, I can have a love life if I sleep with these bodies.'"
