James Franco meets Faulkner

Faulkner fans—and anyone who has ever pondered the line “My mother is a fish” in high school English class—will be interested in this news:

James Franco is set to direct As I Lay Dying for the screen and plans to start shooting this summer. He also wants to direct Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in 2012.

As much as I love James Franco, who is an author in his own right, I can not begin to imagine a movie of As I Lay Dying. The story has multiple narrators, including a woman speaking from the coffin, and a stream-of-conscious style.

Franco explained his plan for the movie in an interview with Entertainment Weekly:

“You want to capture the tone, but you can’t work in exactly the same way,” says Franco. “I don’t believe it’ll feel the same if you divide it as rigidly as the book, like titles that say ‘Cash’ and then you’re with Cash. You can slip into the characters’ heads and give them their inner voice for a while, but it has to be more fluid because movies just work differently than books…”

Can you picture it? Do you think Franco can pull off this difficult adaptation?

Also in BookPage: Read a review of On William Faulkner by Eudora Welty; read other book-to-film news.