Vanity Fair released an article yesterday which features Dave (and with it, we got a brand new photoshoot). In the article which you can read bellow, Dave speaks about The Disaster Artist, working with brother James, their production company and much more!
Photoshoots > 2017 > Session 030
At one point while making The Disaster Artist, Dave Franco filmed a scene in which he had to calm down his brother, James Franco, who was—in character—thrashing around a film set nude, save for a small, strategically-placed piece of cloth; a wavy black wig; and enough facial prosthetics to make him look like “a vampire Frankenstein.”
“That was a strange scene to shoot, for obvious reasons,” laughs Dave, 32, as he leads me up Griffith Mountain on a hike he regularly takes with his wife, Alison Brie. “My brother was only wearing a cock sock throughout the entirety of the scene. That was actually the first day that Alison came to set, so that was the first thing that she witnessed. In that moment, she kind of succumbed to the fact that this movie was going to be strange and like nothing she had ever seen before.”
The Disaster Artist, which is directed by James and out in wide release Friday, is a comedy chronicling the making of 2003’s The Room—the film written by, starring, and directed by Tommy Wiseau, which has been christened both the worst movie ever made and, in the years since, a cult classic. The Disaster Artist recasts The Room as a triumph of the human spirit—proof that two wide-eyed dreamers can make a movie, no matter how nonsensical the plot, how disjointed the dialogue, and how inexperienced its filmmaker.
In The Disaster Artist, James plays Wiseau—a real-life enigma who claims to be from New Orleans, despite his thick Eastern European accent, and who believed The Room to be such a masterpiece that he screened it during the Oscar consideration window. Dave plays Wiseau’s best friend Greg Sesteros, a naïve actor swept up in Wiseau’s deluded optimism, who helps make The Room. (After seeing the film, the real Wiseau told Dave that Greg was “20 percent dorkier” than how Dave played him. “I don’t know exactly how to interpret that, but it’s a good note,” grins Dave.)
Though James has the flashier role, Dave has the more difficult one—keeping a straight face through his brother’s in-character hysterics and tethering Planet Tommy to reality, acting as Tommy’s go-between to less-deluded characters and the audience’s sympathetic stand-in. Because Dave finds this tricky balance, in his best performance to date, The Disaster Artist lands as the rare comedy that is as heartwarming as it is hilarious. And because of A24’s canny distribution strategy, the film is getting a glossy December 8 rollout—after earning rapturous reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival—and being positioned as an awards-season dark horse.
