Phrases

-I used to care about how I looked. Now I don’t care as much. Maybe it’s because I’m so handsome.

-All I know is that when I needed McDonald’s, McDonald’s was there for me.

-Create your world around your work. Create your work around your life. Let other people help you shape it.

-Sometimes I get a little sad, and I feel like being alone. Then I talk to my cat about it, and he reminds me I’m James Franco. Then we dance.

-If this is the only life, then why I’m not just doing everything I want to do.

-You want to be interesting? Be interested.

-You are successful if you are able to work on the kind of material that you want to – if your life conforms to your dreams, regardless of outside acceptance or acclaim.

-The selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, ‘Hello, this is me.’

-I am very grateful for my life. I think one of the keys to not being depressed is to find gratitude and to be grateful for what you have. So I am grateful for what I have.

-I’ve decided I can’t really control people’s perceptions of me. All I can do is decide on what I work on and how hard I work on it.

-Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.

-Sometimes I think to myself, what should James Franco say next? And then it comes to me.

-Quite Franc-ly, I think I am an asset to this world we live in. I know that if I didn’t exist, there would be some truly upset people just waiting for me. A life without Franco is like a kitten without fur. That’s what my reflection told me.

-Always have one artistic thing that is pure, at least one thing, where you don’t compromise. You can do other things to make money, but have one pure area.

-Boys and girls were both created with given attributes, and given the freedom to act and react. But Adam was allowed to name all the animals, and Eve was made from Adam’s rib, as a companion for him. No wonder she ate the apple, she was rebelling against a world where everything was stacked against her. She was just a prop to make Adam happy.

-If many people love me, then I must be important.

-If liking Katy Perry and drinking margaritas is gay, then who wants to be straight?!

-There’s no relationship that I find that’s closer than a creative relationship.

-Sometimes rabbits, like, turn me on. I don’t know why.

-They say living well is the best revenge but sometimes writing well is even better.

-I don’t even like to sleep – I feel as if there’s too much to do.

-I was a black center in the middle of all the nature. I was nothing, but I could do anything.

-For April Fools Day, someone played a really cruel joke on me. They stole ALL my mirrors and I had to go hours without seeing myself. I mean, I couldn’t even do my daily affirmations. What kind of world is this? I tell you, it’s artists like myself that really suffer.

-Everyone pretends to be normal and be your best friend, but underneath, everyone is living some other life you don’t know about, and if only we had a camera on us at all times, we could go and watch each other’s tapes and find out what each of us was really like.

-Dreams and expectations also have the very dark flipside of disappointment, broken dreams.

-My style is casual-chic? Casual-messy?

-You say I sucked at the Oscars. I was a genius at the Oscars. That was experimental tuxedo sleep art.

-I feel there are so many things in this world that have been and are being created that I could spend the rest of my life thinking about, and I couldn’t cover all the things I’m interested in. That to me is what makes life sweet-learning and exploring.

-If I’m working on a film, I’ll do sit-ups for before I shoot. Like, 100 in the morning or something.

-I don’t have many hobbies. If I think of hobbies, maybe ping pong. But I don’t have a desire to get a ping pong medal.

-I don’t need a vacation in the traditional sense, like I would if I had a job I hated.

-I don’t consider weed to be any worse than having a beer.

-I could have a sex change and become a woman, physically. But in some ways that isn’t even necessary. Because we live in a time when real life, and virtual life are at parity. We are so used to being creators, and creating versions of ourselves, mainly online, and through our communication technology, that I could very well picture myself as a woman, and consider myself a woman, even if my body would be classified as a male body by a medical examiner.

-When I was younger, I didn’t know that I should just listen to my own voice, my own artistic sense of things when I was choosing projects, because one of the biggest creative decisions that an actor can make in the film business is what you will work on.

-If the work is good, what does it matter? I’m doing it because I love it. Why not do as many things I love as I can? As long as the work is good.

-For whatever reason, I have an emotional life that wants to come out.

-I’m an actor, I do movies, and I need to find somebody who enjoys that kind of stuff. It’s not like, “Oh, I have my work time, and we go on a date, and it better be darn fun and exciting!” I think it should all coalesce a bit more.

-It feels really sad, to me, to go to a dark bedroom. It’s like surrendering to the night or something.

-There’s so much pressure put on relationships to deliver the satisfaction of life. And to me, that is just not the answer. I feel like it should be something in addition to what you love or be a part of that.

-In any creative endeavor, you do have to sort of take your shots. Nobody is going to beg you to go into the creative arts. So, if you want to pursue a career in something like acting or writing, the motor and the drive have to come from you. And that does take courage because, A, a lot of people want to do it, and B, it’s hard. So, you have to have the guts to put yourself out there and go for it in spite of the world saying, “You know, it would be so much easier, if you didn’t pursue this.” So, it does take guts.

-The hair is really a way to push me even farther out of just what people know me for. I don’t really know what people know me for.

-When I was a child, I wanted to be an actor, but I had really bad buck teeth. I didn’t want to get braces, but my mom said I couldn’t be an actor if I didn’t get the braces. So, I got the braces.

-I put out a lot of different kinds of material, and maybe people read that as egotistical. Or maybe, since a lot of it does involve some aspect of me, they find it self-aggrandizing. But there’s a long tradition of artists using themselves. Look, I know I’m not perfect. And, who knows, maybe a part of it has to do with self-obsession. But it’s also about using this weird thing that is a public persona as raw material for creative projects.
I only work with people I trust and respect.
Teens today rule the world. The whole culture – movies, music – is pointed at young people. They have so ‘much’ power.

-If you just read the book, you’re taking in the narrative, you’re taking in the characters, you’re understanding it in a certain way. If you make a movie it’s really an act of translation.

-When I started writing after my career as an actor, I knew that that other life in the film industry would be pulled into my writing life and that people would see me not as an author but as an actor starting to write.

-There’s art on the show that’s really bad – these cliché Abstract Expressionist gestural things. It’s almost like extensions of my performance, because in the scene I’m really mad.

-Almost all the movies I’ve directed are adaptations. And I think what I found when I went to film school, where they try to push you to find your voice or your thing, is that I got a lot of things out of adaptations.

-I guess it’s ironic. I just did the Gucci cologne ad, and I was the cologne thief in junior high.

-A lot of the people in San Francisco think of themselves as healers – not just as people delivering this base service, but giving their clients spiritual help. It’s almost like being an actor, playing a different part for each trick.

-I drank from the bottle again and it was a scary plunge because I always wanted to take too much. It hurt, but it was also impressive, like being in the hands of a bigger force. And because of that, a relief.

-I love collaboration of all kinds, and I love the way that collaboration pulls me into directions I wouldn’t go in if I was working on my own.

-He was so. So dirty, and just moving in front of me, and cute. I was in love with him, especially because he was talking to me.

-When I was a young actor, I just didn’t understand how to function in this business as an artist. It is a business, it’s called the film business for a reason, there’s money involved … But on the flip side, now I do not let the business side of it rule either. It’s a balance.

-When I was younger, I thought, ‘Ok, I’m supposed to do this project because it’ll help my career,’ but that didn’t work because I ended up doing movies that I worked really hard on but I didn’t really like and they didn’t turn out well, so it was like I lost double. Once I just started working with people and projects I believed in, everything changed and I suddenly had a career that I loved and that I was proud of.

-I worked at a McDonald’s drive-through. I could always tell when girls were interested: They’d drive around again and say, “I forgot something.”
But I don’t want to die! I have so much to do!
The fame and the fame-hungry world we live in does it all for you. Women are lining up on your Instagram account to meet you.

-The wind came in languid gusts like whispered reminders.

-I become kind of obsessive about research.
I got arrested for graffiti. I got arrested – a lot of, like, underage drinking, drunk in public, shoplifting, you know, your various, like, suburban arrests, I guess.

-I don’t go on vacation. I don’t really need vacation.

-Life as a performance is just a way to look at life choices as character choices. Every morning you choose what to wear, you choose how to wear your hair, you choose your friends, you more or less choose your profession, and how hard you will work at it. Those are all things that an actor decides about his character when he is performing, and they are things that we decide in life. We create our “character.”

-In a movie, a book, or a play, a character doesn’t live in a vacuum. She is subject to pressures from the world outside of her, just like we are in life.

-These pressures and circumstances shape character. Who your parents are determines your genetic make up: your skin color, your sex, your height, weight. Where you are raised does affect your worldview either positively or negatively, your accent. Your economic class affects where you go to school, what you eat, where you sleep.
I was being generous. Gia Coppola wasn’t even a filmmaker at that time, but I asked her to do it, because I believed in her as an artist. And because I wanted a woman’s take on the material. The book Palo Alto is very male-centric, but Gia carved out a bunch of the female characters, and brought them to the fore in the movie. And the project was richer for it.

-I wouldn’t want to live life in an untroubled garden, blissful and ignorant. I would want to get out into the world, and be a part of something. In a way I was born into the Garden of Eden, or as close as you can get in our world; I was born white, male, and in Palo Alto. I had it pretty kush.

-I worked the drive-through at McDonald’s and tried out different accents – Italian, Russian, Irish.

-I loved the book [The Adderall Diaries] I optioned it, I think some years ago. But there’s a lot of different threads in the book. It starts off as one thing, where he’s trying to cover this murder trial, and then his own life starts to impinge on that, so it becomes something else. I found that fascinating.

-We all age. You shouldn’t discount it as a subject for a film. Just because the characters are dealing with issues that you might not deal with for another 45 years doesn’t mean you won’t like it.

-I needed an outlet in high school and came across painting. I’ve actually been painting longer than I’ve been acting. A movie is a collaborative effort, and with painting you just have yourself.

-The first piece of art that I ever bought – when I could afford it – was a Warhol sketch from the period when he was just getting out of doing commercial work and more into art. It’s a sketch of a young guy’s face. I guess the gallery that I bought it from thought I would like it because the young guy kind of looked like James Dean.

-I start movies with people that I believe in and people with visions, you know, that I believe in.

-And so if it doesn’t kind of come together in the right way, at least I was doing it because I believed in the person and the movie.

-I was supposed to go out with this girl, but the plans mixed up because I was working late. So I went to her apartment with a flower. She was asleep, but I really wanted to see her. I figured I’d be like Romeo, and climbed up to her balcony and gave her a rose. She was very shocked. After that, it was over.

-When we were doing ‘Freaks and Geeks’, I didn’t quite understand how movies and TV worked, and I would improvise even if the camera wasn’t on me. I thought I was helping the other actors by keeping them on their toes, but nobody appreciated it when I would trip them up. So I was improvising a little bit back then, but not in a productive way.

-I’m a big cardigan sweater guy.

-I loved the world of Oz. I guess as a young man, I was just drawn to fantasy worlds. I liked being transported to alternative realms where a lot of my early imagination was sparked.

-I am not going to be the guy who’s not pulling his weight.

-We fell in love last night. He’s the coolest guy.

-I love to bring humour into my work. Because comedy is not a huge part of the art world. And big-business film takes itself very seriously.

-Most of the books that I’ve adapted I’m doing because I love the book and I feel like it’s a great work of art in itself, and when it’s a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.

-It’s basically the best job in the world. If you’re fortunate enough – and I consider myself fortunate – you get to work with your friends and you get to work on projects that interest you.

-I still work really hard, but I like to think I’m a little smarter about at least the type of movie I’m getting into.

-I went to NYU graduate film school and met Pam [Romanowsky], and after doing a few things with her I thought she had the right sensibility and that she could figure it [The Adderall Diaries] out.

-I still don’t like going to bed alone.

-Acting is an art form and you want to take roles that are challenged and it’s more of a challenge I think to play dark characters. Not that I want to always play those, but it is a challenge and challenges are rewarding and fun.

-Did you ever see Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke? That’s what happens if you really smoke weed and make a movie. You get two guys and no plot and it’s basically like, ‘Yeah! Let’s drive a van made of weed!’ And that’s pretty much the movie.

-…it can be so boring being you sometimes, and if you were the most special thing like that, it could be really great, but maybe some people say the same thing about you, and you want to tell those people: ‘No, you’re stupid, it’s no fun being me.

-I get like six or so hours of sleep a night.

-I was an English major at UCLA when I was 18, and then I left after a year to start acting. I was educating myself during that time.

-My name is James Edward Franco. Ted is a nickname for Edward. That’s what my parents called me. I also got ‘Teddy Ruxpin’ a lot. It just got to a point where I got sick of it, so when a teacher called out ‘James Franco’ my junior year of high school, I didn’t correct her.

-I’ve been acting for many years now, and I find there’s nothing I enjoy more than making films with my friends and people I like, who also are the funniest people around.

-I actually don’t smoke weed, but I’ve played a lot of stoners – especially with Seth Rogen.

-Villains can often be one note and I would say in that case, it’s not fun to play the villain. It’s fun to play the villain if he a) has dimension and b) the villain gets to do all the things in the movie that in life he would get punished for. In the movie, you’re applauded for them if you do them with panache. And so that’s why it’s more fun to play the villain.

-I am actually turned off when I look at an account and don’t see any selfies, because I want to know whom I’m dealing with. In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, ‘Hello, this is me.’

-You don’t really prepare for a kissing scene.

-Japanese moe relationships socially dysfunctional men develop deep attachments to body pillows with women painted on them.

-School allowed me to have outlets so that some of the pressure was taken off the acting. Every role in every movie, I used to live or die by. Once I had these new outlets, I relaxed a lot more.

-I have high aspirations. I want to be an architect.

-I love that the idea of examining memory, and the way memory is edited was made more interesting because it was being filtered through a writer.