Award-winning director Paul Haggis’ latest romantic thriller “Third Person” follows the journeys of three sets of couple at three different stages of a relationship set at the backdrop of Paris, Rome and New York. The movie’s main character Michael, played by Liam Neeson, a novelist who’d been famous for his previous work has holed himself up in a hotel suite in Paris finishing his latest book. Within the hotel works a maid named Julia, Mila Kunis’ character – an ex-soap opera actress who was once a frequent guest at the hotel.

Julia is caught in a custody battle for her 6-year old son with her ex-husband Rick played by James Franco, who is a famous New York artist. With her support cut off and her legal costs ruinous, Julia’s lawyer Theresa (Maria Bello) has secured Julia one final chance to change the court’s mind and be reunited with the child she loves. Julia’s sole motivation in life is to gain joint custody of her son but her fragile psychological state and the circumstances of her marriage break-up make that a big challenge.

A fan of the director’s works, Kunis had no qualms joining the cast, “I’ve been a fan of Paul’s work and he has a very specific way of writing so I didn’t necessarily know what to expect but I knew it was going to be intertwining storylines. I can honestly say that there are those movies that come along that they make you realize why you love doing what you do and working with Paul Haggis made me fall in love with my job again. I love it, I love every aspect of how he works, how he interacts, how, confident he is and how confident he makes you feel. I think we just kind of get each other’s work ethic and work rhythm. He trusts me and I trust him that’s just so incredibly important”.

“Given the complexity of the film, Julia is a hard character to explain,” says Kunis of her character. “She’s slightly misunderstood but she means well. Technically speaking, she’s in a custody battle with her ex-husband Rick for their child Jesse. At heart, Julia’s a sweet person but she’s always late and if a person has to make a right or a left turn, she always makes the wrong choice, but it’s not on purpose so you can’t blame her for it. Maybe she just has the world’s worst luck, or maybe not. She seems to be constantly put in situations where she’s just being attacked or accused of not being good enough.”

Kunis’ onscreen ex-hubby in the film, James Franco, Rick, pulls their son away from her mother. “Rick is one of a number of characters who come in and out of the film and he’s an artist, a painter in New York and has a child with Mila Kunis’ character Julia. He and Julia have had a very rocky past and she seems to be emotionally unstable and irresponsible and maybe even dangerous towards Jesse, our child. So, I gain custody of Jesse and I prevent her from seeing him because I think she might hurt him. Paul writes very intricate characters. I remember years ago he once told me that he likes to make himself the villain. He likes to put himself into his characters,” Franco enthuses.

“Mila Kunis and I have done something like seven projects together, after working together so many times, there’s certainly a shorthand with Mila Kunis and I. We just get along very well. We’ve kind of done everything together - fantasy, comedy, drama, a weird vampire thing, an experimental movie, so I guess the only thing we haven’t done is maybe action, so we’re looking for a, an action script next!” concludes Franco.

“Third Person” opens June 18 in theatres nationwide from Axinite Digicinema.

Directed by Oscar-nominated James Franco from a screenplay by James Franco and Matt Rager, As I Lay Dying is adapted from the 1930 classic American novel by William Faulkner.

The story chronicles the Bundren family as they traverse the Mississippi countryside to bring the body of their deceased mother Addie to her hometown for burial. Addie’s husband Anse and their children, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and the youngest one Vardaman, leave the farm on a carriage with her coffin - each affected by Addie’s death in a profound and different way. Their road trip to Jefferson, some forty miles away, is disrupted by every antagonistic force of nature or man: flooded rivers, injury and accident, a raging barn fire, and not least of all -- each individual character’s personal turmoil and inner commotion which at times threaten the fabric of the family more than any outside force.

William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, while working at a power plant and according to literary legend, the author claimed: “I did not change a word of it.”

The novel was published in 1930 and was Faulkner’s seventh. 15 different characters narrate As I Lay Dying over 59 chapters.

Bringing As I Lay Dying to the screen faced as many natural and man-made challenges as the Bundren family: 25 days to shoot on a low budget, finding local actors in Mississippi, a dangerous water stunt in a running river, the burning of a barn. But before all that, the biggest hurdle was turning Faulkner’s complicated, 56,000-words, 59-chapters and 15 different characters into 120 concise screenplay pages. That process took much longer than the time it took the Bundren family to deliver their mother to Jackson, and the six weeks it took Faulkner to write the novel. But no one has ever suspected James Franco of being an underachiever.

As Franco explains, “As I Lay Dying, the book, was one of the first novels I read outside of the high school curriculum. My main interests were art, literature, acting and film. As I Lay Dying was a book that my father gave me and I can remember spending a weekend reading late into Friday night and Saturday night, when all of my friends were out partying. It was a difficult book back then. I just tried to understand every line of it. It stayed with me. I thought it would be a very interesting movie because of its structure. Each chapter in the book is in the first person by different character. Even though it's very complicated in the way it's told, it had a very simple structure. There was a journey that an audience could follow, and I thought that combination would allow for a good movie because you could have complexity, but it would be hung on a very clear through-line.”

Franco continues, “After years of acting I started thinking about writing or directing movies. Having never directed a film, taking on As I Lay Dying seemed almost impossible. I wouldn't know how to do it. Then I remembered reading a biography on Sean Penn -- I know Sean, we worked together on Milk, but I didn't ask him about this. I read that at one time had wanted to do an adaptation of As I Lay Dying, and he would play the character that I eventually played and Jack Nicholson would have played the father. So that was probably the first spark that made me start thinking, ‘this is something that's possible.’ Years later I started thinking about As I Lay Dying again. So I started inquiring into the rights.”

As I Lay Dying is considered a masterpiece in American literature, but was always considered an impossible challenge for adapting to film: “As I Lay Dying is dense and people have always said it will never be made into a movie. When James adapts books into screenplays, he wants to be very loyal to the book.”

“There were a lot of things that I was interested in the book, Franco says, “On one level it's a very simple story, and on another level it's told in a very complex way. I felt like it's about a farming family just trying to bury their mother. You could say each member of the family has his or her own need, and that its about a family coming apart -- that the death of the mother is an event that starts a chain reaction. On another level it's an epic journey. Going from go the farm to the city -- they pass through a flood, they go through fire, they undergo great physical hardships. Their journey signifies something bigger… maybe that’s journey that we all go through in life or that’s the epic nature of the day-to-day that we all go through.”

“As I Lay Dying” be shown exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas nationwide starting Nov. 27.

“What if you were stuck in a house with your friends as the world was ending outside?” says Seth Rogen, who, with his writing and directing partner Evan Goldberg, answers that question in the new comedy This Is The End.

In “This Is The End,” six friends – who just happen to be James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, and Craig Robinson – are trapped in Franco’s house as the end of the world begins outside. And we’re not talking about any old California-slides-into-the-ocean earthquake… we’re talking the fire-and-brimstone Apocalypse – the real Biblical deal.

Seth Rogen was successful in creating a film that I would love to watch over and over again. This film is peppered with cliché, crass humor, dick jokes which might make some moviegoers cringe. But even if you feel like you are watching a “stupid” film, the timing, the writing and how the funny elements was injected into the film was smartly positioned in such a way that once they hit the punchline, you’re in for a great laugh!

Yes, James Franco plays James Franco, Jonah Hill plays Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen plays Seth Rogen, and so on.  But of course, they’re not really playing themselves. “People think they know everything about you based on the characters you play,” says Rogen.  “So we thought it would be funny to play into that – to have these characters that behave in the way that everybody thinks is what we’re like off-screen.  There are elements of our real selves, but we all twisted them or exaggerated them to make it funny.”

Definitely a must-watch for those who would like to be entertained this weekend! Watch out for the end scene and the cameo appearances of Rihanna and Emma Watson.

Hip actor James Franco satirizes himself as he plays a Hollywood version of, well, himself, in Columbia Pictures' wacky comedy “This Is The End.”

Says writer-director and co-star Seth Rogen, “The things we mock in James Franco in the movie are real, but Franco in real life is nothing like the way he acts in the movie. He genuinely does like art and weird stuff, but it’s not pretentious and he’s not in-your-face about it. He doesn’t care what others think about his art. He just likes art.”

In “This Is The End,” six friends – who just happen to be James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, and Craig Robinson – are trapped in Franco’s house as the end of the world begins outside. And we’re not talking about any old California-slides-into-the-ocean earthquake… we’re talking the fire-and-brimstone Apocalypse – the real Biblical deal.

Franco says that he didn’t hesitate to sign on for the project – even though he wouldn’t have even considered the project if it had been with anyone other than the writing-directing team of Rogen and Evan Goldberg. “We’re playing extreme versions of ourselves, and I would really only trust Seth and Evan to depict me in an outrageous way,” he says. “Their take on me is funny – of course, I don’t think I’m really like that, but yes, it’s a version of me, it’s their version, and it’s funny. But going back to `Superbad,' through all their movies, they put in a level of heart, or emotion, that grounds the characters, and that’s in this movie, too. I was game for it because the way they make movies, their sensibility is just so solid.”

“The way my character is on the surface, he’s a pretty shallow person,” says Franco. “He’s a guy who thinks that Seth can’t be his friend and anybody else’s – like sixth grade behavior. So that’s where we took the character deeper. In real life, Seth has been there at important points in my career – ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ ‘Pineapple Express’ – so we took that and decided that the character of James Franco would have this affection for Seth and need to connect with him. Really, he’s obsessed with Seth.”

In the film, Franco’s house is filled with art. Not surprising, in a way, because the real Franco cares deeply about art. However, the filmmakers and the real Franco make it clear that there’s a blurry line between the art he cares about and the art that the pretentious character he plays prefers. “My first conversation with James Franco was about the fact that the character is a ‘version’ of James Franco,” says production designer Chris Spellman.

“People know I’m interested in art,” says Franco. “I just went to school for it and for a while I was collecting art – I sold most of it a while ago so I could go to school and not work so much. So it was kind of a funny idea that the Franco character would be collecting art, and Seth asked me if there was any particular artist that I wanted to have in the character’s house. And I thought, there’s a way to take this to a different level. There’s a painter that I really like named Josh Smith – his work is hard to place because a lot of it has a very humorous feel, even though it’s abstract work. Josh was interested. Not only interested, but wanted to create new work, and it would be special because it would be work that was only intended for this movie. And as Josh and I were talking, we came on the idea that we could do the paintings together. Josh and I spent two days together and we painted a lot, through the night, ten huge paintings and a bunch of little ones.”

Together, Franco and Smith created art that directly references the movie. “The idea is that my character is somewhat obsessed with Seth,” says Franco. “So the subjects of the paintings are shows I did with Seth – there’s a Freaks painting and a Geeks painting, there’s a Pineapple Express painting.”

Distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International, “This Is The End” will be shown exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas nationwide starting Sept. 11.

For a film about the group dynamics among a group of friends facing the apocalypse, it’s no surprise that the characters in Columbia Pictures' critically acclaimed comedy “This Is The End” were tailor-made for the actors playing the roles. They would all play horrible “versions” of themselves, says co-director/writer Evan Goldberg.

In “This Is The End,” six friends – who just happen to be James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, and Craig Robinson – are trapped in Franco’s house as the end of the world begins outside. And we’re not talking about any old California-slides-into-the-ocean earthquake… we’re talking the fire-and-brimstone Apocalypse – the real Biblical deal.

“Seth isn’t a duplicitous coward, but he plays one in this film,” Goldbrg says. “Danny is a delightful sweetheart, but his character is a maniac. Franco – the things we mock in Franco in the movie are real, but Franco in real life is nothing like the way he acts in the movie. He genuinely does like art and weird stuff, but it’s not pretentious and he’s not in-your-face about it. He doesn’t care what others think about his art. He just likes art. The only exceptions are Jay, who is more like his character than anyone else in the movie, and Craig, who isn’t a jerk like his character, but is a guy who carries a towel around to wipe sweat off his face.”

“People think they know everything about you based on the characters you play,” says co-director/writer and star Seth Rogen. “So we thought it would be funny to play into that – to have these characters that behave in the way that everybody thinks is what we’re like off-screen. There are elements of our real selves, but we all twisted them or exaggerated them to make it funny.”

Playing yourself can be a challenge – even for an Academy Award® nominee, as Jonah Hill says, “I’ve never slipped out of character more than when I was playing myself.”

But it’s more than just a joke, says Rogen. It’s a way of acknowledging the elephant in the room. “Everybody knows that we’re friends and we’re always in movies together. It was almost weirder that the movie wouldn’t acknowledge that in some way,” says Rogen. “So we thought, OK, let’s acknowledge it, and then let’s move beyond it. We wanted the relationships to feel real. We thought that would be the element that grounded the movie if the dynamics between the characters were real and relatable. So even though the movie gets super-crazy – it’s the Apocalypse – there’s a simple idea at the center that I hope is very believable. We never could have written this movie if we didn’t know these guys – and we definitely couldn’t have directed it.”

Distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International, “This Is The End” will be shown exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas nationwide startingSept. 11.