James Franco and Michael Shannon in “The Broken Towerâ€
It's 10 a.m. on a weekday morning, and James Franco is doing exactly what youd think: Talking about a major blockbuster he just finished, rhapsodizing about poetry and indie cinema, preparing to read at a New York bookstore before flying to L.A. to read there, and doing homework on a laptop.
The fact that Franco Oscar nominee, tainted Oscar host, daytime soap dabbler, multimedia art ist, author is known for his multitudes than any one thing is the only constant his life. Its (sort of) the subject of a (kind of) documentary he co-directed, Francophrenia (Or, Dont Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is) showing this week at the Tribeca Film Fest. (The title refers to the General Hospital character hes played for three years, Franco.)
It resonates as well in his thoughts about The Broken Tower, a film he wrote, directed and stars in that opens Friday. The black-and-white drama is a sexually frank biography of poet Hart Crane (played by Franco), whose gay lifestyle and suicide at 32 in 1932 are as towering as his stanzas about the Brooklyn bridge.
In it, Franco, 34, gives a turn far from 127 Hours and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, or even Howl, in which he played poet Allen Ginsberg.
I made Tower in a way that I thought was tonally resonant with Cranes poetry and life, even though I knew it would be a more difficult movie. But I wanted to be loyal to him, says Franco, whose scruffy grad-student looks obscure the fact that he recently finished playing the Wizard in Oz: The Great and Powerful for Sam Raimi, who also directed him in the 2002-2007 Spider-Man films.
It was about a decade ago that Franco, then known for TVs Freaks and Geeks and the James Dean telepic, decided to put Cranes cinematic life on the screen. But I didnt know how, I was just an actor, he says. I was talking to the foreign press, and when asked what I wanted to do, I said, I want to play Hart Crane! I threw it out there so a director or writer would say okay.
Yet the project would only come alive once Franco went back for the undergrad degree he abandoned. Hes since pursued several postgraduate degrees.
At NYU film school, you start with shorts ... so I did a four-minute film from a four-stanza poem. When I got to my thesis, a feature film, I remembered a biography of Hart Crane Id read; I thought it would be a g reat progression. Because I learned in bringing poetry to film that poems can be represented in a variety of ways, and here would be a chance to use many of them.
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