How I Work – James Franco
Welcome to the second instalment of ‘How I Work’. The series in which, each month, we’ll be asking a creative or business professional to take us through their daily routine. This time we’ve got one of the biggest names in acting…
James Franco – Actor, professor, writer and director.
Best known for his roles in Spider-Man, Milk and 127 Hours, James has also directed documentaries (Saturday Night), feature films (Child of God) and managed to complete a Ph.D at Yale University along the way. He’s currently working on a book about acting for Palgrave Macmillan due out later this year titled “James Franco: Actors Anonymous”. We caught up with him ahead of the release…
James Franco is one of the biggest names in acting. You’ve seen him in movies such as 127 Hours, Pineapple Express, and Milk, just to name a few. But he’s probably most loved by fans for his work on the cult classic TV show Freaks and Geeks. Nowadays James does a lot more than just act; he writes novels, stars on television shows, directs movies and generally runs around like a man possessed.
As you can imagine he stays pretty busy. What might be surprising is how much time Franco spends working. Here’s what James told us about his work habits:
I have always worked all day everyday since I started acting professionally at 19 years old. I’ve never had any time off from that point until now when I am directing my first feature film, The Broken Tower (a biopic of poet Hart Crane), which I also wrote and star in. [I] average about 10 hours a day at the office (my apartment) writing or developing projects; then after that meetings and phone calls with producers or agents etc.; and then usually on an evening set, or often times two sets – one of my own projects, or another project that I’m acting in. Then back to the office to read scripts or write till late
In the week leading up to this interview, James Franco has published a book, produced and starred in a stage play, and flown to Sundance for the premiere of his latest movie. On the day we meet at a New York City hotel, he has just finished teaching an acting class, and shortly after our conversation is due to begin filming on a new movie.
“On my days off I read a lot, but I don’t take time off,” Franco says. “I find it very hard having nothing to do.”
His work ethic is legendary: while gaining recognition as an actor in the early 2000s, he was taking classes at UCLA; by 2008 he was enrolled at Yale University as well. In addition to his acting career, Franco has published four books of short stories and poems; produced several art exhibitions; directed more than 20 films; taught classes at NYU and Columbia; and appeared onstage in everything from Shakespearean tragedies to Broadway musicals.
As if that weren’t enough, Franco decided back in 2005 that he wanted to complete a year’s worth of projects. “I thought ‘What should I do?’ Then I realized I had already started some things that would take me through the next year.” The results were shared with the world via his tumblr
I’ve always been obsessed with time. As a kid I would stare at the clock, waiting for the second hand to move. I have a lot of clocks in my house, and they’re all set to different times. It’s probably my way of trying to control time, or make more of it.
I’m not going to tell you how many hours I work a day because you’ll think I’m bragging or lying. But I will say that I have a hard time turning off. My waking day is about 24 hours long.
When I was younger, acting seemed like magic. You went into this room and became another person and caused other people to cry or laugh just by pretending to be someone else! People applauded! Now it seems like craft, but I still love it.
The thing about acting is that you can never know it all; you can only know more than before. The craft is so vast that I feel like my head is going to explode every day!
I am interviewed a lot. Usually the interviewer asks me to describe what I do in a typical day.
I don’t have a typical day.
But if I had to pick a day, it would be Day 2 of my film “The Broken Tower.”
The Broken Tower is about the American poet Hart Crane and his life and death (he leapt off a ship in the Gulf of Mexico in 1932). The film is an attempt to make an authentic portrait of Crane’s life–the relationships, the places, the creative process. It took two years to write the script, which was an arduous process because it was not just about Crane’s biography but also about how a writer writes. Day 2 was my first day on set as director/actor.
Day 1 was spent shooting on location at Columbia University with Michael Shannon as Hart Crane’s mentor, Professor Yvor Winters. The dialogue in this scene comes from actual letters between Crane and Winters that are housed at Yale University. Winters taught poetry at Columbia University and he was one of the major players in literary criticism during his lifetime (1909-1968). He believed that art had no social function other than to instill beauty in people’s lives after they had met their basic needs like food and
At 16, I was already a huge film buff. I had been watching tons of movies since I was a kid, but in high school, I started to take it seriously. I would go to the art house theater on Wilshire Blvd. every Sunday and see double-features for three or four dollars. One day, I saw an interview with Paul Newman where he said that early on he did live theater to get his Equity Card (a union card). This had never occurred to me – that you could do anything other than be discovered.
In my senior year of high school, I joined the school drama club and played the lead in “Of Mice and Men.” Then I auditioned for and got into UCLA’s theater department. Once there, I signed up for as many classes as possible. UCLA is a fantastic place, but one of the things they don’t do is train actors. They offer classes so you can learn the craft while you’re there but they don’t have an actual program. So after two years of getting no real training, I decided to get my Equity Card.
I started working at a theater in Venice Beach called “The Actor’s Gang” which was run by Tim Robbins. We did experimental plays and a lot of Antonin Art
I DON’T KNOW IF I should be writing this at all. It seems like something I would regret. That’s not the only reason. There’s also the fact that I have a lot of other work to do and this is just another distraction. And it seems like an arrogant thing to do, to add another blog to the already massive number of blogs out there. But then again, maybe that’s a good thing because it would be one less person from “the establishment” adding to the mass of blogs. Then there is the idea that by doing this I might help someone else or give some insight into the process of making art — whatever that means (as long as what it means is whatever I happen to write about).
The other reason I don’t know if I should do this is because I am afraid that what I say will be taken too seriously by some people and then they will think they know me and that they can judge me based on what they think they know about me. Most people who know me well, or even not so well, don’t take my words very seriously — and most of those people are right!
So, why do this? Because just by writing this blog
