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
