James Franco recently caught up with Playboy and amongst many topics discussed the actor touched on his latest effort, Rise of The Planet of The Apes. Franco in particular addresses his role, the critics' likely reaction to the film & whether he's seen the final cut. The movie arrives Aug 5th. Hit the jump for the details.
"I never thought of this movie as an example of my creativity. I was an actor for hire. But people still have it out for me, so they’re going to go after the movie.They haven’t shown me the movie yet, so I don’t know what the result is. I did reshoots, and it sounds to me the final movie will be different from the screenplay, which had a lot of character development. The movie seems to be more action now. I went and did my job, and I’m supposed to be a scientist. I feel pretty confident that I did that. What strikes me, looking back at those movies now, is that they had really good actors, including Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall, in these crazy masks, and they were having pretty interesting philosophical conversations about society, the ethics of interacting with other societies and mysterious cultures. It’s fun to see those kinds of conversations and issues. In the later movies it becomes about race and social upheaval, so the movies were kind of comments on current issues. The older movies can get away with that with their cult value. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not a bunch of apes sitting around having philosophical discussions."