"Still Getting a Rise Out of Audiences"

James Franco’s has ridden quite a wild ride as an actor in film from the Spider-Man films to Pineapple Express to Milk to Date Night to Eat, Pray, Love to 127 Hours. Now, the 33 year-old is playing scientist Will Rodman in what may be his wildest ride yet in Rise From The Planet Of The Apes.

Franco was asked about how he was approached to do the role and how he felt about being a film where the poster features an ape rather than him.

“I’m not really an actor that envisions the poster before the movie or my face on it,” he says, “I was given the script by [director] Rupert [Wyatt] and before I read it, I thought, well, I don’t know about that idea. But once I saw their take on it, much more compared to the other [Planet Of The] Apes movies, it was certainly a very grounded take on it.”

“And then, when I met with Rupert, once he told me that the Apes would be captured with this performance capture technology and WETA would be doing it, it was a lot of the crew from The Lord Of The Rings,” James adds, “And I just thought, well, yeah, this would be the way to do it. I didn’t really honestly think about being upstaged by apes. I just thought it would be an interesting movie and a great thing to be a part of.”

James talks about how his attitude towards acting alongside visual effects on this film has changed from the days of him doing the Spider-Man films.

“My attitude has changed a lot actually about these kinds of effects,” he says, “But partly because the technology has advanced to a place where we can do a movie like this where I don’t think I acted in front of a blue screen once, or if I did, it was just way, way in the background. We had actual sets and the technology

"Still Getting a Rise Out of Audiences"

allowed Andy to come onto our sets and act in a set. So in a way, it brought us back to good old-fashioned moviemaking where you get to act on a real set, but get these kinds of computer-generated creatures, but also have a great actor underneath the computer-generated creature. And I’ve been studying digital media at the Rhode Island School Of Design.”

“That has changed my whole perception of this kind of work,” Franco continues, “I embrace it and it was actually one of the reasons I wanted to do this. It was a chance to have a different kind of acting experience. And maybe when I started the first Spider-Man back in the day, I was one of those actors that thought, oh, I’m a part of a big thing and it’s going to be fake acting or acting to nothing or acting to tennis balls and this kind of thing. But now, here we are ten years later and I get to make opposite a chimpanzee, but underneath, there’s an incredible actor and I can look him eye-to-eye and engage with him and interact with him and do everything that I would do with a non-performance-capture actor, and so it’s exciting.”

Franco was asked if he would ever consider directing his own films with visual effects.

“Actually, Andy [Serkis]’s making it possible, or so he says, for smaller-budget projects to use this kind of technology,” James says, “I’m very interested in it, but right now, the kind of movies that I’m making don’t scream like big box office, so I can’t really justify spending millions of dollars to do this. But if I had a script that I felt like, OK, this will make its money back, then I would definitely do this because it’s incredible.”

James talks about how the mythology of the Planet Of The Apes series has endured from the enormous success of the 1968 original, which spawned four sequels and a 2001

"Still Getting a Rise Out of Audiences"

remake.

“One thing that I’ve been studying is there’s a book by Michael Cunningham called Specimen Days and it’s his regular three section thing,” Franco replies, “In the first one, the characters are in the 1850’s and dealing with Walt Whitman. And by the third section, they are in the future with these androids. And what it shows is up until this point, we as humans kind of define ourselves as superior to animals because of our intelligence. But now as technology grows and we have thinking machines, and I guess in the foreseeable future, machines that can interact with us and talk or whatever, we start to define ourselves as humans based on our feelings, as opposed to machines.”

“Now with this story, you get a weird kind of combination of what we normally would consider our primitive side, our animal side, the apes, our connection to the apes, and now it’s kind of leaped over,” he adds, “This movie and all the other movies really define who we are as humans and the way we treat both animals and other equally intelligent species or cultures. The previous films, all the apes have been around for a number of years, so their cultures are fully developed, so those are much more about culture clash. This is an origin story and so the dichotomy and the tension is more between animals and humans, but it’s still there. It’s still there, it’s still all about who are we, how do we treat the other, whatever that may be.”

Franco has done quite a lot in recent years besides acting including going to college at UCLA, attending several schools for his graduate degree, and teaching at UCLA. He was asked if he had more to accomplish.

“Yeah, man,” James answers, “I’m happy. I can’t really look at my life and say, ‘Aw, I still always want to do that.’ I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve had to work hard, but I’ve had

"Still Getting a Rise Out of Audiences"

opportunities to do everything I wanted, so it’s kind of just gravy. That’s one of the reasons I’m teaching.”

“I’m trying to give back to other people,” he continues, “I’m trying to give people opportunities that I was given. The class I’m going to be teaching at NYU is not only a class, but it’s a production class that will result in a feature film that the students will get to make together, so I guess that’s what I’d like to do now is continue to be creative, but in a way that I can give back in some way or another.”

James says he’s also an avid admirer of art and has been an regular visitor of the Museum Of Modern Art in Manhattan. He talks about the differences between the art world and th film world and why the art world has a reputation for being on the snobby side.

“They are, they aren’t, the art world’s its own thing,” he explains, “I guess maybe when you bring up the snobby aspect of it, a part of that is the way art is purchased and the way that artists make a living. When you make a film like this, you need to make the money back by selling tickets and a bunch of tickets. Normally, when you make an art piece, it’s not distributed in the same way. A, you’re making objects or concepts that will be sold in a limited edition. And so, I guess maybe where the snobbishness comes in is that people are going to have a lot of money and have very refined tastes and if they’re going to buy this level of art and the kind that that’s expensive, I guess. And so, that’s kind of maybe where the difference comes in, but you’re going to find snobbishness in any kind of field for a variety of reasons, but that’s kind of the big difference between the distribution or the selling

"Still Getting a Rise Out of Audiences"

of a movie like this and art in general terms.”

“And in the art world, the main reason I’m drawn to it is I’m doing stuff that could say comes from the film or video world, but the art world allows you to kind of step out of some prescribed constrictions that you might find in the movie world and just things that come with having to distribute movies like this,” Franco continues, “This movie costs a fair amount of money, so you have certain responsibilities to make it attractive. You can’t just make it a slow Norwegian art film or something like that, that it has to kind of have pace. There’s tons of artistry and it’s completely cutting edge, but it has different requirements then, like an art piece is only going to be seen in a single gallery or a few galleries, so I enjoy that aspect of it. I enjoy that different kind of freedom that the art world has.”