James Franco Interview For Danny Boyle’s Incredible Movie 127 Hours

During the BFI London Film Festival I had my second opportunity to catch up with James Franco for his new film 127 Hours (check out my first interview here). I’m sure Franco will receive some much deserved awards season love for his performance in Danny Boyle’s film. In the movie Franco stars as real-life mountaineer Aron Ralston, the mountain climber who amputated his own arm to free himself from being trapped by a boulder. Ralston’s right forearm was pinned for nearly five days under a boulder, forcing him to use a dull knife to amputate the limb. He then scaled a 65-foot sheer wall and hiked out before running into a family that gave him water and food. It’s about as riveting and gut-wrenching as you could imagine. I haven’t seen a movie in a long time that has captured the strength, love and will of the human condition as triumphantly as 127 Hours has. It really does strip away what’s important in life.



As a director and an actor, what did you learn from Danny Boyle specifically?



James Franco: I learnt a lot actually. There are two major things I learnt from Danny. One being the way he’s guided his career, how he has shaped his career and his movies. He really looks to challenge himself by approaching different kinds of material, material he is not used to, subject matter he is not used to, different technical requirements that force him to make new discoveries and pull him out of his comfort zone or abilities he‘s comfortable with. What that does is enable him to make a different kind of movie every time. If you look at his resume, they’re all very different and not just because of the different genres but the way that they’re made. That I find to be very inspiring.



The other thing he unashamedly likes to do is entertain, he likes to make entertaining movies, so in this film he had the challenge of making a movie about a man in a single area, it’s not even like Tom Hanks in Castaway because he had an entire island to move around in and a volleyball to talk to (laughs), here he is stuck in a single place. Some directors will take that really slow and contemplative, but Danny will take that challenge and make it exciting and entertaining. He did it, one of the most common things I hear is people saying it’s unlike any movie experience they’ve had. He makes very original films that are also very entertaining, I really take those things to heart.



How method could you be? What did you put yourself through that could compare to Aron’s own experience?



James Franco: Well, I didn’t cut my own arm off (big smile). But I dunno if Danny does it on every movie but he does like to push the boundaries a bit and push his actors. So that meant getting a little methody in our approach, especially with some of the more physical aspects. In an early scene in the movie Aron has just been trapped by the boulder, he’s a great athlete so he tries to pull his arm out with his physical strength. We shot pretty much in order, other than the scenes with the young women, we had to do that at the end because of snow….so this was a very early scene and in the spirit of Danny’s exploration, because I don’t think he had exactly planned to film it this way either, but he said to me on the day ‘so try and pull your arm out, do anything that you can, bash yourself against the rock, knee it, kick it, yank, pull, anything you can and don’t stop until I say cut‘. I said ‘ok I’ll probably be pretty bruised, and exhausted, I’ll probably get hurt a little bit". He said ’Yeah, yeah’, and I know this is exactly what was said because we have this on video. A friend of mine was filming behind the scenes (laughs). I said ‘alright, I’m up for it, just make sure you get it on the first take‘. So we did it and I think until Danny said cut, it had been 22 minutes, I was completely exhausted and the next day my arm was literally purple, but we figured it out how to do those scenes and actually as an actor it was incredibly liberating, I had the freedom to just really experience that, if I had my arm stuck that’s what it would have been like, I’m not acting exhausted, I’m really exhausted, I’m not acting with the pain, it’s real. I guess in that sense it’s very method.



For other things like when we had to amputate the arm, we had a very good prosthetic so I didn’t have to cut my own arm, but what we figured out in that early scene was that we could do these extended takes with these digital cameras that are capable for shooting for 15-20 minutes. Also they were mobile so they could adjust. It was a very different process than a typical film where you have to set up, then relight, then another setup again, then relight…here you could do all that during the take and it just gave the performance more authenticity because I was experiencing it to a certain extent.



How do you think Aron managed to keep his mental strength? Is that something that you can grasp?



James Franco: Well, I talked to Aron extensively before we started filming and tried to get into his head space, we all did. But as helpful as all that was, Aron gave us another thing that was incredibly invaluable. He showed us the actual videos that he made while he was trapped down there. As an actor they were incredibly valuable because it wasn’t even necessarily what he was saying, it was the pure behaviour in those tapes, we were sitting there watching a guy who had pretty much accepted his own death, and didn’t know that there was a happy ending, so now when Aron is telling us those stories looking back its different, but at the time, he was a man in the middle of a situation. So when I was watching it, as an actor you train yourself to pick up on little signals almost subconsciously. So I tried to absorb however we read each other and our behaviour and other peoples mindsets is manifested on the surface. So when I watched that in the most basic terms, I’m watching a guy that thinks he’s going to die, but the other very interesting thing is that he wasn’t wallowing in self pity, he was delivering these very personal, simple and dignified messages to his family, and to me that says loads. There’s great strength and great connection and love to his family there. It said a lot to me. The strength he had to get through it came from those messages and family.



When Aron asked me why I wanted to play him I said a lot of things, but one was ‘because it’s an amazing story and I really admire the strength you had to get through it on your own, it’s an incredible example of human will’ and he corrected me a little bit and said ‘no, actually it was the connection to my family that got me through. That allowed me to get through those 5 days.‘Those messages weren’t just goodbye messages, Aron said he felt a connection while he was making those messages, although his family weren’t there, he felt like they were, and that gave him the strength to pull through. One of the points in the movie is that we all have that in us. Aron may have been an accomplished athlete and climber, but when he get’s trapped in that canyon, he is humbled and he gets in touch with whatever it is inside us that has that need to survive, and for Aron it was the love for his family.