In “Your Highness,” James Franco and Danny McBride play rival princes on a quest to save a kingdom — with stops along the way for nudity, weed jokes, foul language and comedy. It’s a parody of ’80s fantasy-action films, but that also means the people in it have to be able to do fantasy-action. When I spoke with Franco and McBride, I asked Franco how specifically he trained for “Your Highness.” He spoke with serious intent: “I read all of Shakespeare every day while riding a horse and practicing (with) my sword while I held the book.” And the horse, I asked — what did it read? Franco broke into a smile: “The horse was a dumb animal, and did not read.”
All kidding aside, I asked Danny McBride if he worked hard to prepare for the action, or if he stayed inept for comedy purposes. “David (Gordon) Green, the director — I went to one or two days with sword training, and he quickly pulled me out of it,” he said. “He was like, ‘I don’t want you to have any training: I want you to look pathetic and terrible.’ He yanked me from the sword training. I was happy about that, because I am very lazy and swords are very heavy. That’s tiring, swinging a sword around. It’s not cool. I feel like I would be more of an archer.” Franco, with his greater action experience, noted, “I warned you that it would not be a lot of fun.” McBride, for his part, merely added, “Crossbows are light.”
But while McBride gets to flail and fail, Franco has to look assured as the film’s “hero,” so I asked him how hard is it to keep a straight face, to be the guy who takes everything seriously no matter what else is happening? “It’s not that hard, actually,” he said. “I like being the straight man every once in a while. I think of it as a Zen comedy, where if you do it, if you really commit to it, you’re helping the overall thing and actually can achieve some subtle comedy.” McBride, nodding as he mocked himself, chimed in: “Zen comedy. I like that, that’s good. That’s intelligent.”
“Your Highness” owes a lot to ’80s fantasy epics, a genre Franco admitted a youthful fondness for: “When I was younger, I loved ‘The Dark Crystal‘ and I loved ‘The NeverEnding Story‘ and the original ‘Clash of the Titans.’ I don’t think I’ll ever get over those. They do look very different to me now, but they still have a lot of their nostalgic charm.” As for McBride, “I was a fan of all those films and things like ‘Beastmaster‘ and ‘Troll‘ and ‘Excalibur.’ Granted, you watch those movies again and they don’t quite capture the imagination the way they did when you were a kid, but they still have a very big place in my heart. I still enjoy going back and visiting them.”
“Your Highness” doesn’t lack for special effects and production values — even if all the high art is in the service of low comedy. I asked Franco and McBride at what point on-set were they looking around at mechanical birds and wizardry and naked minotaurs and saying, “I can’t believe we’re getting away with this?” Franco laughed: “I guess we said that pretty much every day. Whatever popped up, I wasn’t very surprised by, because David Gordon Green was directing. That means that pretty much anything goes. I’m not really supposed to talk about it, but we did have the first minotaur erection ever captured on film.”
McBride, laughing, confirmed that milestone in the art. “It’s a landmark in modern cinema.”
–From my article at The Rundown
