James Franco seems to be the name on everybody’s lips at the moment, and if you ever get a chance to look at his schedule you can see why, he’s certainly one busy boy.
Having recently cut off his arm (not literally of course) in Danny Boyle’s recent biopic 127 Hours Franco now looks like he wants to step behind the camera and has discussed rumours that he’s getting ready to direct two book adaptations.
Speaking to EW Franco confirmed that he would be adapting William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian for the big screen.
He will host this year’s Oscar awards with Anne Hathaway, and revealed that he hopes to shoot As I Lay Dying this summer.
“You want to capture the tone,” he says, “but you can’t work in exactly the same way. I don’t believe it’ll feel the same if you divide it as rigidly as the book, like titles that say ‘Cash’ and then you’re with Cash.
“I want to be loyal to the book – my approach is to always be loyal in a lot a ways – but in order to be loyal I will have to change some things for the movie.”
He also hopes that he’ll direct Blood Meridian a year later in 2012. He’s already had help from Scott Glenn and Luke Perry for the film by shooting a scene from the book.
“We made that as a way to convince Scott Rudin to give us the rights,” Franco says. “It was like, why should he give it to me when Ridley Scott didn’t make it?
“So I called him up and said, ‘I’m planning on doing this. You don’t have to give me any money, I can finance this shoot. Would you just wait? Don’t do anything with it until I show this to you.’ And I showed it to him and he loved it.”
Its not even the end of the year yet but the Oscars machine is slowly starting to crank into life, its not so much rumours about who is going to win but who is going to host it.
do just that.”
(4/5)
