Daily Archives: November 10, 2010

In “127 Hours,” James Franco plays Aron Ralston, the hiker who, infamously, found his hand trapped by a fallen boulder in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park and, driven to desperate measures, cut his own arm free to escape. Normally, I’d want to ask an actor who spends so much time on-screen alone about process, or acting, or the differences between solo monologue and two-character scenes — and yet, sitting down with Franco to talk about the film, all I can ask him is the specifics of the effects rig they used to create the illusion his hand was trapped. “It was on a set, but they built the set in a very interesting way,” he says. “They used a scanner … (it was an) absolute replica. When we went to the real place, it looked the exact same. The boulder — we needed different kinds of boulders for various things, but the main one was kept in place by a steel rod, and then they built a space for my arm to go. Then it was like a handgrip, so I could just rest it there when I needed to. I didn’t have to worry that it was going to slump down; I didn’t have to be conscious of holding it in place the whole time. I just put it there. It was a handgrip. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think they would have allowed me to really tie myself in there.”

And while Franco never had to truly share Ralston’s predicament, he did feel like he shared plenty with the man whose story he had to portray. “Aron is a bit goofy, in the best way,” he says. “He has a goofy sense of humor. I guess some people would say I do — I don’t know. At least tangentially, I feel like I can relate to a lot of things. He was at Intel; I grew up with my father in Palo Alto. My father worked in Silicon Valley, so I was around all that stuff. As a high school student I worked in some of those companies as an intern. Aron loves the band Phish, and actually the shirt he’s wearing is a Phish shirt. I wouldn’t say I was a Phishhead like Aron, but when I was at UCLA, I went and saw Phish at Pauley Pavilion.” I joke that during the ’90s, seeing Phish was mandatory with UCLA tuition. Franco laughed. “Is that right? I didn’t realize it was cliché. It was a great show. ”

Of course, much of the film is just Franco — and much of Franco’s role involves him being tired, dirty and hungry. Did he, I clumsily ask, stay awake, go without water, deny himself food? Did he “method it up?” Franco laughed at the phrase, and the question: “Yeah, well, no. As a young actor, I ‘methoded-it-up’ quite a bit, and in some places where I think maybe it was unnecessary. But it might have taught me extremes that I was capable of as an actor, and I think every actor — at least, every actor that tries to push him or herself — does strange things. You want to do things that will make you close to that situation or be able to perform what happened to Aron in an authentic way. But you also don’t want to do things that are going to debilitate you as a performer. So depriving myself of water would only just make me really uncomfortable and not perform at my best. But other things, like doing a 20-minute take where Danny asks me, he says, ‘OK, this is where the character tries to pull himself out with brute strength. Do anything that you can: Yank, pull, bash yourself against the rock, kick it, knee it, anything and everything, and don’t stop.’ To do that for 20 minutes, that’s real. Those are real bruises; that’s real exhaustion after 20 minutes. That’s a real pounding headache because I’m so exhausted. So in that sense, we were method-ing the f— out of it.”

–From my article at The Rundown

Looking like Morrissey’s older, smarter, nicer brother, director Danny Boyle is animated and affable when he talks about the challenges of making “127 Hours,” a much smaller-scale film than his Oscar-winning creation, “Slumdog Millionaire.” I ask Boyle if it was important, in crafting and telling the story, to keep an eye on the wattage of Aron Ralston’s halo — which is to say, making sure Ralston stayed human and real. Boyle explains his challenges: “I found a way the story was perceived on superficial levels to be incorrect, really. It’s particularly prevalent in America that he’s often looked at as a superhero. You read the story really closely, what he did was superhuman. So it’s that idea that we can turn a person, an individual into an extraordinary example to everyone of something that’s impossible for everyone else: a superhero to lead us all, to inspire us all. The story’s much more inspiring because he isn’t that, I think.”

Boyle also had the challenge of depicting Ralston’s ultimate fate without either skimping on the real labor and agony of the event … or splashing blood around like one of the “Saw” films. “I didn’t want it to be a splatterfest or gross-out, or anything like that,” he says, “but nor was I going to let it be trivialized by anybody — the studio, anybody — who’d try to reduce it, because I thought it’s crucial that you understand that it’s a journey in itself, this 40-odd minutes that it took him, and you have to go through that really to appreciate the power of what drove him to do it. The courage and the resources are not just drawn out of individual super-heroism. It’s drawn out of a collective thing somehow, and his need to get back to people. He doesn’t cut it off so that he can just go to another part of the canyon and go climbing again. He doesn’t do it just to live.”

Finally, Boyle talks about the challenges of filming and long days when he couldn’t even be on-set, working with a small-scale budget: “The stuff that emerges in the end feels appropriate to Aron’s limitations. You can’t tell this with luxury. I always thought that we wouldn’t have gotten a lot of money for it, but I thought even if you could get a lot of money for it, that would be wrong to tell it in that way. You’ve got to have restriction. We got plenty of money for it; it’s a lot of money, anyway. I thought you have to tell it circumspectly — financially. All we could use ‘Slumdog’ for was permission to make the film, really. They were never going to give us a huge amount of money, because they always thought — and rightly, I understand why, and we still haven’t sold many tickets, incidentally — that it’s going to be a difficult film to get people to go and voluntarily give up their time for.” “127 Hours” is currently in limited release.

–From my article at The Rundown