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Thread: James Franco finds his most despicable character in 'True Story'

  1. #1
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    James Franco finds his most despicable character in 'True Story'

    PARK CITY, Utah: Killing an exaggerated version of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Sony's controversial comedy "The Interview" wasn't a problem for actor James Franco but he found challenges in playing real-life murderer Christian Longo for thriller "True Story."

    "He's probably the worst person that I've ever played, just because I have such a great family and there's just something so horrible about killing your kids. So I have very little connection to him," Franco told Reuters.

    "True Story," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday and will be released by Fox Searchlight in U.S. theaters on April 10, is based on the memoir of former New York Times journalist Mike Finkel, who formed a friendship with a murderer who used his name as an alias.

    What unfolds is a complex relationship as Finkel, played by Jonah Hill, meets Franco's Longo, an Oregon man awaiting trial for brutally killing his wife and three children. The two men find common ground in writing but the dynamic wavers as each man struggles with his search for intellectual credibility.

    "I think it's to do with nemesis. I think it's a very male thing," said director Rupert Goold, who made his film debut with "True Story."

    Goold, a British theater director, said much of "True Story" played out like Shakespeare's "Othello," a story of male friendship and betrayal.

    To prepare, Franco watched tapes of Longo testifying at his 2003 trial, which he called "chilling," but he opted not to visit the convicted killer currently on Death Row.

    "There was no need to go and meet him, and I certainly didn't want to give him any attention or validation by doing that," he said.

    Franco and Hill starred together in Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's raunchy 2013 apocalypse spoof, "This is the End," and Hill is well known for his comedic roles in films such as "The Wolf of Wall Street."

    But the duo spun a twist on their friendship to play out the drama of "True Story," which Franco said was essential for the movie to work.

    "You need the audience to, on some level, want to watch this budding friendship," Franco said.

    "Because Jonah and I do have a history, people do know us in a different, more comedic sphere, our relationship in this film had a little something extra because of that."

    http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Arts-and....MPNTQkda.dpuf
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    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    'True Story' weaves a web of ambiguity

    Nonfiction stories on screen, long a little traction-challenged, have become especially slippery of late.

    Hit television reality franchises such as "The Bachelor" and "Real Housewives" present basic human emotions as a form of sports. Sports figures are dressed up in elaborate narratives. The cable phenomenon "The Jinx," a twisty tale of the alleged twisted acts of Robert Durst, presented itself as fact, even though, like many documentaries, it was rife with elisions and edits.

    What to make, then, of "True Story," about the dance between disgraced journalist Michael Finkel and the convicted killer Christian Longo? The true-crime movie — starring James Franco as the murderer and Jonah Hill as the journalist — is dramatized from Finkel's nonfiction book on the subject, which in turn is about both the author's confessed lies and a killer's compulsive deceit. Its title suggests bedrock honesty. But the film that follows wonders whether such a claim is ever possible.

    "I'll admit," said its director, the theater veteran Rupert Goold, "that part of making 'True Story' was figuring out what a true story is."

    Opening in theaters April 17, barely a month after Durst's apparent on-screen confession, "True Story" is a murder-mystery told in the manner of "The Jinx" but also as interested in the telling as in the mystery. It's a procedural that doesn't just ask audiences to interpret events but also implicitly ponders the validity of interpretation in the first place.

    In 2002, Finkel, then 33, was flying high as a conflict-zone writer for the New York Times Magazine when he was caught inventing a composite character for a cover story about childhood poverty in Africa. After he'd returned from an assignment in Mali and the Ivory Coast, an editor asked if he could write a deep-dive portrait of a single poor child. Instead of simply saying he didn't have the goods, Finkel told her he could, then blended details from multiple children and presented them as one, rationalizing that the spirit of the story was true.

    His sins were uncovered by an aid agency and investigated by the New York Times. He was subsequently let go by the publication and shunned by other outlets, leaving him to lick his wounds at his home near Bozeman, Mont.

    Matters soon took a turn for the surreal. Finkel received a call from a newspaper reporter in Oregon informing him that an accused killer named Christian Longo, on the run in Mexico, had been passing himself off as Finkel. Longo had been caught and would soon face charges in the U.S. for murdering his wife and three children, but was apparently a well-read fugitive who thought Finkel's swashbuckling reputation worth claiming.

    That coincidence would have been strange enough for Finkel — here was a man whose life was upended because he'd invented an identity, and now his own identity had been appropriated.

    But Finkel decided to delve further. What followed was an odd set of jailhouse encounters. Finkel was unsure of Longo's artful pose of innocence but realized he had a lottery-ticket story on his hands. Longo, aware he now had a man both eager to hear his tale and with the skills to convey it, began spinning an ambiguous yarn.

    That ambiguity becomes the heart of "True Story," both book and film. At times Longo can seem guilty both to the author and to us. On other occasions both Finkel and we do have reason to doubt that events happened as prosecutors say.

    In other instances, Finkel is unsure whether to believe Longo — but we are unsure whether to believe Finkel. Are the fallen journalist's doubts about Longo's guilt undergirded by intellectual honesty or simply that a wrongly accused man will make a better story?

    It is on this score that Finkel's book, published in 2005, becomes most vexing — when the credibility of the narrator becomes as much an issue as the events being narrated. Reading a tale with such career-redeeming aims, it's easy to wonder about the intentions behind, and extent of, his mea culpa.

    "You are totally right to ask that. I would ask it myself if I was covering me and this story," Finkel said by phone last week. "But I knew I had to be the most accurate as I could be, that I had no margin for error, because everything would be checked so carefully."

    In January, Finkel moved to southern France with an eye toward gaining new cultural experiences. He has rehabbed his career somewhat, with less hot-button feature stories in National Geographic and GQ, and of course selling film rights to his book. He also has gotten married; he and his wife now have three children.

    As for the evolution about his feelings toward Longo, he said, "I don't think I ever believed, deep down, that he was innocent. But there were moments where I genuinely thought there were good reasons why [Longo] did it." He added. "He was saying some very convincing things. It was only at the trial [where the jury didn't buy Longo's dodges and convicted him] that my blinders came off."

    Tricky spot

    If Finkel acknowledges his own written account must be examined carefully, Goold is also in a precarious position. He has, after all, crafted a scripted drama, and one with thriller ambition besides.

    Some of the changes he makes are understandable — Finkel's letter cutting off contact with Longo at one point is turned, in the movie, into a pounding on prison glass. But others are larger in scope. There is key information held back so that "True Story" plays more like a spine-chiller about whether Longo killed his family.

    "There was always a tension between the territory of the thriller, the 'Primal Fear' of it, and on the other hand, the real story about these complicated men," said Goold, who is making his feature debut. (The film also contains shades of 2003's "Shattered Glass," which similarly examines the psyche of a man caught up in his own painted truths, and the "Fatal Vision" controversy involving journalist Joe McGinniss and convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald.)

    "True Story" is produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B, giving it a veneer of social concerns found in other Plan B dramas such as "Selma" and "12 Years a Slave." But it is also a more broadly commercial Hollywood enterprise. Originally at 20th Century Fox, "True Story," later moved to specialty division Fox Searchlight in the long two-year period since it was shot (there was much editing and a reshoot of a final scene during these months), a company known for tackling more serious issues in its film. Like Finkel at the moment of his Africa reporting, this is a film caught between imperatives — a thrilling story and the raw search for truth.

    Then, of course, there is Finkel's decision to engage Longo in the first place. It's hardly a simple question, the morality of his career redemption resting on the back of a gruesome tragedy, and it was approached cautiously by those involved with the film.

    "I really fell for the idea that this guy shows how we all can be despicable in certain ways," said Hill, who along with Goold had dinner with the fallen journalist before shooting. "Finkel didn't kill anybody, but he's using this pretty horrific thing for selfish reasons." Thus we have a movie that seeks to portray a memoir's subject even as it questions its author.

    Slippery truths

    What is truth, really? It's a question humans have asked since the serpent made some clever arguments to Eve and continued right up through when George Costanza told Jerry that "It's not a lie--if you believe it."

    Self-deception can be a potent force. And if the author of a story doesn't always know where the truth resides, can we? Is omitting or revising a key detail acceptable for a larger goal? What about shading meaning in one direction or another?

    Finkel admits he had gone down this rabbit hole himself. "There was a time," he writes in his book, "during which I convinced myself that what I'd written was true. I cheated on the quotes but I captured the correct story."

    Even tales that are more technically true may be problematic. Other Finkel pieces turned up no inaccuracies. Still, the stories sometimes employed New Journalism techniques that took readers into hard-to-read minds and motivations, crossing from simple reportage to gripping narrative.

    It is an issue only exacerbated in the 13 years since Finkel's sins — with an abundance of media, under ever-greater strain, writing for a distracted audience that craves ever-bolder spectacle. That syndrome was recently on display in the Rolling Stone-University of Virginia scandal, in which the impulse for a dramatic story appeared to trump journalistic standards.

    Franco, though, says he's not so sure our current ethical lines are the correct ones. "When I was in a fiction graduate program [at Columbia], we'd mix with the nonfiction people. And there are guys there who would basically argue that Finkel didn't do anything wrong," Franco said. "They come at it straight up — 'I change stuff in my nonfiction, any documentary filmmaker changes something.' You're granted leeway for a larger truth."

    Goold, for his part, said he was aware of his own role in this process. "I find it really fascinating what happens when stories move through media. There's a piece about Longo and then a book by Finkel, and then a documentary about the case, and then I make a movie. And all these different media, by their nature, do something to the story." The more lenses through which one views the subject, the more distorted that subject becomes.

    Franco added a Franco-ish layer. "And when you go and write this story," he said, addressing a reporter in an interview, "you're creatively selecting what's most interesting. You're not putting it in raw. You're choosing, shaping."

    Those questions percolated below “The Jinx.” Is director Andrew Jarecki, aware of Durst’s confession before the first episode ever aired, within the lines when structuring his six-parter so that it seems more ambiguous? It would be easy to say he violated journalistic precepts of full disclosure. But then, if he didn’t mold his tale this way, many of us wouldn't have watched or paid attention in the first place.

    After all his own circumlocutions, Longo now sits on Death Row. He has become involved in various prison causes and even penned an op-ed for the New York Times (about inmates and organ donation)...which means his own lie about writing for the Times has now, eerily, become true.

    Startlingly, Finkel continues to keep in touch with the inmate. They haven't communicated since December, but there have been longer hiatuses before, and Finkel suspects they will be eventually be back in contact.

    "If you like your story tied up with a beautiful bow, this isn't the one for you. If you're a person who understands shades of gray, you will like it more," Finkel explained. "I'm still drawn to Longo, even after everything." He and the killer continue their dance, two people putatively seeking the truth, making things murkier as they go.

    http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...ry.html#page=2
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  3. #3
    Senior Member Member Dillydust's Avatar
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    If anyone was looking to watch this. It is on netflix.

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