by James Franco
Does your film end tragically? You probably don’t know. Can’t control it. Maybe you could if the character committed suicide.
I knew a young woman whose grandmother committed legal suicide in Europe. She was sick of life.
My grandmother is full of life at age ninety because she is vitalized by my career. All of her friends are jealous that I’m her grandson.
Even the friend who is the mother of Judith Butler.
Actually, especially the mother of Judith Butler.
Movies and entertainment dominate. That’s all there is. They rule the world.
I guess they are dependent on a stable country, but when we have that, there is nothing more influential than popular entertainment.
Maybe when things are unstable, entertainment is just as influential. A nice escape, they say. But if your life is in entertainment, is it an escape? And if everyone just watches videos now, aren’t the videos life, and real life is the escape?
It’s safe to say that entertainment is life.
Do you differentiate your life from your art? Sometimes it’s best to.
It’s great to read Hamlet, but you probably wouldn’t want to be Hamlet, or even hang out with him.
Horatio. What a good guy. Like Razumikhin is to Raskolnikov, he is to Hamlet. In life, it’s better to be Horatio and Razumikhin; in art it’s better to be Hamlet and Raskolnikov.
When I was in fifth grade, I copied down the character lists from all the Shakespeare plays.
I wanted to own all those characters. It was an attempt to encompass all of Shakespeare.
I had the same impulse in seventh grade, when I wanted to draw a diagram of all the people at my junior high and how they were all socially connected, all the cliques and shit.
These were two early attempts to make sense of both my artistic world and my social world.
Both worlds are made up of people. Even abstract art has a human creator.
Art is given different definitions at different times, but those definitions will be destroyed.
My director? The poet Frank Bidart.
Read Frank’s poem, “Advice to the Players.” It talks about all of this, about the human need to create.
Fuck business. Fuck money. Fuck fame. Fuck coolness.
I am in a great position. I can say fuck all of those things because I am a famous actor and because I have money and I can do whatever I want (within a range) and I will look cool.
But I still say fuck it all.
My work is my life and my life is my work. And something like this—this book—is totally free of the pressures of being popular, because I don’t make my living off of books, I make my living off of acting.
Always have one artistic thing that is pure, at least one thing, where you don’t compromise. You can do other things to make money, but have one pure area.
Now, being pure doesn’t mean that you don’t listen to others’ opinions or don’t listen to your director (whether he be actual or in your mind), but it means that you listen for the right reasons: for artistic purity, not for reasons of money or popularity.
But there is also something to be said for being successful for the sake of being successful, or getting rich for the sake of getting rich, or being famous. Maybe in the end, this is all there is.
But I would prefer a nation of artists than a nation of businessmen.
This is how they get the kids to go to Wall Street: The banks recruit at the top Ivy League schools. They make it seem like Wall Street is the next step in the elitist rise up the ladder. The young Ivy Leaguers want to continue their dominance, so they join the ranks of rats.
Business. It’s all business. Culture is business. Art is business. They call it the movie business for a reason.
Here’s the new game, or the same old game (French New Wave): Get one over on them while still playing their games. Make movies that fit into their system but also subvert their system.
That’s the best way to go. Just don’t let yourself become Disneyfied or Hollywoodified or indiefied or dramafied or comedyified.
Sometimes you can get into a situation where you can be the actor in some pieces, the director in others, and the writer in others. Sometimes you can be all at once, but that is usually not the most fun. Unless you’re Charlie Chaplin.
Or Woody Allen.
Must be nice to control your whole world the way Woody does. His whole world is his movies, his music, and everything he loves. He’s brought everything he loves around him.
Create your world around your work. Create your work around your life. Let other people help you shape it.
The film lovers and the crazies: Sometimes they’re the same people.
Some people love the characters, and some people love the actors behind the characters.
Sometimes the characters take on attributes of the actors; sometimes the actors take away attributes of their characters into their own lives.
John Wayne became a cowboy because he played so many. He grew up in Glendale.
The Marlboro Man probably thought of himself as a cowboy.
If a real cowboy posed for a Marlboro ad, he’d be a phony, no?
You need to be able to take on all roles and laugh at all roles. To be able to mock the role you’re playing while you’re playing it.
You also need love. Your characters need to love something, otherwise they will be unlovable.
That’s one of the big secrets. Make your characters interested in something. Striving for something. In need of something. Good at something. This will make them likeable and interesting.
You want to be interesting? Be interested.
You want people to open up to you? Open up to them.
I was a brat when I was little. Closed off. At camp, with strangers, I didn’t want to share my secrets.
But I had no secrets worth keeping. Be open, open, open.
Your experiences are your most powerful resource. Share them.
When I was twenty-seven, I had to teach myself how to talk to people, how to be social. How not to be shy.
Being famous also helps. People will just talk to me. I am never alone at a party. People will chat my ear off.
Or I’m like Santa Claus: Everyone needs a picture sitting on my knee.
The ones I don’t mind are the young pretty ones.
Eat everything up.
Don’t worry about rejection. Keep trying.
If you are a player, it’s fine; you’ll just have more experience when “the one” comes around.
The people who hold back and wait for “the one” are usually too obsessed once they find the one that they pressure the relationship to death.
Be free.
Your life is not in your control anyway. You are made up of everything around you. So choose your characters and play them out.
Don’t worry about the consequences so much—they’re just roles, right?
Life is but a stage. Life is but a film. Life is death if it is not recorded.
Create.
STEP 4
Made a fearless and searching moral inventory of our “character.”
River Poems
1. River in Idaho
River gets a blowjob from a fatman
In the first scene. He gets money.
He meets with Keanu, they are young hustlers.
Gus’s idea to use pop stars of the day
To play gay for pay Portland prostitutes
Was the first time anything like that went down.
Back when playing gay was as cool
As getting raped. But River had balls.
He played his role like James Dean
Mixed with Charlie Chaplin,
Mixed with the most vulnerable,
More vulnerable than any
Prostitute ever played before.
And funny.
That’s the trick, he was funny.
2. Beautiful River
River died when I was in high school
I r
ead his biography in college.
I became a vegetarian because of him.
He was so damn cool.
What about him?
Probably just his good goddamn looks,
That’s all. I used to want to look like him
And I do a little.
But he had this long blond hair
That would do anything he pleased
And he had a great nose
And beautiful eyes.
Sometimes an actor will like another actor
Because he looks like him,
And sometimes an actor will hate another actor
For the same reason.
3. River Died
He died in front of the Viper room
On Halloween, in his brother’s arms.
How can you blame the Phoenixes
For shutting down, for saying nothing
To no one, their darling son died in public.
The scum broadcast the recording
Of his little brother’s high pitched pleas on the 911 call.
If I were a Phoenix, I’d tell the world to go to hell.
But that means that the last word on River
Was the tabloid word, the twisted word
That used River to sell papers, to turn his name
Into something flat.
But River was the coolest person
That ever lived. He was a force,
An actor and a musician, he could create
Something natural and ethereal,
Even in something like a teen thing,
Or a caper film, or the third Indiana Jones.
In Stand by Me, the boys go looking for a body.
River, I’m looking for your body, stand by me.
4. James, it’s River
Hello, James, it’s River.
Where do you think I’m calling from?
Deep in hell, deep in the Florida wilderness?
Deep from the cement bowels of LA,
Beneath the neon, and the signs?
It’s me, River, calling you
From the underworld. Did you think
I went to heaven? Do you think
You’ll go to heaven? We all die, James,
I died at age 23, ten years before your age now.
James, you’re the Jesus age.
Are you even close to Jesus?
Are you close to what I was?
You fucking egomaniac,
You’re not even close.
James, you think you know me?
James, I tried to be something good,
Something that spoke to people,
I was pushed into acting, but I loved music,
You’re in acting because you chose it.
Pick up the phone, James, it’s River,
I’m calling to say it’s over.
You know that choke feeling,
Like the air is gone, because there is no
More of a life? I’ve left just a little,
I know you want more, James,
But I left only a little.
And what time do we have for others
Anyway. I did a bunch of movies
You haven’t even watched them all.
You say you love me, but not really.
I’ve been gone for decades,
I’ve been forgotten.
I spent my two decades focused
On work and family,
You spend your time all over, James.
You’re all over the place, James.
I was a River that flowed straight
And pure, you’re like a king
That orders one thing,
And then orders the opposite thing.
STEP 5
Admitted to the Great Director, to ourselves, and to another actor the exact nature of our “character’s” wrongs.
Experiences
MY DAD DIED WHEN I was twelve. I took it like a man. I grew up near Cleveland in Shaker Heights. That’s where Paul Newman grew up.
I went to college for a year at Ohio University. I studied English literature, which was okay. I also took one acting class in the theater department. It was an introductory class for first-year students. The teacher’s favorite exercise was to make us act like animals and trees. I liked being a turtle. I moved very slowly on all fours and didn’t smile. My teacher thought it was shitty. He said I should be a more expressive animal, but it’s cheesy to be a tiger or a gorilla. So I just did a turtle and then I did a frog.
I hated school. Mostly because I didn’t like my classes, and I didn’t like my friends. No one was special, and we just got drunk every weekend. One weekend I got drunk, and this girl on my dorm floor got drunk too. We were in her room. She passed out on the bed, and when she was unconscious, I pulled up her skirt and took her panties off and I had sex with her. She woke up in the middle of me doing it, but I don’t think she knew what was going on, she looked at me for a bit and then closed her eyes and moaned a bit. I didn’t use a condom, but I didn’t finish inside her. I did it on the sheet. Then I put her panties back on. She was this little blond girl, pretty cute. I liked her, but she left school after that. I thought I might get in trouble, but no one ever said anything. At the end of the year I dropped out too.
After I left school, I went to Cleveland and worked in my uncle’s bar. I was nineteen, and wasn’t supposed to be working in a place that served alcohol, but my mom asked him to work it out. I slept in the storage room above the bar. There were old liquor bottle boxes that said Seagram’s and Bacardi but were filled with papers and checkered tablecloths and Christmas tree lights. In the corner below a frosted window there was a small bed with a fuzzy orange blanket. My uncle said he used to take hot women from the bar up there and do ’em. For the first week I slept with my clothes on because I didn’t want to touch the blanket.
After a while, I got used to the place, and I ended up spending a lot of time in the storage area above the bar. Whenever I wasn’t working, I would go up there and read and think. I still had a few acting books from school and this big play anthology, and during the day I’d lie on the bed and read them. I hardly ever went out except to work in the bar downstairs. I’d lie on my back on top of the orange blanket, and I got to like how it scratched the skin on the back of my arms and the back of my neck. Above me the ceiling slanted up to a peak and made a crotch where there were layers of cobwebs, as thick and white as milk. When my brain was tired, I’d stare up at the spiders sitting like raisins in all the white. As I slept, they probably crawled all over me and in my mouth, but I didn’t kill ’em. More would just come. Sometimes during the day I would look out the window. I couldn’t really see out of it because it was frosted, but if I looked down toward the street I could see blurry shapes and colors moving by.
I read all those acting books. They were mostly craft books, about getting into character and analyzing scenes as an actor, how to behave naturally, and how to make things interesting with props. But I had no one to practice with, so I did all the exercises in my head. I read a ton of plays too, all the ones in the anthology and some others. William Inge and Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill. And Lillian Hellman. All the Americans. And Odets, all of his early stuff. Maxwell Anderson and Robert Anderson. I’d act everything out in my head, and I’d play all the parts. And I had this book called The Fervent Years about the Group Theatre, which was exciting. And I had a book on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov by Stella Adler. She insisted that Russian names be pronounced correctly. I read all the plays those guys wrote: Ghosts, Miss Julie, The Seagull. I read all that shit, and then I would work at night. No one talked to me in the bar, I just bussed the tables.
Except one time this lady started talking to me. She was probably thirty-five. I was wiping down the bar and she asked me to bring her a vodka cranberry. I said I couldn’t but I asked the bartender to bring her one. After he brought it, she asked my name.
“Ben.”
“That’s a pretty plain name, Ben.
”
She took a sip of her drink but kept her eyes on me at the same time like she was being sexy.
“I didn’t choose my name,” I said.
“I wonder why your parents gave you that name.”
“They didn’t. They called me Benjamin.”
“That’s even worse. Benjamin. It sounds like corduroy. Or cardboard.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean it’s boring.”
“I guess it’s a biblical name.”
“A boring one.”
She took another little sip and then smiled at me as she swallowed. There was evil underneath her face; it seeped out of her smile lines.
“What’s your name?” I asked. She kept looking at me but stopped smiling, so then it was like everything was very serious. Then she said “Jenny.”
She lifted her glass to take a drink but then she didn’t drink; she just held the glass in front of her mouth and stared at me. It was like she was trying to be very mysterious.
That night I took her up to the storage room. She had had five more of those vodka cranberries, and by the time she was on top of the orange blanket with me, she was slurring her words.
“Boring Benjamin,” she said while we were kissing. We were kissing hard so that when she said things she said them right into my teeth and the back of my mouth. Her breath was hot. She said it again, “boring fucking Benjamin” and I could feel it in my throat. I was trying to kiss her and ignore what she was saying. The kissing was very messy, saliva all over our chins and across our cheeks.
