But what James Franco really wants to do is direct Blood Meridian or As I Lay Dying

Plenty of actors eventually feel the itch to get behind the camera and call the shots, and it’s certainly no surprise that the endlessly ambitious James Franco is heading that way.

The actor/writer/scholar/Oscar host really wants to take the reins on an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s grim and gory Western novel BLOOD MERIDIAN. How bad does he want to climb into that saddle? He tells EW that in order to convince producer/rights-holder Scott Rudin of his qualifications, he “self-financed a test sequence of a scene from the Meridian with relatively high production values, including horses, costumes and period-accurate props, and starring Mark Pellegrino (a.k.a. Jacob from “Lost”), Scott Glenn, Luke Perry, and Franco’s brother Dave, also an actor.”

Several other directors have considered tackling the brutal tale of scalphunters over the years, including Ridley Scott. Franco says: “It was like, why should [Rudin] give it to me when Ridley Scott didn’t make it? So I called him up and said, ‘I’m planning on doing this. You don’t have to give me any money, I can finance this shoot. Would you just wait? Don’t do anything with it until I show this to you.’ And I showed it to him and he loved it.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean Franco has the job, but he’s not exactly sitting around and waiting — he’s also eyeballing William Faulkner’s literary classic AS I LAY DYING for a directing gig. He explains his ideas for approaching the difficult stream-of-consciousness story about a woman’s death and her family’s delivery of the body to burial, and about handling the multiple narrators: “I want to be loyal to the book — my approach is to always be loyal in a lot a ways — but in order to be loyal I will have to change some things for the movie.”

Franco, who’s also made several shorts, has already been at work directing himself and Michael Shannon in THE BROKEN TOWER, a feature biopic about poet Hart Crane. He apparently doesn’t sleep.