James Franco is the leading man in the Rise of the Planet of the Apes movie, which comes out today and already getting great reviews.
The story is set in present day San Francisco and Franco’s character is a scientist whose experiments with genetic engineering lead to the development of intelligence in apes.
It sets off a war between mankind and the apes for supremacy.
We got a chance to talk to James about everyone from the cast, which is an extremely gifted and well respected bunch. We predict Planet of the Apes is going to be one of the top movies to end off the summer!
What was the attraction in doing this movie? Are you going to be upstaged by apes since your picture doesn’t appear on the movie poster?
I was given a script by Rupert and before I read it I thought, well I know about that idea, but once I saw the take on it compared to other apes movies, it was a very grounded. Then when I met with Rupert he told me that the apes would be captured with this performance capture technology and I thought, this would be the way to do it. I honestly didn’t think about being upstaged by apes, I just thought it’d be an interesting movie and a great thing to be a part of.
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A lot has changed since your last big budget movie franchise, the Spider-Man movies. You’ve been in film school, there’ve been a lot of advances made in visual effects. How have you changed in terms of your approach to acting for this particular movie when it came to the visual effects? If you wanted to direct a visual effects-heavy movie what would you want to do? What would it be about?
My IQ has changed a lot actually about these kind of affects. That’s partly because the technology has advanced to a place where we can do a movie like this. We had actual sets and the technology allowed Andy to come onto our sets and just act, so it brought us back to good old fashioned movie-making. You get to act with a real set, but get these kinds of computer generated creatures with a great actor underneath the computer generated creature.
I’m studying digital media at Rhode Island School of Design and that has changed my whole perception of this kind of work. I embrace it and it was actually one the reasons I wanted to do this. It was a chance to have a different kind of acting experience and maybe when I started Spider-Man one back in the day, I was one of those actors who thought ‘alright, I’m part of a big thing and fake acting will be acting to nothing or tennis balls or this kind of thing,’ but now here we are ten years later and I get to make a movie opposite a chimpanzee.
But underneath there’s an incredible actor and I can look him eye to eye and engage with him and interact with him and do everything that I would do with a non-performance capture actor and so it’s exciting. And as far as doing it myself, Andy’s making it possible, or so he says, for smaller budget projects to use this kind of technology. I’m very interested in it, it’s just that right now the kinds of movies I’m making don’t scream big box office so I can’t really justify spending millions of dollars to do this, but if I had a script that I felt like, this’ll make it’s money back, I certainly would do this because it’s incredible.
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Can you comment on the mythology of the apes and why it’s still around?
One thing that I studied, I hope it doesn’t go too far off track. There’s a book by Michael Cunningham called Specimen Days and it’s this regular three section thing and in the first one, the characters are in the 1850s and dealing with Walt Whitman and by the third section, they’re in the future and there are these androids and what it shows is up until this point, we as humans kind of define ourselves as superior to animals because of our intelligence.
But now as technology grows and we have thinking machines and the foreseeable future machines that can interact with us and talk or whatever, we start to define ourselves as humans based on our feelings as opposed to machines. Now, with this story you get a weird kind of combination of what we would consider our primitive side, our animal side, the apes, our connection to the apes, but now it’s kind of leaked over.
So this movie and all the other movies really define who we are as humans by the way that we treat both animals and other intelligent or equally intelligent species or cultures. The previous films all the apes have been around for a number of years, so their cultures are fully developed, so those are much more about culture clash. This is an origin story and so the dichotomy is more, the tension is more between animals and humans, but it’s still all about who are we.
How do we define ourselves? How do we treat ‘the other,’ whatever that may be.
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You seem like the “Jack of All Trades” and you’re in a lot of different projects like this film and you go to school. We wanted to ask what’s on your bucket list? What is something that you want to accomplish that you’ve yet to do?
I’m happy … I can’t really look at my life and say, ‘Oh I still always wanted to do that.’ I’ve been very fortunate I’ve had a lot of opportunities. I mean, I’ve had to work hard but I’ve now had opportunities to do everything that I’ve wanted, so it’s kind of just gravy. That’s one of the reasons I’m teaching, I’m trying to give back to other people, I’m trying to give people opportunities that I was given. The class I’m going to be teaching at NYU is not only a class, it’s actually a production class that will result in a feature film that the students will get to make together. I guess that’s what I’d like to do now, continue to be creative, but in a way that I can give back in some way or another.
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How did you get involved in art and are you finding the art world different from the film world insofar as people are a little snobby?
The art world is it’s own thing, you know. I guess maybe when you bring up the ‘snobby’ aspect of it, I think that part of that is the way that art is purchased and the way that artists make a living. When you make a film like this, you need to make the money back by selling tickets and a bunch of tickets.
Normally when you make an art piece it’s not distributed in the same way. You’re making objects or concepts or something that will be sold in a limited edition and so I guess maybe where the snobbishness comes in is the people that are gonna then purchase art have to have a lot of money and they have very refined tastes and if they’re gonna buy that level of art or art that’s that expensive I guess that’s kind of maybe where a little bit of the differences come in. You know you’re gonna find snobbishness in any kind of field for a variety of reasons. But that’s kind of the big difference between the distribution or the selling of a movie like this and art in general terms. And then the art world one of the main reasons I’m drawn to it is because I’m doing stuff that you could say comes from the film world or video world but the art world allows you to kind of step out of some prescribed restrictions that you might find in the movie world and just things that come with having to distribute movies like this or having to … this movie costs a fair amount of money so you have certain responsibilities to make it attractive. You can’t just make it a slow kind of Norwegian art film or something like that. It has to kind of have pace. That being said there’s tons of artistry and this is completely cutting edge but it has different kind of requirements than if you make an art piece it’s gonna be seen in a single gallery or a few galleries and so I enjoy that aspect. I enjoy the different kind of freedom that the art world (allows).
