Michael Kirby Smith for The New York TimesJames Franco leading a class at New York University last Saturday.In the 10th-floor classroom, students were gathered round with coursework packets and coffee cups. The instructor tapped his red pen against a long, wooden table.
“If somebody doesn’t understand or believe in what we’re doing, don’t listen to them,” said the instructor, a scruffy, familiar-looking man in a peach T-shirt topped with a wide-lapeled, dark-hooded jacket. “We’re going in the right direction.”
The class was “Directing the Thesis I” at New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts, meeting last Saturday night to accommodate the instructor’s demanding, erratic schedule. James Franco, in his latest academic incarnation, was leading graduate students through the process of stitching their individual cinema projects together into a feature-length film.
Mr. Franco is already an extreme scholar — he has a B.F.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles; M.F.A.’s in writing from Columbia University and Brooklyn College; an M.F.A. in film from Tisch; and is working on other degrees including a Ph.D. at Yale — but the course on directing is his first professorial role.
Seated around him in the Tisch building at 721 Broadway were his nine enrolled graduate students, several acquaintances and, for exactly 15 minutes last Saturday, a reporter and a photographer.
The class officially meets on Tuesday afternoons, but Mr. Franco did not make the call for the first two, though he has been conferring with students sporadically since May by phone and on Skype. The class last Saturday was the semester’s face-to-face opener.
The students were not complaining.
“My friends back in Venezuela are amazed I have such an incredible opportunity,” said one student, Virginia Urreiztieta. “I got over being star-struck,” she added. “But handsome, yes, he is handsome.”
It is a serious course, taught by Mr. Franco in an attentive if mellow mode. He said that no exuberant fans had banged down his classroom door, nor had anyone enrolled “just because they liked ‘Tristan and Isolde.’ ”
“I feel like we’re beyond the phase of experimentation,” he said of his students’ progress.
Michael Kirby Smith for The New York TimesMr. Franco’s students are getting ready to shoot a collaborative film in Detroit in November. In May, before the class began, Mr. Franco assigned each student to conceive a short film inspired by a different C.K. Williams poem about “decay, but also a sense of memory and rejuvenation.”
In November, the class will travel to Detroit, a place where memory and attempts at rejuvenation abound, to shoot the movie. He compared the film to the multidirector mash-ups “New York, I Love You” and its predecessor, “Paris, Je T’aime.”
Part of the draw of the class, even apart from the marquee teacher, is the chance at the limelight it offers: upon completion, the piece will head to film festivals.
“Often you make films you never finish and it happens in a vacuum,” said Pamela Romanowsky, a graduate of N.Y.U. and an acquaintance of Mr. Franco’s who is unofficially taking part in the class. “This is unlike all the other courses I’ve taken.”
Mr. Franco is scheduled to teach a similar course in the spring, where the assignment will be to create a film based on the poet Stephen Dobyns’s book “Black Dog, Red Dog.” He said that U.C.L.A., CalArts, and N.Y.U. have all offered him positions for next fall, but that he hadn’t made any decisions yet.
Last Saturday, the group read aloud each student’s script and Mr. Franco prepared them for every aspect of their test shootings, from casting, to lighting, to sex scenes.
“You don’t need to do the nudity now,” he said. “Just do boxer shorts or something.” They giggled.
The final student’s script was read aloud, Mr. Franco offered words of encouragement.
“It’s very cool, very exciting,” he said.
A bit after 9 p.m., he declared the session over.
“All right,” he said. “Somebody’s supposed to be drinking at this point.”
Students and teacher filed out to continue their Saturday night.