Born in California in 1978, James Franco began acting during the late 1990s, appearing on the short-lived television series Freaks and Geeks and starring in several teen films.
He achieved international renown with his portrayals of Harry Osborn in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, drug dealer Saul Silver in Pineapple Express and Aron Ralston in 127 Hours. His other well known films include Milk, Tristan & Isolde, Flyboys, Date Night, Eat Pray Love and the upcoming Planet of the Apes reboot Rise of the Apes.
He has been nominated for three Golden Globe awards, winning one, and received an Academy Award nomination for Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours.
In Your Highness, shot by Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green, he stars as Fabious, a noble prince and knight who quests to save his father’s kingdom, and his true love, from a dire sorcerer, accompanied by a band of compatriots, including the brave (Natalie Portman), and the cowardly (Danny McBride).
- Apparently Danny and David wrote the role especially for you
They did, and I like the fact that there is humour for all the characters in the movie, even though each character has to approach it in a different way.
Danny’s is obviously a more comedic character. He is the character that you wouldn’t normally see in a movie like this, where he is questioning the world and all the rules and the different aspects of a quest.
Normally in a fantasy film all the characters would be onboard and the quest needs to be completed. And so he is a more comic role but everybody else is comedic by being devoted to this world.
It is not as if everybody else is a boring stick in the mud and Danny is dancing around. Everybody has their own particular kind of role and the degree to which they devote themselves to this world, being very dedicated despite how ridiculous this world is, that is funny.
- Even though your character’s comedic in the film, he takes things very seriously, right?
Yes. It is not like there is a joke every second. Really it is the circumstances that are funny. And my character treats a lot of things seriously.
I had to learn to engage with circumstances in a dramatic way but really those circumstances are so silly that in this movie it makes it all fun.
In terms of humour, I would say the closest movie to this would be Monty Python and The Holy Grail where they are treating the circumstances very seriously but they themselves are ridiculous.
Python goes a little farther in some ways, where they don’t even have horses. We have everything here. It’s not like a sketch comedy but it is a mix of the serious and the ridiculous. It comes in that range.
- Is it difficult to have fun with the fantasy genre, without making it a total parody?
Exactly that. Not poking too much fun is the key to the whole movie and it is really David Gordon Green’s style. His earlier films are dramas.
There are bits of comedy in them, although on the whole they’re rather dark, but when you look at his student films he was making, with Danny McBride, they had this his weird ambiguous tone where it is funny, taking things seriously, but also laughing at itself.
- You could say the same of your work together on Pineapple Express, for example. It was a stoner movie but it ran a little deeper
Yeah, when we did Pineapple Express together you could on one level say ‘Well, it is an action stoner comedy’, which it is, but if you look at most stoner films they’re a little dumb, but Pineapple Express does have some sort of deeper level, relating to the emotions of the characters and the integrity that David gives the relationships, despite how silly some things are that are happening.
- What do you think will make this film special, bar the humour?
With the fantasy world I think what David has tried to do is to make it kind of timeless. So, for example, there is this old kind of wise wizard, and it’s a puppet; technology that is 30 years old.
When they were making The Dark Crystal, it was the state of the art, but now you would say, ‘Well, he looks like puppet.’ But obviously David is doing that for a reason and it is a call back to the old movies from the 1980s and it is a very deliberate call back.
When we were first talking that was how we talked about all the creatures - that David was just going to use these old-fashioned effects and it was great because, in a way, it would make the film ageless. All the CGI stuff you see now looks amazing but in about five or ten years you are going to look at it and say, ‘It’s not looking great’, but we are not trying for that.
We are saying: ‘This a puppet movie, the creatures are a deliberate call back. And yet the characters take them all seriously. My character is not going to look at the wise wizard and say, ‘You are a ridiculous puppet character!’
He is going to treat him very seriously and so you are going to have all these weird things working that give the film its ambiguous and comedic tone.
- And you’ve been able to put into play the medieval warrior skills you learned on Tristan & Isolde?
Exactly. There is some very cool action and I think there is a pretty big budget on this movie but it is not going to be Wolverine or something like that!
Going into the fight scenes the approach was to try and bring out the personality of the characters in the fight. There is some cool fighting. Simon Crane who does the Bond movies worked on the movie and they had some really great people.
- How demanding was the action for you personally?
Not that hard. I am prepared to do a lot, but there is some insurance rule that was just enacted. I know how to ride a horse but I guess David has just never done a movie like this and so he really wanted me to prepare, and then when we got here they said, ‘No actors are allowed to ride a horse galloping!’
And then with the sword fighting, I have done my fair share of training. I trained for nine months for Tristan & Isolde, so I was pretty good. It is like a dance. It is not really like you are fighting. You depend on the other person.
So if you train for nine months and the other person has trained for a week the fight level is going to be at a week’s level of training.
- Have Your Highness and Pineapple Express been important for you, to show you’ve got comedy as well as dramatic skills?
Yes. I hadn’t really done much comedy before Pineapple Express. I did a television show with the same producer, Judd Apatow, called Freaks and Geeks. I had been offered comedies but it was not until Judd Apatow started to direct his own movies that comedies were something that I could maybe shine in.
Before it was Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler and they are doing very extreme characterization, which maybe I could do but it was not like anybody was going to hire me over those guys. So when Judd started to make his comedies they felt as through they were more grounded.
There’s whacky stuff that goes on but there’s more of an emotional resonance than in some of the other comedies that came before. So once that started happening I thought I could do that. Judd gave me the opportunity and it’s been great fun.
- Did you watch the likes of The Dark Crystal and Krull when you were a kid?
As far as I can remember The Dark Crystal was the first time I ever saw a movie in a movie theatre. My parents took us and then it became a kind of a ritual.
It seems as though we could have gone a million times. I could be remembering incorrectly but I think movies played longer in the theatre then because it seems like every week we go and see The Dark Crystal in the theatre and that was really important to me.
- So you became a fantasy fan in the aftermath?
Well then my father read to me and my brother - The Hobbit by Tolkien - and that really got me into reading on my own and I read all of Tolkien and I read all the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.
So when I was ten years old, I was really into fantasy. Then the movies, like The Clash of the Titans and the Sinbad movies and The NeverEnding Story. That stuff was really important to me at that age.
- The fantasy kind of kind of died soon after, by the end of the 1980s.
And then it was hard, you’re right. I think even Peter Jackson talked about this when he made The Lord of the Rings. It’s like the fantasy genre, until that trilogy, you couldn’t quite take it seriously. He really revived it.
He took it very seriously. It had amazing effects and great actors and so suddenly the genre has this prestige. You could make a real movie in this genre, a movie that people would take seriously and would be mainstream. So I guess my fantasy love lapsed for a bit but I have always loved Tolkien because it was one of the first books I read.
- Also fantasy has been taken to quite dark places.
All those guys came up through horror, Jackson, Sam Raimi, Del Toro. The thing about fantasy for so long is that it was geared towards kids. That is what it was. It was just for kids. The Lord of the Rings was for kids and adults.
This is a movie that is going to be a hard R. This is for teenagers; it is adult humour, mature humour so it is taking the fantasy genre and it is making it an adult comedy. That’s very rare for this genre.
- What do you find funny?
That is a good question. I like the other people I work with here. I thought Danny’s movie, The Foot Fist Way, was one of the funniest I had seen in a long time. And I was shocked that people didn’t go and see that movie in the theatre.
I like the guys in Saturday Night Live, Laurel & Hardy, Chaplin. I don’t see a tonne of comedies. I through Rushmore was a very funny movie, again because it had its own grounding. It was in a strange world but it was also very grounded. Napoleon Dynamite is funny.
- What makes you laugh outside of films?
I don’t know. Body humour maybe!
- And what is that book that are you reading?
It’s for a class. It’s called Learning to be White by a woman named Thandeka, and it’s about how in America in particular it’s generally easier for people to find non-white races.
And how people who identify themselves as white don’t think of themselves in the same way as they think of other races. I guess the author is a theologian. I am reading it is for class at NYU on horror films and race and ‘the other’, whether it’s race or sexuality.
Your Highness is released on DVD & Blu-ray now.
Born in California in 1978, James Franco began acting during the late 1990s, appearing on the short-lived television series Freaks and Geeks and starring in several teen films.
He achieved international renown with his portrayals of Harry Osborn in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, drug dealer Saul Silver in Pineapple Express and Aron Ralston in 127 Hours. His other well known films include Milk, Tristan & Isolde, Flyboys, Date Night, Eat Pray Love and the upcoming Planet of the Apes reboot Rise of the Apes.
He has been nominated for three Golden Globe awards, winning one, and received an Academy Award nomination for Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours.
In Your Highness, shot by Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green, he stars as Fabious, a noble prince and knight who quests to save his father’s kingdom, and his true love, from a dire sorcerer, accompanied by a band of compatriots, including the brave (Natalie Portman), and the cowardly (Danny McBride).
- Apparently Danny and David wrote the role especially for you
They did, and I like the fact that there is humour for all the characters in the movie, even though each character has to approach it in a different way.
Danny’s is obviously a more comedic character. He is the character that you wouldn’t normally see in a movie like this, where he is questioning the world and all the rules and the different aspects of a quest.
Normally in a fantasy film all the characters would be onboard and the quest needs to be completed. And so he is a more comic role but everybody else is comedic by being devoted to this world.
It is not as if everybody else is a boring stick in the mud and Danny is dancing around. Everybody has their own particular kind of role and the degree to which they devote themselves to this world, being very dedicated despite how ridiculous this world is, that is funny.
- Even though your character’s comedic in the film, he takes things very seriously, right?
Yes. It is not like there is a joke every second. Really it is the circumstances that are funny. And my character treats a lot of things seriously.
I had to learn to engage with circumstances in a dramatic way but really those circumstances are so silly that in this movie it makes it all fun.
In terms of humour, I would say the closest movie to this would be Monty Python and The Holy Grail where they are treating the circumstances very seriously but they themselves are ridiculous.
Python goes a little farther in some ways, where they don’t even have horses. We have everything here. It’s not like a sketch comedy but it is a mix of the serious and the ridiculous. It comes in that range.
- Is it difficult to have fun with the fantasy genre, without making it a total parody?
Exactly that. Not poking too much fun is the key to the whole movie and it is really David Gordon Green’s style. His earlier films are dramas.
There are bits of comedy in them, although on the whole they’re rather dark, but when you look at his student films he was making, with Danny McBride, they had this his weird ambiguous tone where it is funny, taking things seriously, but also laughing at itself.
- You could say the same of your work together on Pineapple Express, for example. It was a stoner movie but it ran a little deeper
Yeah, when we did Pineapple Express together you could on one level say ‘Well, it is an action stoner comedy’, which it is, but if you look at most stoner films they’re a little dumb, but Pineapple Express does have some sort of deeper level, relating to the emotions of the characters and the integrity that David gives the relationships, despite how silly some things are that are happening.
- What do you think will make this film special, bar the humour?
With the fantasy world I think what David has tried to do is to make it kind of timeless. So, for example, there is this old kind of wise wizard, and it’s a puppet; technology that is 30 years old.
When they were making The Dark Crystal, it was the state of the art, but now you would say, ‘Well, he looks like puppet.’ But obviously David is doing that for a reason and it is a call back to the old movies from the 1980s and it is a very deliberate call back.
When we were first talking that was how we talked about all the creatures - that David was just going to use these old-fashioned effects and it was great because, in a way, it would make the film ageless. All the CGI stuff you see now looks amazing but in about five or ten years you are going to look at it and say, ‘It’s not looking great’, but we are not trying for that.
Tagged in James Franco