Just when we thought James Franco and Seth Rogen couldn't get more cute together... they crank that bromance up a notch.
Franco interviewed his buddy and fellow actor-writer-director triple threat for the latest issue of VMAN, and the results—per a sneak peek at the whole feature exclusively obtained by E! News—indicate that Rogen was super-comfortable during the Q&A session.
For instance, Rogen reveals (among other things) that he doesn't think much of all of the promotional appearances he's forced to make when he's got movies coming out.
Asked about his second directorial effort, The Interview, Rogen said that the plot was inspired by the persistent joke that was made after 9-11, about why Dan Rather didn't just kill Osama bin Laden during an interview he had with the Al Qaeda leader years before.
"Yeah, I just went on Charlie Rose and I asked him if he was ever approached by the CIA or anyone to kill anybody that he's interviewed," Franco, who also did the photo collages for the VMAN feature, recalled. "And he was like, 'Oh, no, no.'"
Or, as Rogen put it, imitating the famed PBS talk show host, "'No, I was too drunk to do that.'"
"I do a lot of these shows," the This Is the End director and star continued. "The backstage of them was always fascinating and hilarious to me. They are such bulls--t. We do them and contribute to them, and we're doing it to help sell our movies, which I don't think are bulls--t necessarily, but in order to sell them you have to participate in this massive bulls--t machine. So the idea of entertainment journalism in general was interesting to me."
James Franco, Seth Rogen, VMAN Photography and Artwork James Franco
Rogen also recalled that he first realized that it was probably high time to start directing films when he was in The Green Hornet, which he cowrote with Evan Goldberg.
"It was honestly during Green Hornet that we realized that we could have directed it, because we really had a front-row seat to everything, we saw it all happening, and that was as complicated a movie as you can humanly make," he told Franco. "It has visual effects, it has huge sets and set pieces, car chases, two units going full-time."
Everyone knows by now that Rogen isn't much of a fan of his brief turn as a comic-book hero, but at least it prompted him to step behind the camera for This Is the End, also written with Goldberg.
"As we started to write This Is The End," he explained, "we realized that it was going to be about our friends and that is when we were like, 'We should direct this one.'So we started trying to get the concept art together, we talked to visual effectscompanies, and we started putting it together and we slowly realized we could do it. You see, it's all tricks. You learn how to deal with a logistical complicated sequence, where you figure it out shot-by-shot. It seems impossible. And then you know."
