Emma Roberts co-stars with Dave Franco in the thriller “Nerve.”
Movies
In “Nerve,” a video game pays young players to perform silly pranks and life-threatening stunts around New York City on a dare. The greater the danger and the more watchers the streamed escapades get online, the bigger the payday.
The key players are Ian (Dave Franco), a young man with a motorcycle; Venus, or Vee (Emma Roberts), who’s desperate to escape from high school boredom in Staten Island; and spiderish, merciless Ty (Colson Baker, a.k.a. rapper Machine Gun Kelly), who targets the other two.
The setting of the adaptation of Jeanne Ryan’s young-adult novel is a shadowy New York, yet its broader world is the Web, where the characters do battle and where the game finds an infinitely expanding audience.
“Tech has taken over. It almost seems like it’s overdone in movies, but that’s our reality now,” says Franco. “A lot of people are saying that this movie takes place five minutes into the future. ‘Nerve’ is a game that you could actually see coming about within the next six months.”
With his shirt buttoned at the collar and a pair of tight pants that end way above his shoes, Franco looks 10 years younger than his age of 31; brother James Franco is seven years older. A short haircut evoking Justin Timberlake’s hiphop days enhances the youth effect — not a liability for the star of a PG-13 movie.
But when talk shifts to acting in a film where Web effects are layered in after scenes are shot, Franco sounds like a performer who has been working, as he has, for the last decade.
“There’s so many moving parts when it comes to making a movie. You can’t try to control it all, because you’ll go crazy,” he says. “It’s a scary job being an actor because there’s so much that’s out of your hands. When a
movie actually works, it’s kind of a miracle. It’s very rare.”
Then Franco smiles, squinting, in a moment when he could have passed for his older brother.
Until now, Franco’s roles have been mostly in comedies — “Unfinished Business,” “Neighbors,” “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising,” “Now You See Me,” “Now You See Me 2: The Second Act.” He sees “Nerve” as a pivot from playing to comic type — a romance with Roberts, and a cyberthriller with some real blood, plus some laughs.
“There’s the action element. I played sports my whole life, so I feel really comfortable when I can be physical in a scene. Then there’s the thriller element. Those are my favorite types of movies that I like to go see. When a thriller is done well, then there’s no better movie out there for me. I think of ‘Se7en’ — that’s my favorite genre,” he says.
But thrills have their limits. Franco never rode a motorcycle before playing Ian. “I did have a stunt double, mainly for the motorcycle dare where he’s driving blind with Emma on the back,” he admits. “The studio wasn’t going to take a risk on that sequence.”
“I had about two
The studio “teamed me up with a very proficient (motorcyle) rider. It got to the point where, in an empty parking lot, I felt like Evel Knievel, but it’s a whole different story when you’re in the streets of New York.” Dave Franco
weeks to learn to ride, which isn’t very much time. They teamed me up with a very proficient rider. It got to the point where, in an empty parking lot, I felt like Evel Knievel. But it’s a whole different story when you’re in the streets of New York. If I had to do it all over, I probably wouldn’t, because anything can happen in New York. I don’t think I’ll ever get on a motorcycle again.”
Franco says he won’t forget those riding scenes, yet audiences are more likely to remember scenes filmed in the department store palace of Bergdorf Goodman, where Ian takes Vee on a dare to try on a wildly unaffordable dress. Comedy collapses into farce when their clothes are stolen, and they search frantically for an exit in their underwear. It could be an instant trailer.
“I didn’t have the most fun shooting that scene,” he recalls. “Even if it’s onscreen for five minutes, we spent two to three days filming that sequence. That’s two or three days when Emma and I are in our underwear in front of 100 people. We were happy when that was over.”
When asked to name his favorite actors, Franco lists Joaquin Phoenix, Benicio del Toro, Christian Bale and his brother, whom he likes best in “127 Hours” and “Pineapple Express.”
Dave and James Franco are actors in the same cast in “The Masterpiece,” which is directed and produced by James and due for release later this year. “I’ve been wanting to work with him for many, many years,” Franco says of his brother. The film adapts “The Disaster Artist,” Greg Sestero’s book about the making of “The Room,” the 1995 independent movie that has been called the worst film of all time.
And then there are Franco’s two cats, who made their film debut under his direction in the short “Cat Block,” viewable at the website Funny or Die. They were back home, in his newly acquired house in Los Angeles — “the Bay Area, in terms of a housing market, is crazier than anywhere,” says the transplanted Palo Alto native.
Franco also noted that he’s in a marathon project for television, where he hasn’t been seen much. The drama “Easy,” directed by Joe Swanberg for Netflix, plans 10 episodes a year, each with different characters in Chicago, over a “Boyhood”-inspired period of 15 years in real time.
“I loved ‘Boyhood,’ ” said the boyish Franco.