‘As I Lay Dying’ Trailer: James Franco Adapts a Masterwork of American Literature
Posted on Monday, May 13th, 2013 by Russ Fischer
I’ll say this for James Franco‘s new outing as a director, and his highest-profile directorial gig to date: it takes some balls to tackle William Faulkner. The source material here is Faulkner’s seventh novel As I Lay Dying, which charts a family’s attempt to transport the body of its late matriarch to her preferred burial place, miles away. To grossly reduce things to a simple statement, the journey does not go well.
The film will premiere shortly at Cannes, and this trailer showcases the use of some of Faulkner’s original text in the script for the film. We get some idea of how Franco and the rest of the cast do with the material, but it’s too early to tell if the movie works. The novel is narrated by over a dozen characters, but we also don’t know how Franco, who also scripted, has dealt with the presentation of the story.
