Top 169 Quotes & Sayings by James Franco - Page 3

I think all great comedies - or at least the comedies I like - it has some of the funniest moments, but it never breaks the spell for the audience. It never pushes the audience away by spoofing itself too much or undermining the characters or making them cardboard or flimsy. Everybody is really trying to do what their characters believe in - and so nobody breaks the spell of the world, even though in other ways it's a comedy and very funny.

For some reason, when I was in junior high school, my friends and I had, like, a cologne-stealing ring.

I hate being an actor, they dress you and put on your makeup and you just feel like a little baby.

Showing the addiction and unusual sexual practices are ways of just outlining a much bigger character trait.

Anyone has outside influences. They are the results of the cosmic roll of the dice: this person is born Aragon the Ranger, this person is born a prisoner in North Korea, this person is born Carlos the Dwarf. Some of these things are out of our control, but that doesn't mean that they can't be changed. A character, just like a person in real life, is a summation of her actions and feelings. Our actions and emotions are not performed against nothing, they do not arise from dust, we are in constant friction, and/or flow with our surroundings.

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 have high aspirations. I want to be an architect.

I think as far as straight actors playing gay roles, "Brokeback Mountain" was a big breakthrough. I'm pretty sure when they were casting that movie that - I think the story is, like you know, 10 to 15 other actors turned it down.

I get to work with incredibly talented young filmmakers and students, and their attitudes and relationship with film is still so pure. That re-inspires me and reminds me why I got into it and what I love about film, and allows me a little reprieve from the business side of it. And it rekindles my love of film.

There's this phenomenon where people do like to announce movies that they think I'm doing that I'm not.

There's a long tradition of teen comedies where the kids are getting drunk on beer and whatever else, so smoking a joint to me is no worse than having a beer. So, if someone has a problem with it, I'll just tell them to relax.

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.

When I read the book [The Adderall Diaries] I loved it, and I maybe had an inkling that there was a lot of good material in there. I didn't quite know at the time how to adapt it into a film, but I hoped I would figure it out one day.

You take advantage of your position as a famous actor to meet women.

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.

The number of women in power positions is a fraction of the number of men in such positions.

A director on a film really sets the tone of how people go about things, so everybody is happy to be at work and everybody does their best.

I personally just love movies about the creative process.

"The Wolfpack" is a real life clash of life and fiction and the saving power of brotherhood and make-believe.

It's like low-budget filmmaking - a focus on dialogue and relationships over plot. Quirky. Improv.

This was the way the night had cashed in. Choices had been made and things happened, and here we were. It was sad, and funny. My life was made of this. Stuff like this.

There's a large chunk of me in all the parts. As an actor, I got involved largely because I want to let things out. The best acting is that that is most real and the only way to do that, is to genuinely feel it.

Men in your position have women offering themselves in the hopes that they will get somewhere professionally, or socially.

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.

Fight scenes are really more like dances than they are fights, because you're depending on your partner to do the right move at the right time. Yes, a tough person or somebody who knows what they're doing will look better in a fight scene, but it also has a lot to do with the other person.

As an actor in the classroom, you're revealing so much, and teachers are, you know, they're just critiquing like a painting or a piece of work; it's like, it's you, and it's your emotions that they're working with.

I teach a lot - I teach at the UCLA and USC graduate film programs - and a lot of those projects are my students' projects that I act in or I do a cameo.

You just don't really rehearse kissing scenes, whether it's male or female.

I've come to a point where I just want to do movies that I just believe in. I have come to an understanding of filmmaking, a new understanding where I believe it's a director's medium. That means working with people that I believe in.

You don't really prepare for a kissing scene.

You're a white male living in America, brought up in one of the richest cities in the county, Palo Alto. You went to high school with Steve Jobs' daughter, and your journalism teacher is the mother-in-law of Sergey, co-founder of Google.

...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 have a lot of books optioned. This one sat around for a while - part of that was just because I was trying to figure it out, and I didn't realize I needed Pam to figure it out - but I'm not somebody that likes to option books and then sit on them.

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.

We tell specific stories about ourselves to ourselves and we're all the heroes of our own lives. But you live through certain experiences with other people, and sometimes they have very different takes on what happened.

Adapting a book is essentially a collaboration, whether the author is alive or dead.

There is actually a huge suicide problem in Palo Alto schools, so obviously not all is well in paradise. High expectations, and the pressure to achieve in a highly competitive world are too much for a lot of very promising young people. There have been something like ten youth suicides in Palo Alto in the past ten years. They usually step in front of the train that runs by the high school.

I always see nice images like that but I don't know what to do with them. I guess you share them with someone. Or you write them down in a poem. I had so many of those little images, but I never shared them or wrote any of them down.

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

Generally you don't initiate the projects - they're designed and you're inserted. Your material is edited by somebody. You feel a lack of power over your work.

I learned a lot of good things in my school. I've audited a lot of other schools, and I guess after a while I got a little tired of the acting school atmosphere.

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

I felt, implicitly, or not so implicitly, that subjects about women and other races were out of my jurisdiction as a creator. That if I moved too far from my own experience, and my own established identity, I would be criticized for taking even more of those wedding pies from others.

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.

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.

I wanted to do serious movies. I had a certain idea of what good acting was. That's since changed, and I love doing comedies now. I don't like a lot of those movies now, but I thought those were movies that I could do real, serious performances in.

I think it helps the writers to sell their books, if they announce my attachment, but it doesn't mean that I'm going to make the movies in the next year, or two, or three.

If you have a profession that depends on what you look like, you can't blame somebody for caring about that. It's part of their job. So it's vanity but it's also not in a lot of cases. It's being professional.

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.'