You couldnt say if they did. Maybe you already did. You poisoned him. Rose no. No. Frank cofor the hour. Next. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. This is not a roast this is my greatest, most elaborate art installation ever. laughter cheers and applause im not the real guest of honor, these arent real comedians and were not even on a real network. laughter what youve seen tonight was my brilliant opus to sequester and artistic visionary and subject them to the mindless incoherent trashings of a scattering of miscreated talentless abnormalities. I call it genius unscathed. And this is my masterpiece cheers and applause rose james franco is here. He is an actor, a director, an artist. Hes also an author. The Los Angeles Angels of anaheim described him as the Los Angeles Times described him as the prince of perpetual motion. His new book is called actor anonymous and here is the trailer for the book. I am the actor. I am the actor. I am the actor. I am the actor. Im an actor so i can play anything. Everyone is in me and i am in everyone. Im part of your consciousness. You dont think so . You want to deny ive made my way inside . Look, im here to entertain you, but i dont really care about anything, you know what i mean . I used to care a lot about acting. But now i see that youre only as good as your material. And if your material is good, youre only as good as your director. Theres so much dependence on others that i cant care about acting anymore. Im Jack Nicholson and marlon gran bran doe, jimmy stewart, steve mcqueen. Im nicholas cage and robert pattinson, james dean and rock hudson. I am Norma Shearer and lillian gish. Im garbo. Im like a sophisticated prop. I give you all the feeling you want, all the hair styles and wardrobe changes you want. Im say whatever you put in front of me. Do not expect me to take pride in what i do. I used to care about how i looked. Now i dont care as much. Maybe its because im so handsome. Rose i am pleased to have james franco back at this table. Welcome. Thank you. Last time we saw each other was at Brown University where you were attending Rhode Island School of design . Thats great. That was a great interview. Thank you. Rose so i just touch on this because you must get tired of talking about it. Why so many things . Or why not so many things . Right. Good question. Um i admit i do a lot of things but theyre all things ive been interested in as long as ive been interested in acting. Basically they all you know, i guess they all fall under film, art, and literature. Those are my things. They just have different forms and what ive found is that i can combine them. I can bring them together so the book is a great example where its a book, its a novel. At its center is acting. So i suppose why so many, the point isnt some people think its an attentiongetting thing or that rose creating a brand. Creating a brand. Or trying to tackle as many things as possible and its really not that as i think as much as being able to find the best form for the different subjects that im interested in. And in Something Like contemporary art i was at r. I. S. D. Studying art. In that world its fairly common and accepted for an artist to be a painter, make videos, maybe write a book. And thats because the art world has just moved beyond. Theyve moved beyond form, theyve moved beyond the studio. Its a poststudio world and its been that way for decades. But when an actor does it theres skepticism. Rightly so. Because actors generally speak or at least when you do a certain level of movie have a certain level of celebrity and so people are skeptical of act using their celebrity to, you know, gain in roads to areas that they otherwise wouldnt have access to. So i understand all of that. But i also have done as much work and gone to as much school as, you know, anyone else. So theres nothing i can i cant work any harder than ive been working. 1 of it does it to say to people look, im not a fake, back off. The other 99 of me went to school and studied those things because i want to take writing and directing and everything as seriously as i take acting. Rose do you get a pass because youre james franco, meaning that they give you a break . You dont have to be as good as people who have devoted their life to it . I think it goes both ways. I think and then there are some forums that are more accepted paths for an actor to taken that others so now its generally more you know, people are okay with the actors becoming directors ben affleck won an oscar for best picture and eastwood and kevin costner, its its redford. I mean, anyone, almost anyone from the 70s that was an actor, nicholson, de niro, beatty, theyve all directed and most of them directed some very good movies. When an actor writes a book not a memoir but a book of fiction, i would say the fives are out. Before i have anyone before anyone has read it the guns are already out. So i wrote a book of short stories called palo alto. Rose about where you grew up . It takes place in my hometown palo alto, california, about the time i was a teenager and its about teenagers but its a book of fiction, again. Its not a memoir. It was fairly well accepted. I got decent reviews but there was still what i was doing at the time when that first book came out about three or four years ago was trying i thought i need to keep my two worlds separate. Im not going to write about acting and and i want people to view me as a writer. Then i thought i have all this experience in the film world, almost 20 years of professional work. Other writers use what they know journalists who travel the world and have some crazy experience will write a book about that. They wont say im going to write a book about that. Rose David Ignatius is a perfect example. He writes about Foreign Affairs in the washington post. Hes also a very good novelist and writes books made into movie and there you go. And im sure theyre about Foreign Affairs. Rose right. He writes about what he knows, spice and iran and all of that. John grisham is going to write about lawyers. Rose exactly right. So youre going to write about what you know. Do you fear failure or not . In other words, risk taking is part of who is in its part of you. Its in your d. N. A. I need to do that. I realized fear of embarrassment can be extremely stifling and if i think back to when i was a teenager i loved movies and i loved plays. I would gol to San Francisco and see plays butpy never engageed with acting. I never really tried it and i think that was just fear of embarrassment and then on the stage a fear of public embarrassment. And once i became an actor you get over shyness and everything because you have to talk to a lot of people, this kind of thing. But then the second step was, all right, if im going to i was writing and doing art long before i started doing it publicly. But i knew if im going put this book out or if im going do whatever. Im going to have to face potential criticism or skepticism or whatever. So if this is what i want to do this is the price i have to pay and it kind of got me over that so now if the only thing thats holding me sbak the potential for failure and embarrassment i do it i never want that to hold me back. Rose its one thing to write a book. But its quite another thing to go to yale and say i want to be in your graduate program because their standards are different. Its not just write a novel and see if anybody buys it. Heres a case where you have to meet high standards. You have to get admitted and then you have to stay up with i assume a Certain Program otherwise their reputation is damaged. Im sure some people still argue that oh, do we wnt james franco associated with yale . And et cetera. But i could buy that maybe if it was the undergraduate program. Ph. D. Programs are different. Theyre paying me to go to school. So thats a big commitment from them. And it is a lot of work. So, you know for know kind of keep up with. So that was also something i had to be very clear with myself that i wanted to do it. Fortunately im past the course work phase. Theres two years of courses. Rose now youre writing a december pen sags or before i do that i have to take my oral exams. So in the English Department you have to read 30 books in five subjects. So thats 150 books and then five professors will sit around and ask me questions about those 150 books. So im in the middle of that. I read almost a book a day and so i have my exam in january. Rose how do you have time for acting and directing . Well, there are there is a lot of down time on sets. And i read almost a book a day. I have to. Rose do you speed read or do you just know how to read . I move pretty fast and i listen to audio books and i put it on the doublespeed saiding so i read them twice as fast. I listen to them twice as fast. So gary sinise is reading steinbecks travels with charlie so it sounds like speaks very fast. laughs rose and you get the same understanding from that or even better . I would say the enjoyment factor goes down a little bit but i have to read all these books for an f the exam so i do what i have to. Rose finally theres this. You are, in fact, doing all these kinds of things while its broadening you as a human being perhaps if you focused on one youd be off the charts as an actor. And you say . What i say to that is i have a lot of answers to that. I believe in hard work. I believe in honing something. This is a book so that ive worked on for years. Probably i wrote the first material thats in that book probably four or five years ago. Rose when we talked to brown some of the things i see in this book i heard from you. I was writing short stories when i was at columbia and my editor was actually a teacher of mine at columbia. So this is a work thats been i dont just put it down and throw it out there. But i also feel that there theres only so much polishing to be done and then it becomes less productive. Theres actually a great documentary about the making of south park, strangely enough. Which i think is actually a really cool show. Its called six days to air. So they have six days for every show they make. Six days within that they write the episode then they animate it, then put the voices to it. Six days. And one of the great things that i think trey parker says in there is if i had more time weve honed it down to six days. We used to take longer but if i spent more time it would probably get a few Percentage Points better but not that not so much that it would actually pay off. So i just feel like get it together and it will have the playoff is that it will have a certain amount of energy to it. It might be messier but it will have vitality. And thats how i feel about certain things that i can only hone it so much and then ill start working the energy out of it. The vitality out of it. Rose this is what karina long worth of slate says. This 285 page book has been branded as a novel somewhat misleadingly. A. A. Or actors anonymous is more like a published notebook full of sketches on themes rendered in a variety of different styles, sort of like a greatest hits of what one might be left with at the end of a few years of a lot of creative writing workshops. laughs do you agree with that . Does that resonate with you . I think the i feel like thats a fairly common kind of criticism like, oh this is something out of m. F. A. Programs. Like i hear that not only about myself, i hear it about everything rose m. F. A. Is master of fine arts. If this is something out of an m. F. A. Program so is that criticism. Ive heard that about people so many times. Like get a new line. So i feel like that is exactly what i was trying to do, get put different kinds of points of view or different approaches to a single or a collective of themes together togethering so that it would feel sort of like it does to be an actor in hollywood. You are viewed through many different lenses. Youre viewed and read through your film roles, youre viewed through legitimate journalists whop ask good questions. Youre viewed through gossip magazines and the dirt of your life is brought up. People gossip about you on social networking. All of these things are youre viewed through all of these lenses so i wanted to capture that. Its supposed to be a collage. Rose one of the things you do which is make fun of all of this you did i thing on instagram which is a photo taken of you kissing another guy because of that little blip of conversations about whether you were gay or not. Yeah, yeah. Rose and that was, what, to take a bemused look at how crazy celebrity was . No, i think what im trying to do there is use the aesthetic of gossip blogs to make a piece of art. So one of the things that i try and do that i can do because of my position is push different forms of art or creativity through channel through other kind of public channels. So for example, if this sounds pretentious, im sorry but its what i do. I went on to General Hospital and i played a role of this artist murderer named franco. Rose laughs now that was already kind of interesting because it became i think it was a Performance Art piece and when i went to shh a lot of artists i knew at the time said what youre doing is great i wish i had that public forum for my stuff. But i wanted more ownership over that piece so i brought it to the museum of contemporary art in los angeles and we shot a special episode of General Hospital at the museum of contemporary art and then it was both an episode General Hospital aired on abc and then i also made a kind of weird arty documentary that we took to festivals and now have sold to comedy central. So there you see like Performance Art going through a soap opera then going through museum of contemporary art then going through National Networks and then going through finally ending up in the frame of a weird documentary. And part of the art sr. The framing and the reframing. So when i go on stain gram and do something that is basically what these gossip blogs are doing but im doing it, im controlling it but it looks no different than the stupid photos they take of me or try and take of me im taking some ownership over it and they reprint it on their stupid blogs and then rose they reprint it simply because its you. They reprint it because its me. I dont read the blogs anymore so i dont know what they said about it but just the fact that they had it on their page i then have my assistants go and take a screen shot of my photo framed by their page and then i will blow that up and i will make a painting out of that. So thats the next step of that project. Rose a little bit about this. You say in defense of myself, this is a piece of fiction. I know my stories might sound like an autobiography and im not making much of an effort to hide when i call my arker the the actor but isnt fiction writing about what i know . So youre writing what you know about . Its what were talking about earlier. I have a professor at yale, michael warner, hes a specialist in American Literature around like between revolution and the civil war. And he said but hes also a highly regarded year theorist. His first book is called letters of the republic. I think it was his thesis when he was a ph. D. And it had no year theory in it. And he said when i realized that i could put my two worlds together i generated so much energy. Thats when i became michael warner. Thats when i became who i am. Something fairly unique. So what happened with my first book im very happy with the first book, but i was spending a lot of energy keeping out this other part of my life and so i thought ill put them both together and i i think a lot of energy will be generated from it. And i know that people will, you know, use this material and pull lines from it and use them against me or read them as nonnonfiction but that was the case in my other book. So whether i write about acting or not people are going to pull lines from it and say that thats me or thats the real me. But this is pointedly not a memoir. This is not a confession, its just using what i know to create an atmosphere, to create characters. But its not its not autobiography. Rose a lot of people have appeared throughout it. Daniel daylewis, tash tino, chaplain, river phoenix. Thats good company. Is there a common denominator there . Yeah, they were all like rose it is who they are thats a common denominator . Well, theyre all actors. Theyre all incredible actors. Rose these were beyond actors. If you think about nicholson and brando and chaplain, they went beyond simply being actors. Youre exactly right. So what i guess im trying to do is a way of using not only the fact theyre acting but everything that they stand for as forms. As generators of power and meaning that you can just say chaplain and it already resonates a lot of different things. Daniel daylouis stands for discipline, character, disappearing into the roles and you get this amalgamation of all the roles hes played already. When you say the name all the roles kind of flow through your head already so if i put them the book, a lot of work is already done just by saying that name. And i like that. I like being able to evoke some of their power just by saying their name. Rose lets talk about directing. You think directing is ar a more interesting form for you than acting . Its control, its collaborative . Yes, youre right. Rose well, youve said it. Im simply saying what youve said. Thats not to say that i dont still get a lot out of acting. But what ive found and heres one of the things that comes from doing multiple things is variety allows me to do the individual things better because when i was only acting professionally i found that i was trying to control movies that i was acting in. I was trying to do more than my job description. Because i had this urge to direct. But i was the actor. And so i had to come to an understanding that movies are directors i believe that movies work best when they are considering a directors when the director is overseeing the whole picture. So when i understood that i did a few things. I accepted the fact that when i sign on as an actor to a movie my job is to help that director achieve his or her vision. Not through some selfserving thing. Serve the movie as the actor. Tell the story as the actor. Now, that doesnt mean i cant give suggestions, but i want the last word to be the directors. Which is one of the the reasons that its so crazy to me that i get blamed for the oscars. I was not the director of the oscars anyway rose stay on that poin