I teach a lot - I teach at the UCLA and USC graduate film programs - and a lot of those projects are my students' projects that I act in or I do a cameo.

In a movie, a book, or a play, a character doesn't live in a vacuum. She is subject to pressures from the world outside of her, just like we are in life. These pressures and circumstances shape character. Who your parents are determines your genetic make up: your skin color, your sex, your height, weight. Where you are raised does affect your worldview either positively or negatively, your accent. Your economic class affects where you go to school, what you eat, where you sleep.

We all age. You shouldn't discount it as a subject for a film. Just because the characters are dealing with issues that you might not deal with for another 45 years doesn't mean you won't like it.

I was kind of scared of failing at acting.

If the work is good, what does it matter? I'm doing it because I love it. Why not do as many things I love as I can? As long as the work is good.

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

When I started writing after my career as an actor, I knew that that other life in the film industry would be pulled into my writing life and that people would see me not as an author but as an actor starting to write.