Many actors eyeing early directorial projects tend to focus on something both modest and close to home, a performance-oriented piece on which to cut their teeth for more formally ambitious works in the future.
Try telling that to James Franco. In perhaps the most unlikely heartthrob-behind-camera move since Kevin Costner announced his intention to make a three-hour post-Civil War Western with large chunks of Lakota dialogue, news has come down the wire of Franco’s intention to finally adapt and direct Cormac McCarthy’s totemic Western novel “Blood Meridian,” a long-mooted project previously held by the likes of Ridley Scott and Todd Field, for the screen.
But that’s not before he makes his intended big-league debut as writer-director with another little literary adaptation prospect: William Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness classic “As I Lay Dying,” which you may or may not recall has just 15 narrators. No sweat. As fellow film writer Neil Young remarked to me on Twitter, “He might at least warm up with a 10-hour ‘Finnegan’s Wake,’ or perhaps just a couple of Pynchons.”