Actors Anonymous by James Franco Read Free Book Online Page A

saying.
    Who is the cinematographer? Is the cinematography dark and moody? Fast and bright? Video or film?
    Is there a lot of action in your film? Comedy? Are we laughing at you or with you? Are you in control of the comedy or its victim? Who is your foil?
    Who are the villains in your film? Do they get punished? Are you the one to punish them?
    What role do you play in other people’s films? Are you the comic relief? The villain? The mysterious lover? The femme fatale? The father of the bastard?
    It’s nice to think of your life as a film because then it just feels like play-acting. That the consequences are insubstantial, as they are when your camera eye pulls out far enough. If we’re watching your life from space, your personal dramas don’t mean much.
    Who is directing your film? I mean, really?
    Who are you acting for? Who is guiding your performance? It is very hard to act and direct at the same time. I’ve done it a bunch of times, but I always depended on others for help when I did so. Friends.
    Does your film end tragically? You probably don’t know. Can’t control it. Maybe you could if the character committed suicide.
    I knew a young woman whose grandmother committed legal suicide in Europe. She was sick of life.
    My grandmother is full of life at age ninety because she is vitalized by my career. All of her friends are jealous that I’m her grandson.
    Even the friend who is the mother of Judith Butler.
    Actually,
especially
the mother of Judith Butler.
    Movies and entertainment dominate. That’s all there is. They rule the world.
    I guess they are dependent on a stable country, but when we have that, there is nothing more influential than popular entertainment.
    Maybe when things are unstable, entertainment is just as influential. A nice escape, they say. But if your life is in entertainment, is it an escape? And if everyone just watches videos now, aren’t the videos life, and real life is the escape?
    It’s safe to say that entertainment
is
life.
    Do you differentiate your life from your art? Sometimes it’s best to.
    It’s great to read
Hamlet,
but you probably wouldn’t want to
be
Hamlet, or even hang out with him.
    Horatio. What a good guy. Like Razumikhin is to Raskolnikov, he is to Hamlet. In life, it’s better to be Horatio and Razumikhin; in art it’s better to be Hamlet and Raskolnikov.
    When I was in fifth grade, I copied down the character lists from all the Shakespeare plays.
    I wanted to own all those characters. It was an attempt to encompass all of Shakespeare.
    I had the same impulse in seventh grade, when I wanted to draw adiagram of all the people at my junior high and how they were all socially connected, all the cliques and shit.
    These were two early attempts to make sense of both my artistic world and my social world.
    Both worlds are made up of people. Even abstract art has a human creator.
    Art is given different definitions at different times, but those definitions will be destroyed.
    My director? The poet Frank Bidart.
    Read Frank’s poem, “Advice to the Players.” It talks about all of this, about the human need to create.
    Fuck business. Fuck money. Fuck fame. Fuck coolness.
    I am in a great position. I
can
say fuck all of those things because I am a famous actor and because I
have
money and I can do whatever I want (within a range) and I will look cool.
    But I still say fuck it all.
    My work is my life and my life is my work. And something like this—this book—is totally free of the pressures of being popular, because I don’t make my living off of books, I make my living off of acting.
    Always have one artistic thing that is pure, at least one thing, where you don’t compromise. You can do other things to make money, but have one pure area.
    Now, being pure doesn’t mean that you don’t listen to others’ opinions or don’t listen to your director (whether he be actual or in your mind), but it means that you listen for the right reasons: for artistic