A director and screenwriter as well as an Oscar-nominated actor (and former “30 Rock” co-star of TODAY guest host Jane Krakowski), James Franco has a new project: a film adaptation of William Faulkner’s classic “The Sound and the Fury.” He also talks about “Making a Scene with James Franco,” the AOL Originals series that mashes up TV series chosen by a wheel of fortune.
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The first trailer has debuted for director James Franco’s upcoming drama The Sound and The Fury which is an adaption of William Faulkner’s novel of the same name and sees Franco starring alongside Seth Rogen, Danny McBride, Tim Blake Nelson and Ahna O’Reilly
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Ultimate multi-hyphenate James Franco has tackled seemingly everything from “Spider-Man” to Steinbeck, and he shows few signs of slowing down. Franco’s latest endeavor finds him directing and starring in an adaptation of William Faulkner’s notoriously tricky “The Sound and the Fury,” which bowed at the Venice Film Festival last year and hits theaters and on-demand services on Friday.
Calling in from the set of HBO’s “The Deuce” (“I’ve got my producer’s hat on today,” he said), Franco spoke to Variety about the experience of adapting American literary classics for the big screen — living up to his scholarly reputation in the process.
What made you decide to direct “The Sound and the Fury”?
There were a lot of reasons. I’ve loved Faulkner since I was a teenager. I had done a Faulkner adaptation before this, “As I Lay Dying,” and I knew from that experience that Faulkner’s books are written in very unconventional ways and structured in nonlinear ways, or experimental kind of ways. In trying to adapt that for the screen, I was pushed in directions that I wouldn’t have gone in as a filmmaker otherwise.
I really enjoyed that. I really enjoy unusual storytelling. It had everything I wanted: great characters, good drama and a very unusual approach.
What can you say about the experience of playing Benjy? Your performance looks so physically demanding.
Benjy is one of the most famous characters in American literature. For my performance, my only source was the book. I wanted to just play him as he was described in the book: he doesn’t speak, he can’t articulate words, he only makes noises. But then on the other hand, the whole first section of the book is told from his perspective. So he somehow has an inner voice, he just can’t speak to other people.
What I found is that this performance was all behavior. When I was in acting school, my teacher would always say, “The behavior is the most important, and the words are secondary. Get the behavior down, and the words will float on top of the behavior.” And so it was kind of great to play a character that was all behavior. I had to communicate everything through behavior. But I’ve also learned that as an actor — even though I was also directing this — I’ve learned that as an actor that you depend on the context of scenes, the wardrobe department, the other actors — everyone else around you helps reveal characters.
You’ve also been involved with a few Steinbeck adaptations. Would you say you’re particularly drawn to that era of American literature?
Yeah, I am. When I was in high school, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Melville were my guys. I’ve liked them ever since then. Last year I did “Of Mice and Men” on Broadway, and that really rebooted my Steinbeck interest. So I was thinking about, “Well, what would make a good movie?” “Of Mice and Men” was a good book, and there are already two movie adaptations. And I thought, actually, “Of Mice and Men” as a play was its best form, because the experience of the characters embodied by actors, get the the characters live, you get to make that emotional connection that you can make with an actor that’s different than the emotional connection you make with a book. If you look at “Of Mice and Men,” the way the action is staged is very small, very insulated… And so a single stage is actually the best frame for that story.
I didn’t want to do “Of Mice and Men” as a movie, and so I looked and I thought, oh, there are informally called “The Dustbowl Trilogy”: “Of Mice and Men,” “Grapes of Wrath,” and then the lesser-known one is “In Dubious Battle,” which is about an apple pickers’ strike. And I just thought, it’s the lesser of the three books, just because Steinbeck was still sort of figuring things out. I think it was the first one he wrote of the three. But I thought as a movie, it will actually work better than “Of Mice and Men.” It has this sort of rising tension. The tension keeps building. It’s these migrant apple pickers versus the landowners. And they go on strike and tension builds and builds and builds. One side attacks the other, the other side retaliates, and vice versa. It sort of explodes at the end. I just thought that on screen, that would require more scope, it has many more characters, and it would just be much more cinematic.
After you’ve been involved with so many adaptations, when you read a book for the first time now, do you find yourself having immediate thoughts about casting and staging?
Yeah. [Laughs.] Yeah, I just do it automatically. I don’t rule out any book as an adaptation after doing “The Sound and the Fury” and “As I Lay Dying.” There are some books where I think it’s just an awesome book but I don’t know how I would ever adapt it — but not many! I kind of think about most books as somehow adaptable.
And then there’s one that I’ll read and I get that tingle. It’s like, “Oh, I want to do something more with this. I want to have a conversation with this book. I want to pay homage to this book by making a movie out of it.” And it doesn’t happen with every book, and it’s not even every book that I love. But there’s some, and you just get that feeling like, “Yeah, I’ve got to try to do this.”
Did having your book “Palo Alto” adapted for the screen by someone else affect the way that you approach adaptations?
Actually, yeah, I think so. I wrote that book when I was in writing school. I was amongst writers and I was writing it just to write a book. I wasn’t thinking about a movie. But as soon as it was done, I had been in movies for a decade and a half at that point, and I thought, “All right, we could do a movie out of this!” I immediately knew that I didn’t want to do it myself. If I did, it would just be one more iteration of my version of things. I wanted somebody else to do their take on it. Gia (Coppola) was a recently graduated photography student at that time, and I saw her photos and the videos she’d made and I just thought she had the perfect sensibility for it. She hadn’t made a movie, but I thought if anybody has moviemaking in her blood, it’s her. I sort of took a chance on her and it paid off.
What I’ve found is if I had adapted it, I probably would have just — it’s a collection of interconnected short stories, so I probably would have just kept it as different episodes, as it is in the book. What she did is she took the different stories and wove them together and combined them. I thought that was awesome. It gave the whole movie a coherent arc. It gave the characters more dimension, and I don’t think I would have done that if I had done it myself. She really teased out a lot of the throughline.
I think it’s had a huge influence on me. I teach filmmaking at USC and UCLA, and every class I teach is production-based, so the class will collaborate on a feature film project, but I have to break it down into different sections because I’ll have four directors and four writers, or sometimes even more. Because of the way that Gia wove the stories in my book together, instead of making four short films, I’ll have the class weave them together so it becomes a unified feature film. I would attribute a lot of that to the way Gia did “Palo Alto.”
Why is now the right time for audiences to be experiencing Faulkner again?
[Laughs.] Well, I think any time is great to be interested in Faulkner. For me, it was interesting to do this at this time because the books “The Sound and the Fury” and “As I Lay Dying” were written over 80 years ago, and if they were made in that time, it would be very different because people made movies differently then. Nowadays movie audiences are pretty sophisticated. Music videos, reality TV, reality TV confessionals — all of these weird techniques have accustomed audiences to read film and video in new ways.
I thought, “Faulkner’s books are so experimental, I can apply a lot of these contemporary approaches and techniques to Faulkner and actually achieve a closer stylistic adaptation of the novels by using these contemporary techniques.”
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New Films International will release James Franco‘s adaptation of William Faulkner‘s novel “The Sound and the Fury” on Oct. 23 in 11 theatrical markets as well as on VOD, the company announced Monday.
Franco stars alongside his “Pineapple Express” co-stars Seth Rogen and Danny McBride, as well as Ahna O’Reilly (“The Help”), Scott Haze, Joey King and Tim Blake Nelson.
“The Sound and the Fury” is based on Faulkner’s Nobel Prize-winning book of the same name, which was published in 1929. Set in Jefferson, Mississippi, the novel centers around the Compson family, former Southern aristocrats who are struggling to deal with the dissolution of their family and its reputation. Over the course of 30 years, the family falls into financial ruin, loses its religious faith and the respect of the town of Jefferson. Many of them die tragically.
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Matt Rager adapted the novel, which is the director Franco’s second Faulkner adaptation following “As I Lay Dying,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
“While most people recognize James Franco as a talented actor, we are excited to highlight him as a director with a keen eye for narrative stories. Coupled with his love of literature, we think ‘The Sound and the Fury’ is a wonderful addition to the New Film International slate,” said NFI president Nesim Hason.
Caroline Aragon of Made In Film-Land, Lee Caplin of Usonian Media Group, Vince Jolivette of RabbitBandini Productions and Miles Levy produced the film, which was executive produced by Nesim Hason of New Films International, Straw Weisman of Marquee Productions, Sezin Hason and Eddie Siman.
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The 12th Annual Oxford Film Festival started out with a bang. Thursday night, hundreds of Oxonians gathered at the Oxford Studio Cinema because of a picture that was posted to Instagram hours before. James Franco surprised everyone with his selfie and the caption announcing that he was en route to Oxford for the premiere of his film The Sound and the Fury.
Being such a Faulkner fanatic, it is a wonder that Franco has never been to Oxford before. But he certainly wanted to make up for his time lost while he was in town. After a visit to Faulkner’s grave and a two hour tour of Rowan Oak, Franco was ready to unpack his bags and stay for the weekend.
“After his tour, he tried in vain to wake up his personal assistant so that she could change his flight,” The Sound and the Fury producer Lee Caplin said. “It was so late that no one in his circle was up and he ended up having to leave the next morning.”
Franco’s love for Faulkner goes back to his high school days. “I was in high school when my dad gave me copies of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury,” said Franco. “I was a reader before, but this was the first time I’d ever read something that dense.” Years later, while filming a movie in Prague, his knee was injured and he was bed-ridden for weeks. During this time, Franco read several Faulkner novels. That’s when his infatuation with the writer began
Franco and Caplin met for the first time about eight years ago to discuss Faulkner and the possibility of producing a movie together.
“What started out as a half hour lunch turned into a three hour meeting,” Caplin said. “I had it in mind that I wasn’t going to do this with someone on a whim. I wanted to know that he was really serious about it. And he proved himself.”
Both As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury have truly honored Faulkner and his novels. Though his work has been adapted to screen before, no on has truly captured what it is to read a Faulkner story.
“Until Franco, Hollywood has never dealt with the real Faulkner. There have been movies based on his work, but they were just Hollywood versions with fake southern accents,” Caplin said.
The two have made such a great team and they aren’t stopping now. Faulkner’s The Hamlet and The Bear are next on their agenda.