James Franco admitted in an interview with Attitude that it is partly his fault that fans are convinced he is gay and in the closet.
Here is what the 34-year-old had to share with Attitude.
On the constant speculation over his sexuality
One of the things that’s very much part of my public image is the question of my sexuality. It’s not something that bothers me in the slightest. It hasn’t gone away and I get asked about it from all sides. It’s partly my doing and partly not my doing.
On playing gay
If I'm playing a gay character, sometimes the sexuality is secondary. In the case of Allen Ginsberg (In Howl) and Hart Crane (In The Broken Tower, which he co-wrote and starred in, I was primarily interested in their artistic lives and their work. And their sexuality, because it played a part in their poems and their identities, became important for that reason. And because they were pushing boundaries of their own in their own time; in the 20s in the case of Hart Crane and in the 50s and 60s for Ginsberg. In the case of Milk, it is a very important film for gay rights and gay culture, and just as a celebration of Harvey Milk as a person, but it's also more universal. It's about equal rights for everyone.
On gay politics, his film Interior.Leather Bar. and the gay classic, Cruising.
In some way there's been progress. And in some ways there hasn't. It was one of the things I wanted to explore when we made Interior. Leather Bar. I wanted to somehow explore similar subject matter to Cruising to see how thing had changed in 30 years. Or hadn't changed. To see how things are represented in film, what can we show, what is accepted, how do people accept things now.... That was the initial idea and it developed from there.
On the reason why he worked with Travis Mathews (his co-director on Interior. Leather Bar.)
One of the reasons that I initially met with Travis Mathews was that I had never directed scenes with actual sex and I wanted someone who had more experience. I thought I was just going to get a regular pornography director and then I met Travis. He was using real sex in his films in a very interesting way. Not for titillation but to tell the story; the sex was a depiction of behaviour between the characters so it revealed character and story rather than being there purely for titillation. That's why I asked him to be a full collaborator.
On watching guys have full on sex right in front of him
Yeah, it was fine. It was, err..... Travis really took the lead in directing those scenes. I've done films with artists before when the material goes beyond what I was used to in mainstream films and it felt like that. It was in line with some other artistic projects I'd been doing.
On losing endorsements for the sake of his artFranco is photographed by Terry Richardson.
It is a risk. I was supposed to do a commercial with this company and they pulled out because they weren't happy, they didn't like the subject matter of my films at Sundance. If I'm at the threshold of doing a project and the question comes up, 'Will this be harmful to your career?', I never want that to be the deciding factor.
