by James Franco
Would you hurt another person to help them give a better performance? If it meant a better performance for yourself, would you slap someone? Cut someone? Punch someone? Spit on someone? Call someone a kike or a nigger offscreen, meaning it wouldn’t be heard in the film, but you would do it to catch the person off guard in hopes of producing a genuine reaction?
Some actors hate doing photo shoots (mostly guys) because they feel phony. But isn’t posing for a still camera the same thing as acting for a motion picture camera? Is it because the photo shoots are ostensibly capturing the real person and the roles in films are characters? I guess.
Acting teachers are fucked up. They are unlike any other teachers, because they deal with their students’ emotions and bodies. They get inside their students’ heads. Even if they have the best intentions, they can’t help from becoming gurus and therapists for their students, because they deal on such intimate terms. When you have a bunch of students looking up to you because you liberated their emotions, it’s hard not to play the role of mentor/lover/father/mother.
As in any profession, it’s the people who break the rules that become special. The problem is that for every innovative rule breaker, there is a whole army of rule breakers without talent that you never hear about.
Harmony Korine dropped out of NYU. So did P. T. Anderson and Woody Allen and Steve McQueen (the artist/director). You’d think dropping out was the way to become a great writer/director.
What do you think is good acting? The most revealing performance? The biggest transformation? Being the most charismatic? The biggest hero? The sexiest? The funniest?
Are film actors the most respected of all actors? And by whom? The general public? By other actors? Is it the renown that makes them seem bigger and better than the rest?
Do we like to kick film actors when they step outside of their comfort zone? Or do we like to praise them? Julia Roberts got criticized when she went on Broadway. Scarlett Johansson won a Tony.
What do you think the best performance on film is?
What is the best theatrical performance? Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski? Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie?
How many people are alive that saw those performances?
Shakespeare was an actor.
So was Sophocles.
It’s funny when people say actors can’t write. Most of ’em can’t, but look at Woody Allen. Look at W. C. Fields.
And what is good writing? Even the best writers resemble the best actors. They have a few good projects in them, and the others don’t seem to add up.
Screenwriters and directors. Weird people. They’re of a different breed. I don’t know if I like them. I mean, I do; I really like some of them, but I’m also prone to hate them.
At acting school I was taught to hate directors, because they knew nothing about acting. My teacher said Elia Kazan was the last great director of actors because he came out of the Group Theater. But this was stupid thinking. Directors might not know much about acting, but there isn’t much to know. Be simple, be in the right place, and go with your instincts.
Basically, if you’re relaxed in front of the camera, you’ll be good.
Acting wasn’t and isn’t always this way, the less-is-more idea. In some cases it’s good to be tense, to be over the top, not to know your lines, to be too loud, or to be too quiet, to jump up and down, or to scream out everything you say.
If you try to look cool, you can sometimes pull it off. Steve McQueen was cool (in Bullitt, The Getaway, Papillon, The Great Escape), but how many books did he read in his life? His characters outsmart everyone, but it’s the smarts of the streets, where the rubber hits the cement. Isn’t it lonely in that place? Where thoughts are feelings not articulated ideas?
McQueen’s intelligence was all body and machines: the way he moved and the way he handled machinery, the way he came out on top.
At the height of his popularity Steve McQueen would make people pay him before he would even consider a script. He made tons of money. At one point he was the highest paid actor in the world. I guess that’s something to aspire to.
Arnold Schwarzenegger got paid a record breaking $30 million for Mr. Freeze in the Batman film that had ice skating and nipples on the Batsuit.
Steve McQueen stole Ali McGraw away from Robert Evans while they were shooting The Getaway. He married her, then made her quit acting.
McQueen was a sex addict and would have threesomes all the time. He wanted to do Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People for the longest time, and then when he finally did it, no one saw it.
He would just sit in his hot tub all day and drink beer. He would only watch his own movies. He got cancer at a very young age. He tried to cure it with a bunch of quack doctors in Mexico. He thought he was cured. He died at fifty.
Jack Nicholson struggled for twelve years before Easy Rider. He started as a gopher in the animation department of MGM at eighteen. He loved basketball even then. Eventually he took an acting class with Jeff Corey, James Dean’s old teacher. Later Jack studied with Martin Landau, James Dean’s old friend.
Jack might not have even wanted the role in Easy Rider. It was intended for Rip Torn. Dennis Hopper was a nut that Jack knew from the coffeehouses on Sunset, and then was in a movie that Jack wrote for Roger Corman called The Trip, about LSD. The story goes that Jack did the role in Easy Rider as a favor to his friends Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the producers, in order to look after Dennis.
Dennis’s director’s cut of Easy Rider came out at four hours. Everyone from Bob Rafelson to Jack to Henry Jaglom helped cut down the film. Sometimes it’s bad to have an actor in the editing room; sometimes it’s okay.
Then the movie was released and hit a nerve with the young. Jack was nominated for an Oscar.
Jack grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey, thinking his grandmother was his mom, and his mom was his sister. By the time he found out who was what, both were already dead.
James Dean’s mother died when he was eight. She had loved Jimmy; his father didn’t. After the death, he sent young Jimmy back to Indiana to live with his aunt and uncle on the farm. Jimmy traveled back on the train with his mom’s coffin.
It’s no surprise that Dean’s characters so desperately needed the love of the father figures in East of Eden (Raymond Massey), Rebel Without a Cause (Jim Backus), and Giant (Rock Hudson). Or maybe he just hated them.
Dean had tons of natural talent and a strong drive to succeed. He seemed like he was all instinct, or maybe that’s just a way of saying that he put all of his energy into acting.
If Dean had lived, he probably would have made some flops. He was supposed to play Billy the Kid and then Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me. After Dean died, Paul Newman did it. It wasn’t very good.
Newman was older than Dean. He tested alongside Dean for the brother in East of Eden, the role eventually played by Dick Davalos, the guy on the cover of the Smiths’ Strangeways, Here We Come album. The Newman test still exists. I think Jimmy is playing with a switchblade in it.
Newman must have been frustrated that Dean got all the roles.
River Phoenix was supposed to play Brad Pitt’s part in Interview with the Vampire opposite Johnny Depp (in the Tom Cruise role). Then he was demoted to the interviewer part for commercial reasons. Then he died before it was shot.
River was supposed to have been interested in the book The Basketball Diaries and in the play about Rimbaud, Total Eclipse. Leonardo DiCaprio was in both movies based on these books.
Lots of famous actors hate acting, or say they do. Partly because they hate the lack of control.
Lots of actors turn around and love acting when they get praise for a performance. It’s easy to blame a director for a bad movie, and it’s easy not to give him credit for a good movie.
Everyone thinks Scorsese is the best director. His best movies are Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. Now his movies are huge. It’s hard to go back to the good old days when you we
re making audacious things for no money.
And no one went to see them.
Quentin Tarantino’s best films are Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. They had heart and soul. His new movies are fantasies. He is an authority on the LA underworld and B-movies.
He has recreated history. He killed Hitler.
Somewhere along the way his characters became their dialogue and lost some of their heart.
I am a good actor, but sometimes I look like a bad actor. And I don’t care.
I used to want to do a bunch of accents and physical impediments with every role. Now I don’t care. Now I want to be as simple as possible, just slip into the world I’m in and be as natural as possible.
When they get older, some actors that were once respected become clowns.
It’s like young women: When they have great bodies they don’t want to show them, but when they’re older, and they’re no longer pretty, they do.
Al Pacino was in such high demand he turned down roles for three years before doing Scarface.
In Sunset Boulevard, Erich von Stroheim plays Gloria Swanson’s butler and ex-husband. When she screens a film for her new lover, played by William Holden, what they show are shots from Queen Kelly, an actual silent film starring Swanson that von Stroheim directed. It was financed by Joe Kennedy because he was Swanson’s lover at the time, but Swanson had such a bad time with Stroheim she had Kennedy pull the plug before it was finished, and it was never released.
Would you rather be Buster Keaton or Peter Fonda? Charlie Chaplin or Leonardo DiCaprio? John Wayne or Phillip Seymour Hoffman? River Phoenix or Mickey Rourke?
Mickey used to be so beautiful. Look at Diner. Yes, he looked like he was falling apart a little even then, but there was no indication of the creature he would become. But he did some things that were pretty amazing, even if they were crazy. He opened a boxing gym, and he became the highest paid four-round fighter in history ($500,000 for a fight in Japan). I heard he had a little soda shop/cigarette stand in Beverly Hills. Bikers would hang out there, also, and under the counter young people could buy beer.
How can you do good work? How can you always do good work?
There are so many people in Hollywood that make your good stuff into bad stuff. They even turn you against yourself so you don’t know what is good. So, you’re just standing there waiting for something safe to come along. A real fucking snorefest.
It’s weird. Many actors have great runs of success and then they seem to lose their taste, or lose whatever it was that made them great. Or do they not get the same kinds of offers anymore because they’re older?
Marlon Brando cut a great figure in The Wild One, but the movie falls apart halfway through.
Marlon Brando was great in Zapata, but in hindsight he looks a bit silly with all that strange makeup on, trying to play Mexican.
When I see an actor with bad makeup I think about how he has been let down. Not by the makeup artist, but by the times. Look at how Breakfast at Tiffany’s is ruined by Mickey Rooney playing Japanese. I guess back then that was comic relief. Why didn’t Rooney protest such a racist caricature? Why didn’t Audrey Hepburn?
Actors get worn out by doing small movies and never having them seen, so they just do things for the money.
John Cassavetes did it right. He used acting to finance the films he cared about, and then he didn’t need those movies to make money, because he made his money off his day job, acting.
Even though he didn’t seem to care about acting as much as directing, he was still a great actor. If your day job is acting in Rosemary’s Baby, that’s not too shabby.
Actors are treated like royalty on-set. The extras are treated like peasants.
There is a hierarchy on a movie set and a hierarchy in Hollywood. Everyone has his place. There are all kinds of skilled positions, but the actors are the ones that are most visible, so the people in different departments, even if they don’t like the actors, treat them with deference.
It seems that the old wisdom of keeping a private life is not appealing anymore. Back in the day, the stars would present a public façade that was probably quite distant from who they really were. The young people today share tons, but I suppose it’s just a bunch of the same kind of old bullshit.
There are tons of actors who are well loved by the public who are not what they seem. Tons.
I wouldn’t want to be in movies with half of them.
The problem is that when actors are successful, they build up asshole capital. That means they can be assholes for a while and get away with it. If they keep having successes, they can keep being assholes. I guess this goes for anyone: directors, writers, producers, etc.
If you have a bunch of flops, it’s harder to be an asshole and get work. No one wants to work with you.
If you have a bunch of flops and you’re a nice person, it doesn’t really matter: No one wants to work with you.
Some actresses fuck just as many crewmembers as their male counterparts.
Lots of actors like to screw the extras. It’s pretty easy.
When you’re portraying a romantic relationship onscreen, you can usually score with your acting partner after the first makeout scene. This applies even if the other person is in a relationship.
On-set relationships rarely work out. Don’t make any life plans while you’re in the middle of a film, especially if you’re shooting on location. It’s like going to camp: Everything changes after you leave.
When you’re shooting on location (away from your home, which usually means away from LA), you have a bunch of people around you that are your world for a number of months. They create an environment that is part of everything you do, even your private relationships on-set. Think about it: If you’re fucking your castmate, you’re either keeping it secret from the crew, or you’re open with the crew, but either way, they’re helping to define the relationship. When the movie ends, that feedback network from the crew and the regular schedule of the shoot disappear.
When you play a role, sometimes you take on characteristics of that role. In subtle ways. Like if you play a lothario/magician, maybe you don’t start doing magic, but you might start sleeping with a lot of women.
If you play a dictator, people might start treating you like you’re an evil, powerful man. Or if you play a monkey, people might treat you like an animal.
Sometimes actors behave badly. They show up hours late to the set every day, or they don’t come out of their trailers. I’m not saying this is acceptable behavior, but they do it because they have spent years waiting for the crew, namely the director of photography, to set up lights and shots.
Of course cinematographers have their own gripes, and of course the position is invaluable; a cinematographer is one of the director’s closest companions on-set. But from an actor’s POV, the DP takes up all the time on a movie set.
I’d say the ratio of lighting time to acting time is on average 3:1, if not 4:1 or 10:1.
An actor needs to learn how to fill his time on-set when the lighting crew and the camera crew are setting up for shots.
Some actors like to chat and gossip. They will chat with anyone. Usually the other actors, but definitely with any cute women or men on-set.
Some actors read on-set. Some actors go to their trailers and play video games or watch TV. Some actors do yoga and work out. I’m not sure how they keep from getting sweaty before they have to act again.
I heard Nicolas Cage used to have a workout regimen that he would do between setups. It was about forty-five minutes long, and once he started, he couldn’t be interrupted.
DPs can be the ruin of a movie. But they are also the ones that producers feel they can replace most easily if a movie is going slowly. It’s harder to replace actors because they are onscreen.
I hate when directors say, “I couldn’t do what you do in front of the camera; it’s too scary.” It makes me think they’re saying What you do is embarrassing.
It also makes me think
they’re saying, You can’t do what I do behind the camera; you’re an intellectual baby.
But I also hate actors that try to take over and direct a movie.
I used to be one of those actors. But only as far as my performance went.
It’s not like I tried to suggest shots or anything.
Setting up shots is one the most fun things on the set. People who try to tell you that directing is just working with the actors are stuck in the old days of theater. Films involve cameras and editing in addition to acting; if you’re a director, why wouldn’t you want to get mixed up in those things as well?
The problem is that some directors get too wrapped up in all the camera crap. Their movies are cheap and hollow because they’re all flash and no human substance.
I don’t know if that’s the problem either. I think all flash and no human can be cool as well. But when it’s immature flash, it’s like they’re making movies for twelve-year-olds.
I know most movies are for twelve-year-olds, but still, come on, grow up.
Some of the best actors are really uneducated, but somehow they understand people well enough to fake it. They have behavioral intelligence and emotional intelligence. Like an athlete has physical intelligence.
I hate being limited. If all you have is emotional intelligence, then the directors can just use you like clay.
Nowadays, I like being used like clay (if I like the director) but that’s only because I get to direct my own movies between the acting parts.
