I was an English major at UCLA when I was 18, and then I left after a year to start acting. I was educating myself during that time.

I was being generous. Gia Coppola wasn't even a filmmaker at that time, but I asked her to do it, because I believed in her as an artist. And because I wanted a woman's take on the material. The book Palo Alto is very male-centric, but Gia carved out a bunch of the female characters, and brought them to the fore in the movie. And the project was richer for it.

You are successful if you are able to work on the kind of material that you want to - if your life conforms to your dreams, regardless of outside acceptance or acclaim.

I worked the drive-through at McDonald's and tried out different accents - Italian, Russian, Irish.

Directing, editing, and everything about filmmaking has definitely changed me as an actor.

This was the way the night had cashed in. Choices had been made and things happened, and here we were. It was sad, and funny. My life was made of this. Stuff like this.

Sometimes I think to myself, what should James Franco say next? And then it comes to me. Boobs.