At 39, he is a chameleon; a successful acting career is no longer enough to satisfy him. Perhaps it never was. “I’ve had moments where I was searching for alternative ways of living, for me it was mostly professional. I was unhappy with how I was conducting myself in the professional film world and I was making myself very unhappy,” he says. “So I had to find new ways of working. It wasn’t really a crisis of faith or anything like that... But I did have a similar thing, when I was 27 and I went back to school.” He enrolled at UCLA for an English major in 2006. When he moved to New York in 2010 he signed up to courses at four different schools and counts himself among Yale’s English PhD students. “People like to split it up and make me seem like I’m schizophrenic or something,” he shrugs. “I see everything as connected and the guiding force behind all of it is my interest in all these different things and my pursuit of new forms of creativity. So the producing, writing or directing are just alternative outlets.” Oh, he also writes books. This month marks the release of a coauthored project with David Shields called Flip-Side: Real and Imaginary Conversations with Lana Del Rey, which explores the relationship between celebrity performance and persona. His short story collection Palo Alto, about the California town he grew up in, was turned into a film. He followed it up with James Franco: Dangerous Book Four Boys, which detailed an exhibition that contained video works, multimedia installations and sculptures by Franco. Back in 2013 he wrote a novel, Actors Anonymous. “One of the things that I tell people is, ‘go and do it’. Don’t wait for the gatekeepers to say, ‘okay’. Don’t wait around, because we can now take advantage of the technology.” Some might see this answer as pretentious, but in person the side of Franco that shines brightest is his academic side. He dresses like a hipster but brown corduroys would be more fitting as he gives considered, erudite, answers to questions. Working on his own projects gives him a sense of creativity that he doesn’t get from acting. When I met him for the first time some years ago, he told me: “As an actor I feel like it’s my job to serve
the director. I’ve accepted that. In some ways it feels like a craft rather than an art form. Sure I had some freedom of interpretation, but I feel like I’m serving someone else’s vision. With my writing... I’m the initial creator, so there is more freedom.” He’s aware of the criticism he attracts and could easily shy away from it, but it is all part of his best creation, his most important role – being James Franco. He has played himself enough times. In his collaboration with the artist Carter, Erased James Franco (2008), he re-enacted every performance from his career. This resulted in Franco persuading the soap General Hospital to give him the role of Franco, an artist and serial killer, which was then dissected in his 2012 film Maladies. He also re-purposed the footage for his metaphysical film Francophrenia (Or Don’t Kill Me, I Know Where The Baby Is). And, in the comedy This Is The End, he played himself, as the host of a party on the night of the apocalypse. The need to put himself in his own work comes from his struggle to separate his personal life from work. “My work is one thing and my identity is something else, but when acting was all I had, my identity was inevitably tied to my career. So if my career was not doing well, I inevitably felt bad.” He admits that he struggles to switch off. Between takes, he likes to read books. Rogen would make fun of him for reading on the set of Freaks and Geeks; on the set of his film, Every Thing Will Be Fine, where he played a writer who is driving in the snow and kills a child, he was preparing for his oral exams in literature between shooting scenes. One of the most fascinating Francoassociated projects was a documentary by his former student Lisa Vangellow, who followed the actor around for a year and a half. “There were times I regretted saying yes,” admits Franco. “But only because it’s annoying having someone follow you. And then, automatically everyone thinks it was my idea, that I’m this vain guy that wants a camera following me around all the time.” When you dig deeper, the idiosyncratic bachelor simply isn’t like his publicly perceived persona at all. It’s just that he never lingers long enough to allow such exploration, already off seeking that next creative challenge. 47