Well, that didn’t take long. Less than a week after bailing on directing “The Garden Of Last Days” James Franco has another directorial effort in the works, it’s yet another literary adaptation and he’s rounding up friends and colleagues to take part.
The LA Times reports that while it’s still coming together, Franco is gunning to direct the movie version of William Faulkner‘s “The Sound And The Fury.” The famed stream-of-consciousness novel, tells the story of the Compson family over three decades of upheaval. While considered “unfilmable” by some, it was made into a 1959 movie directed by Martin Ritt, and starring Yul Brynner and Joanne Woodward, so it’s been done. Not only that, Franco showed that he could handle this kind of prose with his uneven but still-with-merit adaptation of another Faulkner novel, “As I Lay Dying,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year (review here).
“We’re in pretty good shape, but there are a few more things that have to happen before we’re good,” Franco told the paper about the status of the movie. That said, he’s hoping scheduling can be worked our for Jon Hamm to play Mr. Compson, while he wants his brother Dave Franco to play Quentin Compson. Danny McBride, who had a small part in ‘Dying,’ is also expected to re-up here as well.
As Franco said, there’s still a few things to organize so this won’t shoot anytime soon and he’s got a role in the next effort from Wim Wenders‘, “Everything Will Be Fine,” along with his crowdsourcing thing to keep him busy this summer. Not to mention he’s got two more movies in post: the Cormac McCarthy adaptation “Child Of God” and “Bukowski.” So yeah, maybe a moment of pause before this starts isn’t a bad thing.
