If you’re like most people, you probably know James Franco best as the goofy comic actor from Pineapple Express, This Is the End, The Interview and the like, or the intense dramatic actor who earned an Oscar nomination for 127 Hours, played Spider-Man’s best friend/nemesis in Sam Raimi’s movies and headlined an acclaimed James Dean TV biopic after getting his start on Freaks and Geeks.

Or maybe you recognise him as the hardest working man in show business, popping up in all kinds of roles in all kinds of shows from micro-budgeted indie films to the soap opera General Hospital to his recent portrayal of twins in HBO’s The Deuce series. Perhaps you also knew that Franco has attended some the finest universities and writes books.

You may not be aware, though, that Franco’s combined all of those interests in a series of fine but little seen adaptations of great American novels he’s directed and appeared in, including William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God and John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle.

Well, it’s all true. And it makes you wonder, a little bit anyway, why this clearly cultured talent would want to direct and star in a movie about the worst movie of all time, The Room. But that’s what Franco’s latest feature, The Disaster Artist, out now in cinemas, is, and unlike the picture it’s about, the new film is receiving rave reviews, as is Franco for his portrayal of the totally bizarre character who made and starred in the 2003 calamity-turned-cult-hit, Tommy Wiseau. Franco won the best actor award at the Gotham Independent Film Awards , the first ceremony of awards season.

“The Room has been playing for 14-and-a-half years, sort of like the new ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ but, like, even worse,” Franco, 39, chuckles about the ineptly written, acted and directed tale of romantic betrayal that novice director Wiseau thought would be a Tennessee Williams-style, Oscar-contending drama, but since its laughed-at premiere has agreed with the world that it is a so-bad-its-great comedy. “People have a good time when they go see it. There’s a great energy when you go to screenings of The Room, people throw spoons and yell at the screen.

“But it doesn’t feel cruel, it doesn’t feel like, ‘Let’s just go laugh at how bad it is,’ ” Franco notes.

“There’s actually a real warm, kind of communal spirit to those screenings. And when the real Tommy shows up to them — I’ve seen him at screenings in Westwood —people love seeing him. He’s entertaining, he throws the football with everybody in line out front, he signs autographs and sells his Wiseau underwear. It’s a real fun, positive atmosphere.”

Unlike many of his Hollywood colleagues, though, Franco had not seen The Room when he got hold of a pre-publication manuscript for The Disaster Artist, co-written by Wiseau’s long-time friend, fellow frustrated actor and eventual Room co-star Greg Sestero.

It recounted the two men’s friendship from meeting at a Bay Area acting class to years of not finding work in LA to Wiseau’s self-financed $6 million (Dhs22m) production of his baby. According to the book, Wiseau didn’t do anything right as a producer/director/actor and refused to take advice from the few professional crew members (out of some 400 people he hired for the little independent production) who stuck with him through a ridiculous eight months of shooting at a small Hollywood equipment rental facility — where Wiseau insisted on buying the cameras he needed (and ones he didn’t).

That narrative, more than the fan phenomenon that came after, convinced Franco there was a movie for him to make.

“When I was more than halfway through the book, I saw that there was a bigger story,” Franco explains. “Greg and (book co-writer) Tom Bissell wrote about what we expected, that The Room was crazy and Tommy went into it headlong, not knowing what he was doing and without any perspective on himself. He thought he was James Dean when he was more like Captain Jack Sparrow. But to me, they used The Room and Tommy’s passion for what he was aiming for as a way to talk about something universal. Which is following your dream, taking a huge swing, putting everything you have on the line financially, personally, creatively and emotionally.

“When I read that, I realised if I do this right I will have both a conventional Hollywood story of outsiders following their dreams and, at the same time, I will have a completely unique, bizarre Hollywood story unlike anything that’s ever been made.”

Franco approached Wiseau for his life story rights and was surprised to discover that the only actor the great auteur wanted to portray him — beside Johnny Depp, that is — was Franco, probably because he’d played Wiseau’s idol Dean. Franco’s long-time comedy collaborator Seth Rogen, who plays the only competent professional on The Room’s set in Disaster Artist, agreed to produce his friend’s film through his company that has gotten away with such mainstream movie murder as Sausage Party and the Sony hack-triggering Interview. Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber were brought on to adapt the screenplay, primarily for their skills at relationship dramas rather than comedy.

That was because Franco viewed Disaster Artist, at its heart, as a bromance between Wiseau and Sestero. The movie not coincidentally also marks the first time James has worked extensively with his younger brother Dave Franco, who really gets across Sestero’s affection for the maddeningly opaque Wiseau.

Well, there’s weird and then there’s playing Tommy Wiseau. With his long, black-dyed hair, vampirish eyes, unplaceable accent and singular sentence construction, Wiseau is a show all to himself, all the time. Add that no one really knows where he’s from — he claims New Orleans, some think they’ve traced his origin to Poland — how old he is or where he got the money to make Room, and you’ve got a facade of strangeness that Franco worked hard to both imitate and pierce to find the real man behind.

“One of the ironies that I love about this whole thing is that Tommy’s acting heroes are my heroes,” Franco notes. “James Dean and Marlon Brando. I approached Tommy’s character the same way that I played Dean. I knew that there was a very specific outer aspect to the character: how he looked, how he moved, how he sounded. I needed to get that down. But I also needed to wed that outer life with an inner life, so that it wouldn’t be a caricature.”

Luckily for Franco, Wiseau had pretty much the entire behind-the-scenes production of The Room videotaped for what he expected to be an appreciative posterity. Sestero also provided Franco with 20-year-old mini cassettes his friend taped of himself just driving around talking.

“That was just this incredible gift for an actor,” Franco points out. “Not only could I hear Tommy’s voice in a relaxed setting, just talking to himself, but he was also talking about his life. Very personal things and very pertinent issues to the themes of our movie.”

Beat going straight to the source in this case.

“Even though Tommy is obviously alive and around, it wouldn’t have been as productive to ask him about who he was when he was making The Room,” Franco figures. “Because after The Room came out, Tommy rewrote history. He had intended to make an Oscar-worthy movie — he paid to keep it in theatres for two weeks to qualify for Oscars — and then when everybody laughed at it he took credit for it being a comedy. So the tapes were sort of a godsend.”

Accomplished as the nonetheless lucky Wiseau isn’t, Franco says he gained a lot from putting himself in the shoes of the similarly, stubbornly creative individualist.

“I learned a big lesson on this movie about working with others,” Franco reckons. “Tommy thought anything he wanted to accomplish, he would have to do for himself. He had learned over years of being rejected that he and maybe his friend Greg were the only people that he could depend on. When he got onto the movie set, though, he didn’t know how to collaborate in a collaborative medium, which movies are.

“I had the opposite experience. I learned on this movie how to depend on people who were more experienced and better than I was. I benefited from that immensely.”