James Franco on The Sound and the Fury: ‘Faulkner pushes me as a film-maker’
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Version 0 of 1. Hi James, you’ve directed and starred in a version of The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner’s 1929 novel about the decline of a Mississippi family. Could you explain the importance of Faulkner’s work to an American audience? He’s the granddaddy of southern writers. He’s our high modernist writer. He goes hand in hand with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and Proust. He’s like our version of all of that. I think his best books are As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, the two books that I’ve adapted. When I think about adapting books for film, what I like about Faulkner is that he enables me to make period pieces. So the world within the film takes place in the 1920s or earlier, but his writing is so complex and unusual that it allows me to use very contemporary film techniques and editing styles. That’s exciting to me. It’s a very big challenge as a film-maker. Right – and that’s one of the reasons that I do it. It pushes me as a film-maker to find solutions, and filmic techniques that I normally wouldn’t use. I have to think ‘how do you get stream of consciousness’, ‘how are we going to tell this non-linear story’. As well as directing the film you play the central role of Benjy Compson, a severely disabled character. What measures did you take to prepare? Benjy is one of the most famous characters in American literature and I just decided that I would approach the character in the same way I would approach the movie as a director. Meaning: I would look to the book. I don’t know what Faulkner’s research was, if he knew a person who he based Benjy on, if it was realistic or not. I just thought I need to get as close to his description of Benjy and that’s my guide. In addition to that, I guess because I was acting and directing I was also fortunate enough to be able to shoot in such a way that would help the portrayal. Meaning: each section has its own shooting style so that the first section is extremely subjective. I think that helps the performance because as an audience member you feel that you’re in Benjy’s shoes; you’re not watching this character, you’re going through everything with him. I then don’t have to show so much as an actor because the film language is saying so much. Benjy assaults a girl and in the novel and there’s a suggestion that it’s sexual desire that’s driving him. Did you try and tone that down for the film? You could very well be right. I can’t recall exactly the passage where it happens. Maybe we could say that it’s more ambiguous in the book but, as a director, because images on screen are more concrete than text on a page, I need to make a decision. I think in terms of the audience’s sympathy, which, for me, also equates to watchability, I wanted Benjy to be doing it just because he wants to get back to his sister. This little girl reminds him of his sister. In that way, the dichotomy between what the audience sees as what Benjy desires and what the other characters think Benjy wants is greater. For me that was kind of more interesting. In the book, Benjy has a lot of interests, he’s drawn to a lot of different things, but in the movie we realised that we need to just make it his sister. He needs his sister, he misses his sister and to make that more of an innocent need rather than a sexual need, that will actually guide us through. Which unfilmable novel will you film next? Well, there are two more Faulkners we want to do: The Hamlet and The Bear. The Bear would be difficult, just because you need a trained bear [laughs], but nowadays you could probably do CGI or motion capture, like in Planet of the Apes, and get Seth Rogen to play it. |