Don’t miss it!
Actor directs and stars — along with his brother — in ‘The Disaster Artist’, about really-bad-turned-cult ‘The Room’
here are bad movies, and then there is a spectacularly bizarre independent drama from 2003 starring, written, financed and directed by Tommy Wiseau, a unique-looking and accented man of ambiguous age and origin. tells the story of a San Francisco banker, Johnny (Wiseau), whose fiance, Lisa, and best friend, Mark, have an affair. And it is bafflingly awful — scenes are out of focus, plot lines are left dangling, soft-core sex scenes leave you cringing and the dialogue sounds downright alien.
Film critic Scott Foundas wrote at the time that the, “Pic may be something of a first: A movie that prompts most of its viewers to ask for their money back — before even 30 minutes have passed.”
And yet, which a film professor called “the of bad movies”, took on a life of its own. It became a cult favourite of the midnight movie set, who treat it as a
event (there is shouting, spoon-throwing and walkouts), a popular book about the making of the film co-written by Greg Sestero, who played Mark, and now a feature film about the whole ordeal,
directed by and starring James Franco as Wiseau.
But as easy of a target as The Room might be, The Disaster Artist is not a spoof or a parody — it is a sincerely told (and very fun and funny) story about two outsiders, Sestero and Wiseau, who move to Los Angeles with dreams of stardom and no idea how to realise them. It is not
“For us, it was a relationship story,” said Michael H. Weber, who co-wrote the script with Scott Neustadter (500
“This one is a little different but it’s no less real and no less complicated than the others we’ve written.”
premieres at the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) tomorrow. It goes on a UAE release on January 4. Tickets to DIFF, starting at Dh50, are available on diff.ae.
Franco also wanted to make it a classic LA film with all the trimmings — the bad diners in the Valley, the creepy agents, the naiveties, the auditions that go nowhere — the things he remembers from being a struggling actor in LA around the same time Sestero moved here with Wiseau in 1998.
He cast his younger brother, actor Dave Franco, as Sestero. It’s the first time they’ve acted together in a significant way.
“I’ve tried to get him into a lot of movies. Some of them he just didn’t vibe with. And there was a point in his career where he wanted to get out from, I guess, my shadow, or just create his own identity apart from me,” said James Franco. “I just thought: This is the one. This is the one we should do together ... we have the perfect dynamic for this.”
James Franco is unrecognisable, behind the prosthetics (which took twoand-a-half hours to apply and 45 minutes to remove), Gene Simmons hair, eccentric costumes and vaguely Eastern European-sounding accent required to play the enigmatic Wiseau.
While Sestero is less of a “character” than Wiseau, Dave Franco had his own hurdles.
“He’s making a lot of bad decisions throughout the film and I had to try to justify each of those so the audience would understand why this guy continued on this journey with this mad man,” Dave Franco said. “But he was a young actor who was not getting support from anyone else in his life and then he met this guy who encouraged him and told him he could make it.”
Sestero, who was only 19 when he met Wiseau in a San Francisco acting class, said he feels like he has James and Dave Franco.