At the premiere of James Franco‘s meta-thriller-doc Francophrenia last night (April 22) at the Tribeca Film Festival, James chatted with Vulture about the buzz that those videos gathered.
Here’s what James had to say about the lip-syncing videos:
The first one was Selena Gomez. And we did a Rihanna one. The latest is Bieber, and I’m sure people will be writing about that. But we have a whole channel of videos that we produce: We have a show about art openings, we have an online soap opera that Kalup Linzy produced and directed, we have a show about undergrad college students. All this stuff takes a lot of time to put together. And we do get a lot of viewers for those shows. But then when I do something so stupid and simple as singing, like, one and a half verses of Selena Gomez’s song with cornrows in my hair, it blows up on the blogosphere and we get, like, all these viewers.
Part of it is, “Wow, I guess I just tapped into what they want!” You know, this pop, surface-level kind of thing, but done in a way where you feel like something else is going on. Or the fact that it’s me doing it is like … fascinating to people, I guess. Maybe it’s more interesting than the shows we put a lot of time into.
What does James have to say about the bloggers who criticize what James does?
I am subject to comments by the most superficial kind of bloggers, and I bring all those commenters to any project I do. The problem is that those bloggers are used to commenting about, you know, pop celebrity and movies. So when I do something else, their comments are just completely uninformed and stupid. But it doesn’t bother me; in fact I’ve come to accept it, and almost like it! That level of commentary, I think, is part of what I do now. It’s certainly part of a project like this.
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