James Franco TV - Funny Or Die

The Art of Elysium, a non-profit 501(c) (3) organization founded in 1997, encourages working actors, artists and musicians to voluntarily dedicate their time and talent to children who are battling serious medical conditions. We provide artistic workshops in the following disciplines: acting, art, comedy, fashion, music, radio, songwriting and creative writing.

Palo Alto is the debut of a surprising and powerful new literary voice. Written with an immediate sense of place--claustrophobic and ominous--James Franco's collection traces the lives of an extended group of teenagers as they experiment with vices of all kinds, struggle with their families and one another, and succumb to self-destructive, often heartless nihilism.

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James Franco is about to alter evolution.

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, opening today, Franco brings the popular chimp-dominated franchise into modern focus.

Franco, 33, calls the live-action prequel, in which he plays scientist Will Rodman, “a new version of Apes for our day.” Gone are the spaceships and tortured humans (the last Apes film was Tim Burton’s 2001 take). In their place are white lab coats, systematic animal testing and a race to cure Alzheimer’s disease, personalized by Rodman’s afflicted father (John Lithgow).

Cue scientific tinkering gone horribly wrong

The plot centers on Caesar (Andy Serkis), a chimp Rodman has raised since birth whose intelligence has been supersized as a side effect of Rodman’s manufactured cure. Now smart enough to question his own condition, Caesar begins a tactical revolt among his ape brethren.

How plausible is it? The Apes story line hits on the debate behind the ethics of genetic engineering, and Franco says he has been contacted by groups decrying outdated testing on apes in the U.S. “To ease human suffering is a noble goal, and I am glad we have medical experimentation that has taken us out of the dark ages,” says Franco, who supports alternative, less harmful methods of animal testing. “I hope that kind of development continues.”

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JAMES Franco – actor, producer, author, screenwriter, artist and PhD student – refuses to be defined by the scath ing reviews he got for his on-stage performance at this year’s Academy Awards.

“I really could not care less about what people think of me as the Oscars host,” says the 33-year-old New Yorker, with the sort of defiant edge in his voice that suggests the almost universal drubbing did, in fact, get under his skin.

Until Franco agreed to play straight man to Anne Hathaway’s 100kW smile in front of a billion viewers in February – a performance so oddly flat that some observers accused him of being stoned – he was having a dream run.

After a decade in which he struggled to find his acting niche, the man formerly known as Spider-Man’s sidekick hadn’t put a foot wrong since his scene-stealing performance as a greasy-haired dope dealer in Pineapple Express (2008), an outrageously silly stoner comedy that had the paradoxical effect of making people take him seriously.

“It was part of a whole paradigm shift, an attitude shift, a karmic shift,” says the actor, acknowledging that previously he had been difficult to work with.

“I had a horrible approach to acting. Part of it was because I wanted to direct but (that meant) I was overstepping my boundaries as an actor.

“When I made the decision to just do my part as an actor, I was able to get along with people. I am sure that had something to do with the opportunities that came up. I was suddenly a lot easier to work with.”

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hen the original “Planet of the Apes” movies were made in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the apes were just actors in ape costumes.  Not this time around, though… now, it’s being done digitally, with the “main ape,” Caesar, animated based on the motions of actor Andy Serkis.  We could call it “Ape-atar”…  and James Franco was amazed at how easy it was to film scenes with Andy as an ape.

Listen to the audio snippets here.

Photos of James before his interview with David Letterman have been added to the gallery along with photos of James during (and after) his appearance on The Today Show.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Appearances > 2011 > Celebrities Visit “Late Show With David Letterman” – August 1, 2011
- Appearances > 2011 > The Today Show Studios

While we wait for the full interview to pop up online, here’s a clip from it.

Here is James’ interview on the Today Show.

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Science reporter Charles Q. Choi talks with James Franco about what it means to be human and how new forms of life might challenge those notions. The interview begins after the trailer snippet.

A B-roll video for the film has been released along with an on-set interview with James.

Thanks to James Franco Italia, I’ve added scans from James’ interview with the magazine to the gallery. Along with this, three “outtakes” have also been added.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Magazine Scans > Scans from 2011 > Playboy (August)
- Photoshoots > Outtakes > Session #91

Playboy has their interview with James up on their site. You can read a part of it below and the rest over at their site!

PLAYBOY: In the past five years alone you’ve starred in numerous movies, including 127 Hours, Pineapple Express, Howl, Eat Pray Love and Milk, published a book as well as short fiction in major magazines, appeared in a recurring role on General Hospital, guest starred on 30 Rock, hosted the Oscars, directed short films and mounted big art projects at international museums and galleries. You also earned a B.A. in English from UCLA, got an MFA from Columbia, studied filmmaking at NYU, are now completing a doctorate in English at Yale and have been accepted into the literature and creative writing Ph.D. program at the University of Houston. Isn’t this a bit much?

FRANCO: I don’t know, but the first short film I ever directed, years before I even went to film school at NYU, is about a boy who is introduced to the concept of his own mortality when his goldfish dies. He says to his parents, “I don’t want to die,” and though they say he shouldn’t worry because there’s plenty of time, they don’t really comfort him. So he thinks, I have to do everything now. He gets a neighbor girl to marry him, gets a job, starts a family. Although I’ve changed and relaxed a bit, my behavior shows I’ve thought along those lines for quite a while.

PLAYBOY: When it comes to your academic work, how do you react when journalists and bloggers accuse you of skating by on your fame?

FRANCO: It’s a great thing. When people heard I was in all these academic programs, the reaction for some person I don’t even know was to take a picture of me sleeping at Columbia. It wasn’t even in class; it was a 10 p.m. optional guest lecture. But people love to post that picture on the internet and criticize me for taking a spot away from somebody else who would really care about the lecture. ­People sleep in class at all my schools all the time and nobody posts their pictures.

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A new photoshoot and interview has surfaced with James from Wired! Photos from the shoot can be found in the gallery.

GALLERY LINK:
- Photoshoots > Outtakes > Session #90

Wired: Your interests seem to be moving toward smaller films and performance art. How’d you end up in another computer-graphics-laden summer sci-fi flick?

James Franco: It sounds weird, but in my head that was one of the things that justified this project. Once I heard that Weta Digital was involved and that the man who shot the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Andrew Lesnie, was the cinematographer, I got very interested. That basically pushed me to say yes.

Wired: Were you a fan of the movies or a fan of Tolkien?

Franco: I was a huge fan of the movies and of Tolkien, and I thought those movies were a perfect meeting of technology and a story that needed it. I especially loved the work Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis did to create Gollum, and then again in King Kong. Suddenly these computer-generated creatures had souls—because Andy was behind them. You know, all this technology is scary for actors—what will happen to us? But right now, in this moment, acting opposite Andy Serkis while he’s playing a chimpanzee is a new and interesting kind of experience.

Wired: What was it like?

Franco: On set, Andy would be dressed in an outfit that looked like gray pajamas, with a ton of wires around him and a small camera at the end of a wire armature pointed at his face to capture his expressions. He looked nothing like a chimpanzee, but he was so good at capturing the behavior of a chimpanzee that I guess my actor’s imagination took over. It was like acting with a chimpanzee who has amazing acting instincts.

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An actor/director/writer/student/author/artist, Franco is talented for sure, but can give off alternating hints of mysterious and open, high minded and down to earth, opaque and transparent. His prolific past few years have, thanks in part to the squadron of opinions on the internet and late night shows, been both celebrated and maligned, with his less than successful turn as Oscar co-host alongside Anne Hathaway coming in as by far the most buzzed about — and criticized — public moment.

Having given what seemed a flat, unenthusiastic performance opposite Anne Hathaway — whom he later compared to the Tasmanian Devil — Franco received heavy criticism, including from longtime Oscar writer Bruce Villanch, with whom he then sparred before making up.

When Franco took the job, he seemed excited to do so, saying it was a no-risk proposition, but as he explains to Playboy in their new issue, he knew as the show approached that it probably wasn’t going to be such a hit.

“It’s hard to talk about because it’s like assigning blame — not a fun thing to do. For three or four weeks we shot the promos and the little film that played in the opening,” he says. “In the last week, when we really started focusing on the script for the live show and did a run-through, I said to the producer, ‘I don’t know why you hired me, because you haven’t given me anything. I just don’t think this stuff’s going to be good.’”

Chief amongst Franco’s complaints was the bit in which he came out dressed like a very unflattering Marilyn Monroe, a scene in which he was clearly unhappy to participate. That much was obvious to the viewer already, but as he reveals, he nearly made it that much more clear.

“I was so pissed about that I was deliberately going to fall onstage and hopefully my dress would fall off or something — they couldn’t blame that on me; I was in high heels,” Franco says. “The plan had been that I was going to sing as Cher and then Cher was going to come out onstage; that got axed when Cher and the song from ‘Burlesque’ weren’t nominated. I told them, ‘Look, this is the thing people are going to talk about, the images they will take away from the show.

“I just didn’t want to fight anymore, even when they said, ‘You’ll come out as Marilyn Monroe. It’ll be funny.’ Me in drag is not funny,” Franco continues. “Me in drag as Cher trying to sing like her is a thing. That didn’t happen, so then I just didn’t want to argue anymore. I was going with their program; I wanted to do the material they gave me, not be one of the many cooks doing the writing. There were a lot of cooks who shouldn’t have been cooking but were allowed to. There were some cooks my manager tried to bring in, like Judd Apatow, who wrote some very funny stuff that wasn’t used.”

Still, he gave it his best, with his low-energy performance actually functioning as an intended foil to Hathaway’s highly spirited effort. And when it was all over, the initial feedback was positive.

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