James Franco compares Rob & Taylor in the tent scene to ‘Brokeback Mountain’ & talks Breaking Dawn

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MTV Hol­ly­wood Crush:

What we love about James Franco is that, despite pur­su­ing a Ph.D. at Yale, gar­ner­ing seri­ous Oscar buzz in “127 Hours” and embody­ing a Hol­ly­wood A-list per­sona, he’s taken time out of his busy sched­ule to keep up with the trends. That’s right, James has both read and watched the “Twi­light” books and films, and when MTV News caught up with him at the Toronto Inter­na­tional Film Fes­ti­val where he was pro­mot­ing “127 Hours,” he spent more time talk­ing about the phe­nom­e­non than the film’s stars typ­i­cally do.

While he may not be a self-proclaimed Twi-hard after read­ing the series, James can at least ref­er­ence Robert Pat­tin­son and Tay­lor Laut­ner on a first name basis (you’d be sur­prised to find there are celebs out there who can’t), and can clearly under­stand the deeper metaphors of the stories.

“I wouldn’t say I enjoy them, but I’m fas­ci­nated with them,” James said about the books. “I’m inter­ested in the metaphor of the vam­pire placed in the high school set­ting and how a rela­tion­ship with a vam­pire can stand in for gen­eral feel­ings that peo­ple have as teenagers. And the obses­sion peo­ple have with that is also fas­ci­nat­ing to me.”

James also took some time ana­lyz­ing the role of the films in the whole “Twi­light” craze. “It’s really hard to extri­cate those actors from the read­ing expe­ri­ence of just the phe­nom­e­non of ‘Twi­light’ now,” he said. He also gave a shout-out to the self-references of “Eclipse” that we loved so much.

“The movies are almost com­ment­ing on them­selves,” he said. “There will be a scene where the go-to guys, Tay­lor and Rob, are in the tent, it’s almost like a ‘Broke­back Moun­tain’ scene, where the two guys are talk­ing in a tent and the girl is asleep, and they’re hav­ing, like, this roman­tic moment almost through her, in a way. One of them says, ‘Well, I’m hot­ter than you,’ and it’s almost like they’re wink­ing at the fans, like to the Team Jacob or the Team Edwards.”

But he does have one “Twi­light” con­ces­sion to make: He hasn’t fin­ished read­ing “Break­ing Dawn.” He has heard a bit about the birthing scene (“I kind of know what hap­pens, some very strange birth, right?” he asked rhetor­i­cally), but at least his rea­son­ing for call­ing it quits part way through the book matches our own frus­tra­tions when we were read­ing it the first time!

“I read a part of it. I think I got to the sex scene, but it was so brief, I didn’t even know if it was the actual sex scene,” he admit­ted. “It was kind of a let­down after all that buildup.”

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