The actor is the protagonist of Claudio Giovannesi’s feature film in which he plays a veteran of the 70s who returns to Naples to meet his never-known son born in the aftermath of the Second World War. At the cinema from November 28th.
Baseball hat by The Poltergeist Cursesweatshirt with the Hollywood sign and sunlight filtering through the window shutters. Let’s meet James Franco via Zoom to talk about Hey Joe. Film directed by Claudio Giovannesi in theaters from November 28th with Vision Distribution in which he plays the veteran Dean Barry. An American from New Jersey who, at the beginning of the Seventies, returns to Naples where he had had a relationship with a Neapolitan girl during the Second World War.
A union from which a son was born – played by Francesco Di Napoli – who he has never met and with whom he would like to build a relationship. But that never-met child is now a young man raised by the underworld and by a smuggling boss who has no interest in that father from the United States.
Hey Joe: video interview with James Franco
A film that moves on two temporal tracks and addresses the theme of second chances. New beginnings that also pass through the bene that you do to others without asking for anything in return. Exactly like Dean does with his son or with Bambi (Giulia Ercolini), a young Neapolitan woman he meets during his stay in the city. “I speak from personal experience. When I was young, if I think about it in retrospect, I wanted very simple things in my life. I wanted it to have meaning, I wanted to connect with other people through meaningful relationships, important relationships. And I just wanted to feel that that what I was doing had a purpose”says the actor.
“And so I spent all this energy focused primarily on myself. ‘How do I get this? How do I get that? I have to work for myself. I have to be considered a great actor and this will give meaning to my life.’ But the way when I did it it was never enough”.
“I ended up making great films and working with so many of my favorite heroes and directors and actors. And it was a great experience, but there was something that made me say, ‘Okay, now I have to do more. And more. And more.”continues Franco. “I realized that I needed to make a fundamental change in the way I lived. How do I add to life rather than take from life? And that kind of energy ended up giving me everything I wanted: to give meaning to my existence and to have a connection with other people add to life rather than take awayI got all the things I was looking for”.
A layered story
Like many other books, films or series, too Hey Joe it has the strength to tell a specific story limited to a specific time and succeed in doing so talk about the present thanks to the consequences of the war or the idea of the future. Is this one of the aspects that pushed James Franco to accept the role?“For sure”admits the actor.
“I think the film can be accessed by so many different levels: the father/son relationship and reconciliation, the trauma of war or the effects it has even on non-soldiers. And then it’s about different countries and cultures coming together. Like my character who is from the United States while my son is Italian and grew up in Italy. It’s like uniting across great divides. Not only geographical, but cultural and even linguistic. And all of these things are so interesting both as an audience member and as a performer. It’s very exciting for me.”.
“I think the experience of the film is timeless. My character was in his twenties, went to war and had an affair. At that time, he probably didn’t understand the circumstances his partner found herself in. For he was just another experience, but I’m there consequences important. And he doesn’t understand it until much later. And so the idea of him coming back to try to correct it I think is incredibly powerful.”.
Hey Joe, review: James Franco, the consequences of war and a film that welcomes the viewer
Between Rossellini and Ferrante
Claudio Giovannesi was influenced by a lot of literature for the screenplay of the film, including The Gallery of Norman Lewis, Napoli ’44 by John Burns The Skin by Curzio Malaparte. James Franco is also a writer with novels, essays and short story collections to his credit. If you were to think of a great author who could have written Hey Joewho would it be?“I’ll start by saying that the book that had the greatest influence, that helped me the most with the character was Napoli ’44a kind of memoir of a soldier stationed in Naples during the Second World War”underlines the actor.
“It gave me a very clear picture of how difficult it was at that time. Even the old Italian neorealist films, especially Rossellinihad a big influence on the style of this film. It’s as if Rossellini wrote the book on this film, or Pasolini. But also Elena Ferrante who wrote about Naples through various eras”.
