James Franco, in Palm Springs Wednesday to discuss a collaboration with his USC film students, said he was happy to have his latest project screen at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, rather than die at film school and only be seen by a few – a common fate for student films.

“I’m so proud. This is so great to have a film school here and show a film,” he said, prior to the film’s screening in the Palm Springs High School auditorium.

Franco talked at great length about the collaborative process and what it was like to make “Don Quixote: The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha” with 10 student directors. What he did not mention, but was on some people’s minds – was his controversial movie “The Interview” released just weeks ago and likely the most talked about movie in years.

Franco and Seth Rogen, his co-star in “The Interview,” have stayed mum about the movie in the media since hackers threatened Sony with Sept. 11-type attacks at theaters that screened the movie on Dec. 25. Many theaters, however, decided to screen the movie after all and it was also released through video on demand and on the Internet.

The Desert Sun asked Franco his reaction to the controversy surrounding “The Interview,” but the actor stopped speaking and walked away without a response. He was then led away from the red carpet and into the high school for the 7 p.m. screening of “Don Quixote.”

Franco was accompanied on the red carpet prior to the screening by many of the directors – students in his advanced film production class at the University of Southern California — and actors from the comedy. It tells the tale of Don Quixote, who with his sidekick Sancho Panza, set off on adventures to bring justice to the world.

Franco said he chose the iconic Don Quixote tale by Miguel de Cervantes because it’s one of his favorite books and it also lends itself well to a collaboration with many people. He said the movie was created using an approach similar to a TV series in which there are different directors for each episode.

“It is broken up into episodes so that made it easier to split up the different sections among the students. It’s about knowing how to split up the work flow, designing a script that can be broken up but then also put back together … and once you do that multiple directors is manageable,” he said.

Horatio Sanz, who plays Panza, joined the group of 22 onstage after the screening for the brief Q&A that followed the screening. When one audience member asked advice on how aspiring filmmakers can make a movie on limited resources, Sanz suggested using a cell phone.

“If you have a phone you can make a movie I think,” he said. “Now is the best time ever, unless you don’t have a phone — in which case I will buy you one.”
In his second year of teaching film at USC, Franco said he’s proud of the final product and that likely all his students were getting an “A.”

“One of the things that I try to do with the film classes that I teach is to have the class have one foot in the academic world and one in the professional world,” he said. “We bring in professional, very good actors to be in the project. I try to bring resources that I can manage into the projects and do all that so that the films don’t have to just die at film school, be shown to a few fellow students and then disappear. We can actually take it out into the world and having it here as proof that we succeeded on some level.”

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