James Franco is certainly an ambitious young man. Barely a week goes by when there isn’t a story about him wanting to star in, write and/or direct a new movie, with his slate of possibilities growing ever longer. Now he’s got two more hefty possibilities, as he’s planning to take on William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy.
Showbiz 411 talked to the actor, who told them then he’s keen to direct an adaptation of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, from his own screenplay. He’s apparently been in talks with the author’s estate for a long time, and has a commitment from Fox Searchlight to make the movie. It’s certainly a tough book to adapt, as it has a huge amount of characters and interweaving plots, all surrounding the death of Addie Bundren and her familys attempt to have her buried in Jefferson, Mississippi. It’s the sort of thing you can imagine Robert Altman having done, but whether Franco’s up to it is yet to be seen. According to Showbiz 411 this is the project he’s most keen on amongst the hundreds he’s rumoured to be involved with.
The website also says he’s in ‘in the process of making a deal with Scott Rudin to write and direct Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian in 2012’. Ridley Scott was attached to Blood Meridian for a long time, so Franco would certainly be a different direction to go in. McCarthy’s book is dense, difficult and violent, and the author himself has said it would take someone with imagination and balls to be able to bring it properly to the big screen, as the extreme violence is vital to what the novel explores. The book is set in mid-19th Century and revolves around a teenage vagabond known only as ‘The Kid’ who gets into various adventures while drifting through the American Southwest, much of which revolves around a group of ruthless killers, led by ‘The Judge’, who hunt Indians for the bounty of their scalps.
However it seems Blood Meridian is far from a done deal for Franco, as The Playlist e-mailed Scott Rudin, who downplayed the actor’s involvement, while not outright denying it. And with a hundred other projects swirling round him, who knows what Franco will actually end up doing.