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GQ: Talking Cornrows with James Franco

Gel — Tue, 08 May 2012 00:20:14 +0000

Also spotted was the face of Gucci’s Made to Measure ad campaign and jack-of-all-trades James Franco, who looked pretty sharp himself in one of the brand’s peak lapel “Marseille” suits. We chatted him up about his brother’s big GQ moment, his go-to cardigan, and of course, this look.

GQ Eye: We’re at a Gucci event, you’ve been the face of the brand, and you obviously wear a lot of Gucci on and off the red carpet. Do you have a favorite look or piece you’ve worn over the years?
James Franco: I’m a big cardigan sweater guy.

GQ Eye: We’ve seen you rock a particular navy one a few times, even boldly over a suit.
James Franco: I love that one. Although I’m wearing a lighter blue one in this new movie directed by Seth Rogen. We all play ourselves, so I’m of course wearing Gucci. I’m wearing a sweater I’ve worn before, but it’s a thicker and light blue.

GQ Eye: Did you see your brother’s GQ cover?
James Franco: I did, yeah!

GQ Eye: What did you think?
James Franco: I thought it was great. I was surprised and very impressed.

GQ Eye: Surprised because you didn’t think he deserved it?
James Franco: No, I didn’t know he was going to be on the cover! My assistant brought it to me one day and I was like, “my God.”

GQ Eye: Did you read about the poem he wrote about your grandmother?
James Franco: No.

GQ Eye: [After showing him the poem] So we’re wondering, do you have a poem you’ve written about your grandmother too?
James Franco: [Laughs] I don’t have a poem for my grandmother. Although my movie about Hart Crane just came out this weekend in New York at IFC and one of his best poems is called My Grandmother’s Love Letters, and I did recite that in the film. It’s funny there are similar sentiments in Hart Crane’s poem to this one.

GQ Eye: Moving on to Spring Breakers. We have to know, how long did it take to get your cornrows done, and who did them?
James Franco: We had a local artist down in St. Petersburg, Florida do it. I think it took about five hours total, only because we had to try different cornrow configurations. It doesn’t hurt that much, but it does get very itchy because you can’t get them wet.

GQ Eye: How long did you have to have them for?
James Franco: Only two weeks.

GQ Eye: With regards to your character in the movie, the rapper Riff Raff has said the role you are playing was originally meant for him. Is that true?
James Franco: None of that’s true. I’ll tell you why he could have never been offered the role. Harmony (Korine, the movie’s writer and director) and I were talking about doing a movie together before Spring Breakers was even conceived. I had been a fan of his work and he wanted to do something and I said, “I’ll do anything with you.” We started discussing ideas and one day he sent me a treatment, which he said he’s never done before, just to run it by me. And it was this idea of these girls going on spring break and then they meet up with this guy who leads them into the dark side. And then he wrote the script. So there’s no chance Riff Raff could have been offered the role. Of course Harmony and I looked at some of Riff Raff’s videos as inspiration, but he was one of a number of people we looked at. I would say the biggest influence on the role was this local Florida rapper named Dangerous. He’s fairly unknown, but he was down there in the place, living the life, and he became the biggest model for me and he’s in the movie.

GQ Eye: So Riff Raff never sent you some of his clothes to wear like he said?
James Franco: No, never. But if he still wants to send me clothes, he can.

Source: GQ

Interview Magazine: Girls Gone Wild

Gel — Tue, 08 May 2012 00:18:55 +0000

Chances are good that if you have an Internet connection, you’re already aware of how Harmony Korine spent his spring break. Photos from the Florida set of Korine’s latest film, Spring Breakers—some taken by paparazzi, many shot by the cast and crew themselves—began appearing online in March, quickly invading Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and virtually every other image-sharing social-media channel, and instantly generating the kind of viral buzz that ought to be the envy of every big studio marketing department in the country. In fact, Spring Breakers hadn’t even wrapped shooting (and won’t be in theaters until later this year at the earliest) when images of the film’s principals—Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson clad in neon bikinis, and James Franco done up as a gun-toting vision of Kevin Federline by way of The Dude—passed into pop culture’s visual lexicon. “I liked the idea of the film as a social experiment,” says Korine. “It was like there were two movies—the actual movie, and then the one that the media, paparazzi, and the people tweeting photos were also creating.”

Spring Breakers stars Gomez, Hudgens, Benson, and Korine’s wife, Rachel Korine, as a quartet of college students who land in jail after robbing a restaurant to fund their spring break trip. The foursome is bailed out by Alien (Franco), a drug-dealer and gunrunner, who seduces the girls into his world. Drugs, sex, and violence ensue. (Gucci Mane, Glee’s Heather Morris, and skateboarding weirdoes the ATL Twins also feature.) “When I wrote the script, I started thinking about girls in bikinis with guns, wearing ski masks,” Korine recalls. “I was like, ‘Where would you see that?’ And the idea of spring break came to me. I just started imagining girls on spring break robbing places.”

Even for a guy whose last feature was the 2009 film Trash Humpers (in which trash is, indeed, humped), Spring Breakers represents a radical move. Korine admits that it might have the most commercial potential of any film he has directed. If so, he owes that largely to his cast: the girls are a major draw—Gomez, for one, has more than 29 million Facebook fans. And what would a weird spring-break crime film/media-art project that either is or isn’t an earnest attempt at creating mainstream fare be without Franco? “When Harmony told me who he was going to cast, I thought it was perfect for so many reasons,” Franco says. “The young actresses are so excited to do a movie like this with someone like Harmony. They were so eager and enthusiastic to be a part of it.”

For her part, Gomez agrees. “I was getting kind of repetitive in terms of the roles I was picking, and I really wanted to do something that was completely different,” she says. “It was a mark thing for me—like, ‘This is what I want to be doing.’ I want to be taking myself seriously as an actress, and this was definitely a stretch.” She adds: “I mean, I’d never smoked a cigarette before in my entire life. It was really funny—they had to show me how to do it.”

Benson, best known for her roles on the ABC Family series Pretty Little Liars and the daytime soap Days of Our Lives, approached the opportunity to show a side of herself that’s not necessarily family-friendly with equal relish. “Harmony wanted to break us all out of the good-girl mold,” she says. “For Selena, Vanessa, and me, our audience is all in their teens or younger, so they’re not even going to be able to see this when it comes out—it’s not appropriate.”

Hewing to his raw, full-frontal aesthetic, Korine shot Spring Breakers in and around St. Petersburg during March and April, just as actual spring break was in full effect, and recruited as extras some 500 kids who just happened to be there partaking in bacchanalia. The realism extended to the details of the characters’ outfits. “I had to keep in mind where these girls are from: a small town in the South,” says the film’s costume designer, Heidi Bivens. “What they were wearing at school had to be stuff they could find where they were living. And then when they come to spring break, it changes, because they’re able to shop in St. Petersburg.” Some authentic-feeling elements proved harder to find. “The most challenging for me were the ski masks that the girls wear,” says Bivens. “They’re supposed to glow fluorescent, but there aren’t any ski masks I could find that were the color we needed in the daylight and that would glow under black light, so I had to start experimenting with dyes. I probably went through 20 different dyes to find the right one.”

Of course, Korine rose to acclaim after writing the script for Kids, the 1995 parental nightmare directed by Larry Clark that introduced the world to Chloë Sevigny, Rosario Dawson, and the uncomfortable realities of a kind of teen life that Korine himself inhabited as a skater kid in downtown New York City. Spring Breakers is similarly fascinated by youth gone wild. “Everybody likes to have fun, and everybody imagines that somebody else is having more fun than they are because they’re willing to break all the rules-to the point of getting arrested,” says one the film’s producers, Chris Hanley. In a way, Korine says that Spring Breakers is his attempt to capture something that he’d missed the first time around. “I grew up in Nashville, but I was a skater, so I was skateboarding during spring break,” he says. “Everyone I knew would go to Daytona Beach and the Redneck Riviera and just fuck and get drunk—you know, as a rite of passage. I never went. I guess this is my way of going.”

Source: Interview Magazine

James Owns More Suits Than He Knows What to Do With

Gel — Tue, 08 May 2012 00:10:45 +0000

Being a face of Gucci, James Franco gets a lot of nice swag. “Every event, they give me a new suit,” he explained at a cocktail party hosted by GQ and, yes, Gucci. “I’ve been working with them for years, so I have more suits than a person could ever wear in, like, five lifetimes. Sometimes I give them back.” Does he wear them all? “Sometimes we use them in art videos we make. And some of my friends are my size, so they wear them.” More on his modeling side gig, below.

So, are you one of those actors who rolls your eyes when you have to do fashion shoots?
When you pose for a photo shoot, a lot of actors will say, “I haaate it.” But now that I’ve shot campaigns, I see that it’s just like a performance. I think what actors don’t like about it is that there’s no mask that they’re wearing — no role, like there is in a movie. But it’s kind of the same thing as making a movie: You’re trying to bring people into that character and tell a story. It’s the same thing in fashion.

Photo shoots can be really awkward.
If you have a bad director, you don’t want to open up to him or her. And if you have a bad photographer on a photo shoot, you just feel cheesy. But if you have a good director or photographer, it’s like just playing a role.

Do you do anything on shoots to feel comfortable?
I just tell them to play music and I go with the groove, and then it’s over.

Source: NYMag

James on the cover of 10 Men

Gel — Tue, 08 May 2012 00:06:54 +0000

James is on the cover of the latest issue of 10 Men. Check out photos from the shoot in the gallery. Thanks to James Franco Italia for the images!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Magazine Scans > Scans from 2012 > 10 Men
- Photoshoots > Outtakes > 2012 > Session #006

Editor’s Letter

So, let’s just state the f-ing obvious: we’ve chucked yet another celebrity on the cover of our fine men’s mag – Mr James Franco. Is he a celebrity? An actor? Or just a caffeine junkie? You decide. I personally think he’s rather hot in a little Gucci made-to-measure number.

The rest of our issue is dedicated to the Autumn/Winter shows. Boys, boys, boys wearing top togs and the odd naked torso. You may think we’re a little pre mature but have you never heard of a waiting list? At least thanks to us there’s a slim chance you can beat it.

And in the style of our blog, that’s enough said about the issue. Short and sweet. That’s all you’re getting from me, Tenners. See you back here in September.

Bye-bye for now.

Antony Miles
Editorial Director

James on Francophrenia, Lip-Synching to Selena Gomez, and ‘Superficial’ Bloggers

Gel — Mon, 07 May 2012 23:59:22 +0000

We sat down with Franco and Olds to talk about the inspiration for the project, how they think it will be received, and whether it’s hard for Franco to be taken seriously as an artist when the blogosphere is “sniffing each and every one of his farts,” as one commenter so boldly put it.

James, why did you bring your own film crew to the General Hospital shoot?
Franco: There was a big response to me being on a soap opera, and at a gala for MOCA right after I started on General Hospital, these artists were coming up to me saying, “Oh, I wish I had a forum like that. I wish I could be on network television doing weird stuff.” It made me think about having a little more ownership over this weird insertion of myself into this soap opera. So I got permission to bring my own film crew.

The footage from Francophrenia was all shot during the filming of the General Hospital episode that takes place at MOCA. Could you tell me a little more about that?
Franco: My character is an artist on the show: He’s a wacky, strange artist that kind of embodies every cliché of an artist, but it’s okay because he’s on a soap opera. That led to the idea of doing a special episode about that character’s art. Then I thought there should be one more level: They should have the official network episode, and then there should also be a fucked-up episode. The original plan was to bring the material from my film crew’s shoot back to MOCA and do a screening there, which we still might do. But after the shoot, I had a lot of other stuff going on. I had all the material sitting there. Then Ian called. Not only did I like Ian’s work, I thought, Yes, this is perfect, because one of the ideas behind going on General Hospital was to surrender, and let the context around me and the people around me control my image and do what they will.

Ian, how did you get involved in the project?
Olds: I edited a documentary for James a couple years ago called Saturday Night, about behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live, and I was aware of this project. I hadn’t seen any footage, but I said I’d be interested in looking at it. We always knew it would be an experimental documentary based on what was interesting to James about the process, but we didn’t know what kind. At first it was just about digesting the material, looking at every single frame and trying to keep an open mind on what’s compelling. You could see a weird tension between the crazy amounts of work and expertise that goes into the production of a soap opera, and the kind of strange empty fantasy that was being created.

Francophrenia is a relatively highbrow endeavor, James, and you have a lot of those — projects with Kalup Linzy and Laurel Nakadate, for example. But everything you do attracts so much attention. Does that undermine your more serious work? Like when you sang the Selena Gomez song in the car — as one Vulture commenter said, “Must we sniff each and every one of this guy’s farts?”
Franco: Ha! I’ve learned to embrace that side of it, and it really becomes part of the project — especially with a project like this. I love collaboration. I get to collaborate with all kinds of people: my heroes, Paul McCarthy, Douglas Gordon, Gus van Sant; my peers, like Ian; people with less experience than I have. But sometimes I feel bad — I feel some of the collaborators get anxious because the blogs will focus on me, and in a very superficial way. But there’s nothing I can do about that. When it’s a project like this, something based in the art world, or writing or something like that, I’ll just embrace my position as a public persona and make that part of it. I am subject to comments by the most superficial kind of bloggers, and I bring all those commenters to any project I do. The problem is that those bloggers are used to commenting about, you know, pop celebrity and movies. So when I do something else, their comments are just completely uninformed and stupid. But it doesn’t bother me; in fact I’ve come to accept it, and almost like it! That level of commentary, I think, is part of what I do now. It’s certainly part of a project like this.

Can you tell me a little more about the recent lip-synching videos?
Franco: The first one was Selena Gomez. And we did a Rihanna one. The latest is Bieber, and I’m sure people will be writing about that. But we have a whole channel of videos that we produce: We have a show about art openings, we have an online soap opera that Kalup Linzy produced and directed, we have a show about undergrad college students. All this stuff takes a lot of time to put together. And we do get a lot of viewers for those shows. But then when I do something so stupid and simple as singing, like, one and a half verses of Selena Gomez’s song with cornrows in my hair, it blows up on the blogosphere and we get, like, all these viewers. Part of it is, “Wow, I guess I just tapped into what they want!” You know, this pop, surface-level kind of thing, but done in a way where you feel like something else is going on. Or the fact that it’s me doing it is like … fascinating to people, I guess. Maybe it’s more interesting than the shows we put a lot of time into.

Even the most prominent artists can’t attract that kind of widespread, rabid blog attention. That really distinguishes you.
Franco: I try to get a lot of attention, but I try to spread the attention around, to get people interested in the things I’m interested in — like the show about art openings. But I agree. One thing that made the MOCA project most interesting is that I was on the inside: I could get ABC and MOCA and General Hospital together to do a project like this, whereas Andy Warhol could only get one episode of The Love Boat, and Chris Burden could only buy eight seconds of a local station for his piece. In whatever field I’m working in, I look for what I can contribute that’s unique — and sometimes that’s just my position as a public persona or someone inside the film business.

Ian, how did you come up with the idea to do an inner monologue for James?
Olds: I had this strange moment of inspiration. The sound cut out of some footage — I think it was footage of James shaving in the bathroom — I flashed back to that Sokurov movie Confession, about the Russian navy, where the captain speaks this fictional voice-over. And it occurred to me: “What if you transplanted that idea to this? What would happen if you wrote a third level of ‘Franco’?”

And you narrated the film as James. Why didn’t you have James narrate it?
Olds: The original intention was that I would write the voice-over with my writing partner Paul Felten, and James would eventually record it. Then we realized it made a lot of sense for me to do it: James is a person who’s a vessel, who people are constantly projecting their own ideas onto. And this became about someone else projecting an internal life for this fictional “Franco.”

Do you feel that any of it was about making a mockery of “celebrity”?
Franco: It’s mocking, but I wouldn’t say it’s solely a mocking tone. It’s a real examination.
Olds: It’s a fine line. I know that with some critics in that blogosphere land, it can be easily dismissed as purely a gimmick: “Oh, it’s just mocking him and having this voice-over. It’s like Mystery Science Theater or whatever.” We’re trying to tell the unhinged story of a celebrity, James, who’s consumed by this work, and all the questions circling his celebrity. But it’s not just about James; we also wanted to give a deranged glimpse into production in the dream factory. If everyone’s responding to it simply as, like, “What does this mean about James?” — that misses a large part of the point.

How do you think people will receive this film?
Olds: It’s tricky, because the fact that there’s a huge red-carpet event for a very strange experimental film seems both totally wrong for the nature of the piece, and also perfectly right for its subject. You are drawing in audiences that perhaps aren’t the most prepared to enjoy the film. People are going to hate it. But that’s okay.
Franco: When we were actually filming the General Hospital thing at MOCA, we invited people to watch — members of the museum, and also soap opera fans — and that night alone, people were seeing the same thing but perceiving it in very different ways. And my guess is you’ll get that with this film too. We don’t have the pressure to have everybody like it. It doesn’t need to be a generalized thing, or something that’s watered down, because we didn’t spend 100 million dollars on it. We can really make the movie that says things that maybe you normally can’t say.

One last question: What do you think will be the Song of the Summer? Do you know what that means?
[Blank stares.]

Song of the Summer? The song that’s most ubiquitous all summer long?
Franco: Oh, the top song that, like, characterizes the summer.
Olds: I got nothing on this one.
Franco: Oh! I guess that Gotye song. [Someone in the room plays “Somebody That I Used to Know.”] Did I say his name wrong? I think he’s from Brooklyn.

Source: Vulture

James talks ‘Fresh’ Trip to ‘Oz’

Gel — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 02:28:30 +0000

The only thing more curious than the announcement that Sam Raimi would be directing a new Wizard of Oz adventure was the film’s casting.

Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz signed on as two wicked witches in Oz: The Great and Powerful (which serves as a prequel to the classic 1939 adventure). Michelle Williams is set to play Glinda the Good Witch, and James Franco replaced Robert Downey Jr. as Oscar Diggs — a.k.a. Oz.

Little is known about the film, but at yesterday’s CinemaCon Convention in Las Vegas, James opened up for the first time about what attracted him to the role. He said, “I get to play all sides of Americana – the idea of American heroes. It’s like he’s part cowboy, part weird magician, part con man, part romantic man. I really got to play everything from classic American cinema.”

And to the naysayers out there wondering why we need another trip back to Oz, James understands your reservations — but deems them unwarranted. “The important thing is to have a fresh take without breaking the bubble of what people know and love,” he said. “When you have a comedic character that can revisit a familiar world, then you can have a fresh take on something familiar. And I think that’s what the [writers] did.

From how James goes on to describe the film, it sounds like Raimi is getting a little more personal with his merry old trip to the land of Oz. “There’s a tendency in these big huge movies to make the actions bigger, make the explosions bigger and make the violence more intense. In this world, you don’t have to do that. It’s strangely a movie for everyone that still is kinda cool and I like being a part of something like that.”

Oz: The Great and Powerful hits theaters on March 8, 2013

Source: The Insider

James Franco Teases Screen Time With Rihanna

Gel — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 02:28:18 +0000

James Franco recently made headlines when he posted a video of himself singing Rihanna’s Dr. Luke joint “You Da One” on the Internet. The clip was short, sweet and a bit out of nowhere.

But if you think that Franco was in one of his performance-art moments when he created the viral video, think again. It turns out he’s just a fan of the colorful singer. “[It] didn’t take a lot of work [to lip-synch to her song],” he confessed to MTV News at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Tuesday. “But I do like Rihanna.”

In fact, his biggest confession about his connection to the singer came next. It seems the two were thisclose to working together on her 2011 “We Found Love” video. As the story goes, before male model Dudley O’Shaughnessy landed the role as Ri’s troubled leading man, Franco had the opportunity to be cast as one-half of that rocky romance.

“She actually asked me to be in that video, the one with the relationship that gets crazy,” he dished. “I couldn’t do it. But, I guess, I hope that that means there’s mutual love between us.”

Well, apparently these two are getting a second chance to work together, and this time it’s on the big screen. Franco teased that Rihanna may appear in pal Seth Rogen’s flick “The Apocalypse,” which follows a slew of celebs playing themselves. They’re partying at Franco’s house when they learn the apocalypse is coming.

“I think she’s gonna be in the new movie that I’m doing, Seth Rogen’s directorial debut,” he shared. “I think she has a little part in that.”

Source: MTV News

Happy 34th Birthday James!

Gel — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:43:53 +0000

Our guy finally turns 34 today! From Finding Franco, I’d like to wish James a very happy birthday! And if you participated in the birthday project this year, do not forget to check it out now!

http://jamesfrancobirthday.tumblr.com
http://jamesfrancobirthday.tumblr.com
http://jamesfrancobirthday.tumblr.com

James Reveals How He’s So Productive

Gel — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 19:05:43 +0000

On Thursday night, James Franco was in New York for a discussion and signing of his book at Manhattan’s absurdly exclusive Core Club, a private club located in an east Midtown office building. If the book’s title sounds familiar, it should. Franco used as source material the 2007 British bestseller The Dangerous Book for Boys that takes a nostalgic look at male childhood with such lessons as how to tie a knot and how to find true north. I was “loosely inspired by that other book,” the suited actor explained, while lounging in the club’s private theater. “I guess you could say it was a fucked-up version of that.”

P.S. 1 founder Alanna Heiss, who ran the discussion and curated the 2010 show, quizzed him in front of a packed house about his artistic inspirations, the choices he made in the show, and the images he included in the book that reference his own boyhood. Speaking of one creepy image, which appeared to picture a terribly wounded man, Franco explained that when he was 12, he and some friends “burned some of our G.I. Joes as a comment on what was going on in the Gulf War at the time.”

In another image, taken from his video “Dicknose in Paris,” Franco wears a prosthetic penis prop from his film Milk on his nose. (Think a rubbery elephant’s trunk with sagging purplish balls). “Franco looks completely different with a penis on his nose,” Heiss noted. This is true. He does. Franco wisely declined to comment on that observation.

Heiss explained that Franco worked on the book while filming 127 Hours and that she, along with Franco and the book’s publisher and editor, prepared it together. Then, they sent it to him and there was “‘The Franco Intervention’ … as if a boy were drawing on those pages.” Virtually every page is “defaced” or commented on by the star – scribbles, scrawls, arrows, diagrams, hastily sketched hearts.

At night’s end, after a long line of co-eds had given him their names to write in their books and asked for advice on being actors, on school, or just generally giggled, Franco inadvertently revealed the secret of his success. Shutting the last exhibition catalogue, he sighed and said: “Last night, I slept three hours.”

Source: Vulture.Com

James packs MOCA for lecture and book-signing

Gel — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 19:04:38 +0000

James Franco is as meta as it gets, the ultimate in creative cross-pollination. He’s an actor-turned-artist-turned-author-turned-actor-playing-an-artist-named-Franco in the soap opera “General Hospital.” His new self-referential filmic offshoot, “Francophrenia” documents that experience. He’s also been cast in the upcoming Seth Rogen movie, in which he plays — who else — the actor-artist-author James Franco.

Drawing on all those areas of interest, Franco appeared at MOCA on Saturday in conversation with art theorist and Rhode Island School of Design digital culture lecturer Francisco Ricardo. The sold-out event –- which drew an appropriately young, hip-looking crowd of roughly 200 — marked the release of Franco’s new book, “The Dangerous Book Four Boys.” The book is a companion to the 2010 New York exhibition of the same name and collects interviews, photographs and multimedia artworks around the themes of childhood and media, among other things.

Not surprisingly, however, Saturday’s conversation defied compartmentalization and strayed much farther afield. After a somewhat heady and hilarious dissection of Franco’s short film “Dicknose in Paris” (a clip was shown), the conversation ricocheted among topics, including Franco’s love of Faulkner; insider stories about director Nicholas Ray; Natalie Wood and Dennis Hopper during the filming of “Rebel Without a Cause”; and the upcoming MOCA show called “Rebel.” The latter, a high-concept group show that Franco conceived, is inspired by the iconic James Dean film and opens in May. It’s brimming with art world star power with works by Ed Ruscha, Harmony Korine, Damon McCarthy, Paul McCarthy, Douglas Gordon, Terry Richardson, Aaron Young and Franco.

Click here to read the rest.