Jamie Foxx, Dave Franco and Texas Filmmaker J.J. Perry Premiere Day Shift in Dallas.
“The action is what I’ve been doing for 32 years, so I hope it's good, and I hope people like it,” he says. “I feel like it's my wheelhouse. I feel like I’m very confident about it. The horror and the tension, it takes good directing, but I felt like I had a command of that as well. I think I’m funny, but I’m not sure if anyone else thinks that I’m funny. When we cast Jamie Foxx, pretty much all of my worries were relieved at that point.
Foxx is also ready to shower his co-star with praise. He says that getting Franco to join the production was one of the chief reasons he signed up. “It’s not leaning too far into the joke. It’s having a strange perspective and just doing it very earnestly,” he says. “When we got to the point where I was making squirrel noises, that was early on. In the moment, it was like I didn’t even know what was coming out of my mouth, then it was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ We could do whatever we want.”
Franco says that directing gave him a new sense of purpose as an actor and made him appreciate the art of filmmaking even more.“I respect actors more than ever because when you’re behind the camera, you’re watching these actors build themselves up and get into this really intense place while hundreds of crew members are watching and scrutinizing their every move,” he says. “This job is weird; this is hard! I just love actors now. Not that I didn’t before.
“I was rattling off these paragraphs and paragraphs of vampire facts, so it was really just knowing when those scenes were coming, and really just taking the time to do my homework and say them over and over and over, so that when I was on set it just felt second hand,” he says. “I wasn’t even thinking about it. That was the toughest part. Saying this vampire jargon in a really quick, succinct way where it felt effortless.
“I did everything on camera in this movie,” he says. “If I couldn’t do it in camera, I was going to do it. I used only visual effects to augment what I was doing. I learned this business back when you couldn’t say ‘We’re going to fix this in post.’ I think in about 10 years, there won’t be car chases anymore, but I’ll be long gone.