James Franco on playing the “supporting wife”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5Pupmdeang[/youtube]

The clip is from the NYTimes in July, and reminds us that James Franco not only stars in one of the more serious movies of the Fall, he was the best part of the funniest movie of the summer, as well. The LATimes feature begins by telling us that he’s pursuing a MFA at Columbia (in fiction writing. Both the clip and the article reinforce what we already feel about Franco as an articulate actor who opens up and reveals his what’s going on his head more than most. On his reaction to the Milk script:

“Reading the script, I knew that one of the major functions is to be the supporting boyfriend, what in a straight movie would be the supporting wife role,” Franco said, grabbing a cigarette on the terrace of Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel, a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Despair” close at hand. “For a female actress, maybe that would sound like, ‘Oh, no, another supporting wife role.’ But I’ve never been offered that part.”

And about how the director and actors created scenes with an indie flexibility:

For “Milk,” director Gus Van Sant tried to bridge the gap between his previous experimental features and biopic conventions. An attempt to shoot scenes on the fly with a documentary cameraman was aborted, but Van Sant did encourage the actors to stray from the script. “You’re going into a scene knowing that the other person can say whatever,” Franco says, “so you don’t get lulled into doing the lines the same way over and over.”