Franco finds his inner wife

Franco is a fiend for character research, building on habits he developed playing Dean. He got his pilot's license to play a World War I ace in "Flyboys" and spent months learning horseback riding and sword fighting for "Tristan and Isolde." But he was frustrated when he thought the fruits of his labor failed to show up in the finished film. "I just felt like, sometimes as an actor, I was doing all this work that just disappeared into the air."

Franco says directing a few low-budget feature films helped him to see acting in a new light. "My directorial efforts I wouldn't say are the biggest successes," he says. "But one very positive thing that came out of them is I got a perspective from the other side, and I think it has really helped me as an actor to approach movies in a much more cooperative way. It's not that I was trying to sabotage any of the previous movies, but I was thinking about myself and my role in a much more isolated way."

For "Milk," director Gus Van Sant tried to bridge the gap between his previous experimental features and biopic conventions. An attempt to shoot scenes on the fly with a documentary cameraman was aborted, but Van Sant did encourage the actors to stray from the script. "You're going into a scene knowing that the other person can say whatever," Franco says, "so you don't get lulled into doing the lines the same way over and over."

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Adams is a freelance writer.

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