James Franco on directing Blood Meridian

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Here’s an excerpt from an entertainment Website on Franco talking about getting the job to direct Blood Meridian. He’s also got a project underway to direct Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

“As for Blood Meridian, which has its own remarkable and distinctive prose style and includes scenes of nightmarish violence which should prove tough to translate to screen, Franco said he got the gig by shooting a test sequence from the book, with all the trappings (among them Luke Perry). Mark Pellegrino (a.k.a. Jacob from Lost) played the Judge — one of the most horrific villains ever to grace a work of American fiction — and the sequence also starred the likes of Scott Glenn, Luke Perry, and Franco’s brother Dave, also an actor.

“Franco said: ‘We made that as a way to convince Scott Rudin to give us the rights. It was like, why should he give it to me when Ridley Scott didn’t make it? So I called him up and said, “I’m planning on doing this. You don’t have to give me any money, I can finance this shoot. Would you just wait? Don’t do anything with it until I show this to you.” And I showed it to him and he loved it.'”

To see the entire article, click here. For the 1992 interview with Cormac McCarthy in The New York Times, click here.