"Milk," the new film about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in 1978 and later assassinated, is a powerhouse film on the top of many year-end awards, including nominations for the St. Louis Film Critics Awards.
While Milk's name is the title, the film is about more than one man and presents gay rights as a human and civil rights issue. While Sean Penn, who plays Milk, is being singled out for Best Actor awards, actor James Franco, who plays Milk's longtime lover and political assistant, is set to garner lots of Best Supporting Actor nominations.
The Current spoke to Franco recently by phone. The actor is coming off a star-making year, in which he virtually stole the show in the summer comedy "Pineapple Express," and followed up with his impressive dramatic turn in "Milk." Franco has also been featured in the two Spider-Man movies, as Harry Osbourne, starred as James Dean in a made-for-TV movie, and was one of the stars of the TV show "Freaks and Geeks."
Franco was asked whether, in playing a role based on a real person, he encountered people who knew the real Scott Smith.
"Those people were advisors on the movie so they were there everyday, like Cleve Jones and Danny Nicoletta and Frank Robinson, all of them were in the movie playing little cameos, not themselves but other roles, so they were there everyday and it was a very unique working on that set," Franco said.
"Especially in the camera shop on Castro Street, we shot in that building. The film rented it and refurbished it to look like the old camera shop. I remember when Frank Robinson, who was Harvey Milk's speechwriter and the writer of the novel "The Towering Inferno," walked onto the set and I was sitting behind the desk and the other actors were there, and he just looked at me and you could see in his eyes that it was almost like he was being transported back," he said. "From that moment on, he just called everybody by their character names because those had been his friends. It wasn't like he was a method actor or anything like that, it was just like he had been in a way transported back and it was easier just to call everybody by their character names."
"It was pretty amazing just being able to shoot there, in probably what had been the center of the gay movement in the entire world - that was 'it' - and to be doing it there, where it all happened, was very unique for me," he said.
Some of the film was shot on location in San Francisco, in the Castro Street District where Harvey Milk and Scott Smith lived. Franco said that the current-day community was supportive of the film.
"I don't think Gus or any of the producers were at a loss for getting extras," he said. "There were huge marches (in the film) and I think they had too many people; they got more than they asked for just because people in the community were so interested in being involved in this movie. As far as I could see the film was really embraced by the community."
In "Milk," Franco and Sean play gay men in a relationship and Franco spoke about not making the scenes too voyeuristic while still creating a sense of intimacy. The actor discussed how he and "Milk" director Gus Van Sant handled the gay love scenes.
"As far as not making it voyeuristic, that was really in Gus's hands, but I knew just based on how he has depicted love scenes in his past films that he doesn't make it gratuitous; it's always very stylized," Franco said. "In (Van Sant's film) "My Own Private Idaho" it's a still camera and the actors are posed in various positions but not actually moving. Same with "Paranoid Park," really, all of them, so I knew that. Those scenes we just did it, and that's it. I've never rehearsed one of those scenes with a female actor so I didn't expect to rehearse with Sean. We both knew how to kiss and just kissed. As far as the relationship, if you want to know about that, I think what it is, is I've known Sean for a while so we're friends and I feel comfortable with him on that level and in addition I just have such admiration for him. I think that whatever acting thing happens, I just transformed that admiration into the affection in our relationship. Scott, my character, is a very supportive character so it wasn't too hard to use my respect and admiration for Sean as the love and admiration that Scott had for Harvey."
Franco was asked if he gain a different insight into the people behind the scenes of public figures in playing Scott.
"What I think about the "political wife" and playing that role is I was very happy to do it. I think that that kind of role and the relationship that it created in the movie was very important to the movie as a whole, because this movie could have just been all politics and just his political career but instead Gus has made a very intimate-feeling movie," he said. "You get to really see Harvey's personal life and what he was like as a man as well as a politician and that is the main function of my role and of our relationship in the movie is to ground it emotionally and really round out the character of Milk and to show just what the lifestyle was like at the time and place."
"Gus has been trying to make this movie for 12 years or more, and I've never read any of the scripts before Lance's script, but what I was told is that it was just too political," Franco said. "It was also maybe too focused on Dan White (Milk's assassin) and his psychology, so that it was just like 'Dan White movie' and not 'Harvey Milk movie.' So Gus really refocused it and reoriented it so that it was about Milk, about the time, about the place, and about the people there, so that relationship gives you access to what that's about."
Franco grew up in California but was unaware of Harvey Milk's story when he signed on to do the film.
"When I was doing the research (for the role), one of the first things I did was watch Rob Epstein's documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk," and it felt familiar. I recognized Harvey's face but I didn't know his story," he said. "And thinking back to it, afterwards I thought it was really sad, here I am growing up in Palo Alto, 45 minutes away from where Harvey Milk lived and died and I wasn't taught anything about him. And I was in the Bay Area! I wish they had taught me about him in school."
What drew Franco to the film was less the subject matter than the director.
"I'm the biggest Gus Van Sant fan. When I was in high school in Palo Alto I would watch "Drugs for Cowboy," "My Own Private Idaho," repeatedly. This was before I was doing any acting. I just fell in love with his movies," the actor said.
"Then I met him, he came to a little play that I co-wrote, years later, in LA," he said. "I co-wrote this play called "The Ape" and I acted in it, and directed it, and he came because we had a mutual friend. That was the best I could ask for out of that play in a little North Hollywood theater. So I got to know Gus a little bit and then my agents called me and said he's doing "Milk," and I did a little research on Harvey Milk, found out who he was, and found that Gus had been trying to do this movie for 10-15 years. I just thought, a) it's Gus Van Sant and I would do anything to work with him, b) it's such an important story for him to tell since he's been trying to do it for so long so this is going to be a very important project for him and c) it's such an important story, so there's no other movie that I would want to be a part of as much as this one. It's everything."
Franco was pleased he is on so many awards lists for the film.
"It's just such an honor. Anything I say is going to sound so stupid and cliché but it is really an honor," he said. "What I try to do with anything, be it good or bad, about my career is just try and push it out of my mind. I got an award at the Hollywood Film Festival, and its really nice, but I just try not to think about it because it'll just drive me crazy."
Franco has been attending film school and also working on the bachelor's degree he abandoned to get into acting.
"I went back to school 2 or 3 years ago because acting was all I had. It was the only thing I was doing and it was where I put so much of my focus so it was driving me crazy," he said. "I believe movies are a director's medium, so if I believe that, then I have to realize as an actor that I have to turn everything over to the director. Coming to grips with that lack of control over my ultimate performance and having to think about competing with other actors was just making me really unhappy. I just really didn't like it. So I went back to school and it helped me; it gave me something else in my life."
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