There’s one drama on James Franco’s resume that made the actor tear up watching it.
Not because of his soulful performance in “The Color of Time,” but the pride he has in the filmmakers behind it — Franco’s former students from the graduate film program at NYU.
“I remember after seeing it, at the end I was pretty embarrassed because I was actually crying a little bit and I never do that,” Franco tells the Daily News of the film’s premiere at the Rome Film Festival two years ago.
“It was really a proud teacher moment. It took me a couple of seconds to stand up because I was a little teary eyed by the end of that screening.”
You couldn’t script a story like the one behind the student film that finally arrives in New York in December: Franco rounded up a band of his students and several former classmates from his own time at the NYU program, also enlisting famous acting peers like Mila Kunis and Jessica Chastain.
“There are a lot of people who would look at a project like this and say, ‘You’re going to take 12 really strong willed people who are all here because they have a very specific vision and you’re going to make something that is one voice out of that?,’” says Pamela Romanowsky, 31, one of the directing dozen. “It’s a challenge and a risk, and James is the kind of person who loves a challenge and a risk.”
Right from the first act of the movie adaptation of C.K. Williams’ poetry, the fledgling filmmakers got the kind of education you can’t get in a classroom.
When Franco went off to Detroit to film “Oz the Great and Powerful” in 2011, his students followed him to snag time with their teacher each night at 8 p.m. after he wrapped filming his Hollywood tentpole flick.
“The budget was so low on this film, that I drove the first equipment truck with one of the line producers from New York to Detroit through a blizzard,” says Shruti Ganguli, 32, who was drafted to be a first-time producer since she was earning an MBA at NYU at the same time as her film degree.
“I learned what ‘hydroplaning’ was when it happened to me.”
It helped that Franco doubled as a casting director. When co-director Gabrielle Demeestere needed to stock a convenience store clerk to shoot her segment, “James was like, ‘Oh why don’t we just have (his ‘Oz’ co-star) Bruce Campbell and this hilarious Detroit driver in Detroit and we can just have the two of them?’
“I didn’t know what to expect but they were amazing bantering improvers,” adds the Brooklyn-based NYU grad.
Armed with a budget less than the catering bill on a Hollywood production, the students split into two teams — quarterbacked by cinematographers Pedro Gomez Millan and Bruce Thierry Cheung — to get it done in the two allotted weeks. Everyone pitched in with multiple jobs, says 29-year-old co-director Omar Zúñiga Hidalgo, who says that when he wasn’t directing his own segment, he doubled as a script supervisor for another director.
Franco, 36, may have a rep for flitting from school to school as a teacher, but the Hollywood renaissance man has stayed in many students’ lives long after “The Color of Time” wrapped. He’s acted in several of his former pupils’ following feature films, including Demeestere’s “Yosemite” and Romanowsky’s “The Adderall Diaries.”
“When James says he wants to collaborate with you, that’s a big thing for someone who’s starting out,” says Millan.
Franco may be somewhat of a film-making Yoda, but he downplays his role as just a “hands-off producer.”
“I just think it’s a way for me to use my place in the entertainment industry to help students get their projects off the ground,” he says.
You should know…
“The Color of Time” can be seen on iTunes and Amazon Instant Video from Dec. 2, is available On Demand from Dec. 9 and hits select theaters on Dec. 12.
