James Franco Wins High Praise For 'As I Lay Dying' At Cannes Film Festival

Renaissance man James Franco presented As I Lay Dying, a film he co-wrote, directed and stared in, at the Cannes Film Festival Friday. Based on the Faulkner novel by the same title, As I Lay Dying follows the Bundren family’s journey after the death of Addie Bundren (Beth Grant), the family matriarch. To bury Addie, the Bundren family takes a gloomy, dramatic trip in the South. Franco, a Faulkner fan, looked at the book many deemed un-filmable as an exciting challenge.

“There was a key to the movie that came from the book. Faulkner works on multiple levels, and on one level I saw this as a really simple story: a road movie about a family and the obstacles they face,” said Franco in an interview with The Los Angels Times.

Franco used the family road-trip as the spine of the story for his adaptation, hoping it would allow him to be more experimental with other aspects of filmmaking — for example, he used split-screens as a way of visually expressing multiple storylines occurring at once.

“The two main formal aspects of the book I most wanted to capture were the multiple perspectives… But also the different levels of consciousness or diction that are on the surface… So we came up with the split-screen: that would give the feeling of multiple perspectives, the sense that everybody’s going on this journey together but that within that journey everybody’s seeing things in a slightly different way and they all have their own personal dramas and tragedies,” Franco elaborated in an interview with The New York Times.

The artistic risks appear to have paid off well for Franco. As I Lay Dying has received mixed reviews, impressing some, while inspiring others to walk out of the screening.

“A rarified art film all the way, one that will divide even brainy students and specialized cinema types, this is by a long way the best of the eight features the mind-bogglingly prolific actor-director-writer has made and is, as such, a big surprise,” writes Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter.

As I Lay Dying is set for wide release in the fall and also stars Danny McBride, Logan Marshall-Green, Ahna O’Reilly, and Tim Blake Nelson.