Picture the scene. Back in March, 2010, James Franco is spending rather a lot of time in Utah with Danny Boyle, his arm jammed between a rock and a canyon, 12 hours a day, for Boyle's true-life survival tale 127 Hours. This is back before the Oscar nomination he would get for it, back before the summer blockbusters - from Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes to Oz: The Great And Powerful - that would spring from it; back before Franco really became known as the Franco he is now, which is to say, before his novels, short stories, art shows, exhibition pieces, before hosting the Oscars and subsequently getting slated for it; before all the things that people talk about when they mention the multi-hyphenate James Franco.
This is when James Franco was simply another good-looking, talented Hollywood actor with his hand pinned by a rock. On the set, in a Utah gully, Franco never leaves to take a break, even when they're not shooting, except to go to the toilet. The rest of the time he simply stays down there and reads. He has one day off each week, which he has made sure is Monday, because Monday is when he has a post-grad class he's recently signed up for. At Columbia University. In New York. "I was in my fourth semester and they were very clear about attendance," he tells me. "They said, 'we don't care if it's a Danny Boyle movie, you need to be here each week for your writing workshop.'"
So, on his day off, he would be flown the 250 miles over the canyons to Salt Lake City, before getting another plane to New York and arrive just in time from the airport for his class of 50. He'd then make "at most three comments" over three hours, then go back to the airport, at which hour he could only get a connecting flight to LA, where he would spend "the night like Tom Hanks in The Terminal, in one of the chairs near the gate", wake up at 5.30am, get a flight back to Utah, and go straight to the set to put his arm back under a boulder for 12 hours. "Of course, it helped in that film that it was OK to look haggard," says the 35-year-old. "And you know what, after all that, after I paid for all those flights, they still made me retake the semester because I missed too many classes!"
Needless to say, he did retake it, and eventually passed.
In the modern age of celebrity, just the mere existence of someone like James Franco raises several questions. But the most obvious is this: why? Many actors have prominent outside interests, some have prominent outside careers. But almost none has so many of both, and certainly not at a time when his main career is sky-rocketing. Imagine Real Madrid footballer Gareth Bale deciding, right now, to also take up professional cricket, golf, and the occasional grand slam tennis tournament, and you have a rough comparison.
This year alone, in his regular guise as film star, Franco has combined an Oscar-hyped role as a drug dealer in Spring Breakers with the iMax-happy lead in Oz: The Great And Powerful, with smash apocalypse stoner comedy This Is The End, in which he played a version of himself. And those are just the lead roles. In all, he's acted in 13 - yes, 13 - films in 2013, and has five already slated for next year. Then there's the three films, all prominent literary adaptations, that he's directed this year, all due out early next year, too - Cormac McCarthy adaptation Child of God, which received raves at the Venice Film Festival; William Faulkner adaptation As I Lay Dying, in which he also stars; and
Bukowski, about writer Charles Bukowski's early years, in which, yes, he stars as Bukowski. Finally, there's a recurring role on US soap General Hospital (picture Robert Pattinson starring in EastEnders), in which he plays a hyper-real version of himself.
And that's just the day job. Add to that teaching - previously in feature filmmaking at New York University; currently at both the University Of Southern California (in short-film production) and the University Of California (in screenwriting) - and the fact he's currently enrolled in Yale's PhD English literature programme, keeping up with classes during the filming of Oz: The Great And Powerful in Detroit via video conference. Then there's his fiction (one of the stories from his first book, Palo Alto, has been made into a film by Gia Coppola, the 26-year-old granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola; his second,
Actors Anonymous: A Novel, is out this month), his poetry (Strongest Of The Litter came out last November), his picture books (A Californian Childhood, essentially a selection of family pictures with the odd poem, was released in March), and a book on his art (The Dangerous Book Four Boys, out last April). And finally, there's the art itself - everything from drawings about childhood to multimedia installations riffing on Hitchcock and death to the scatological and bizarre, notably "Dicknose In Paris", which featured people with penises on their noses... in Paris. He even had his own solo show in the Clocktower Gallery, in New York, which the New York Times struggled to find much meaning behind, beyond it seeming like "one extended, ironic performance piece". Which is sort of what a lot of people think about James Franco as a whole.
To ask the obvious: doesn't he sleep? "Some nights," he says simply, "I don't need sleep. And then you do enough of those and you eventually crash - you know, odd places, on set, or in class, or wherever."
James Franco's brother - Dave, also an actor - has said James never actually goes to bed, only passes out from physical exhaustion.
I speak to Franco in Toronto at 9am, where he is in town for the festival, and for the first five minutes, he doesn't just sound like someone recently woken from a slumber, but still in one. Words arrive like someone gently blowing very large bubbles, each one given its time to rise up and float off before the next is carefully created.
Surely something has to give? After all, he split up with his ex girlfriend - actress Ahna O'Reilly - because his various commitments got between them. "Well, I mean, as far as my social life, I've just learned to work with the people that I love, so..."
So you've moved your social life to... work time? "Yeah. I mean, I enjoy working creatively with people, much more than getting wasted with them [Franco doesn't drink]. I guess I just used those hours at the bar to do other things."
His assistant - former UCLA classmate Dana Morgan - says Franco cuts out other things, too. Namely, the details of his day-to-day existence. "I tease him when people say, 'How do you do it?'" she has said of him. "You don't! You do all the things they know about, but you don't do the normal human-being things. I guarantee he would not eat unless I fed him. He'll do the hand to mouth part, but I definitely bring it to his hands."
Perhaps most remarkably, he says he used to take it all even more seriously than he does now. "For a movie like *Tristan
& Isolde* [a 2006 mythical romance from Ridley Scott], in the original script there were all these battles on horseback, these epic Braveheart type battles with hundreds of horses, so I thought, OK, all right, I'm going to become the best equestrian ever. So for eight months every day I rode horses. And I'd never ridden a horse before that. I'd learn all these tricks, not for one second thinking they might not let me do all these stunts. And finally it came to the movie, and instead of 100 people on horseback, it was, like, Tristan and five of his friends stealthily creeping through the woods. All that for nothing!"
In Palo Alto, named after the Californian city where he was born, he follows a group of bored teenagers. It's good, but not exceptional - he never commits the cardinal sin of student writers (which he has, unfairly, been compared to) of over-writing. Rather, the tone remains flat, Raymond Carver-like, matter-of-fact. But it also struggles to have a strong sense of what he wants to say, other than a general riff on teenage isolation and adolescent angst. His art, too, mostly focuses on adolescence: the idea of feeling apart from the world, or lost in it. His first London exhibition, Psycho Nacirema, which ran from June until July this year at the Pace Gallery - was a witty multimedia take on
Psycho. Along with inviting us to look at the work afresh, what it also did - as you were invited around a remodelled Bates Motel - was recall childhood role-play. By the time you saw Franco himself, dressed in drag as Marion Crane, it was almost like watching a child play dress-up. As he said at the time: "There's role-playing; the power of imagination - in the sense that Norman Bates keeps his mother alive through his imagination, he's able to do things when he puts on the garb of his mother that he's not normally able to do in his own persona."
You can't help but wonder: is all this James Franco playing dress-up, trying on other lives for size?
The son of Doug Franco, a Harvard MBA graduate and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and Betsy Franco, a writer, Franco grew up in a house that was liberal, academic, and well off. The young Franco showed a gift for maths but it wasn't long before acting became the priority. Currently, Franco lives in Silver Lake, a hip boho district of LA home to many of the city's musicians and artists.
He can remember two clear times in his life where he decided he had to change it. The first, he says, was when he was in high school, and started going to art classes after school, "life drawing and life painting and portraiture classes", and "that's when I really learned how much I could devote myself to something."
It was the first thing he could devote himself to "obsessively", he says. In other words, putting on the full outfit. "I'd just do it as much as I could. I'd do it from three to 10pm every day. It really showed me. If you really want to do something, you can just throw yourself into it. And in some ways, you can't do enough. And so as far as doing many things at once, it just continued." Only no one knew, he says, because at first, he never showed any of it to anyone.
The second time was when he was 27 - around the time of both big mainstream success in Spider-Man 2 and budget flops like
Tristan & Isolde - and was becoming thoroughly disillusioned with acting. "I was very grateful for it, but I realised acting wasn't going to let me do all the things I wanted to do." So he went back to school, "and then eventually studied writing seriously". Then film school, "and studied that seriously".
Then art school, "and did that seriously too." And so on.
A clue concerning Franco's prolificacy comes in the crowdfunding Kickstarter campaign he launched to allow his most promising protégés to make films from the short stories in
Palo Alto yet to be adapted. Uniquely, the money Franco raises will only go to making the students' films, and any profits will go to charity. "I'd given so much of my own money to projects for my students, and I mean a lot of money, and I just didn't have any more to give.
But I did feel a little weird about it, so if we're saying this is really just for the art, then it's OK to ask people for money."
The 13 IMDb credits, says Franco, are mostly favours - pay-backs for getting big-name actors to star in the films of his students. "I ask great actors like Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig and Mila Kunis to be in the films that my students direct. Those are big favours to ask. So I feel that I need to spread the love too. I did a day on The Iceman because Michael Shannon asked me. A day on Lovelace [as Hugh Hefner] because [co-directors] Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman are old friends."
It's common to end an interview by asking the subject what unfulfilled ambitions they have. With Franco, however, this can't help but feel absurd. What else does he want to do? I can just imagine the reply: what else you got? Of course, I ask it anyway.
"Well," he says without missing a beat, "I love theatre. I'm actually supposed to act on Broadway in Of Mice And Men.
So I think that's gonna happen." Anything else? "Yeah, I'd like to write a play." Have you written one already? A pause. "Oh yeah.
I've written a bunch."
James Franco is the face of Gucci Made To Measure Pour Homme Eau de Toilette. gucci.com
Originally publsihed in the November 2013 edition of British GQ.
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