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Amber Heard and James Franco "Have Great Chemistry"

Two co-star in the upcoming indie flick The Adderall Diaries

By Marc Malkin, Beth Sobol Apr 18, 2015 2:00 PMTags
James Franco, Amber HeardJemal Countess/Getty Images for the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival

James Franco and Amber Heard are at it again.

Seven years after having appeared together in Pineapple Express, the two have reunited for The Adderall Diaries, a film adaptation of Stephen Elliott's best-selling memoir of the same name.

"James and Amber have great chemistry," the movie's director Pamela Romanowsky told us Thursday at the Adderall premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. "As a director, it's really exciting to see two people who haven't spent much time together come into a room to do a scene and find this connection and electricity between them. It was really exciting to watch."

Franco stars as in the movie as writer with many issues, including substance abuse problems. Heard plays his New York Times crime reporter love interest.

The cast also includes Ed Harris, Christian Slater, Cynthia Nixon and Wilmer Valderrama.

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"James and I met at grad school we both did the [New York University] film program and had been friends and I worked on a short film with him. We really loved working together," Romanowsky said. "He had optioned Adderall Diaries a few years before and offered it to me to write and direct. It was already a book that I had read and loved so it felt like a perfect fit so we embarked on it from there. That was about three years ago."

Heard said she was attracted to the project because they didn't try to sugarcoat it to make it appeal to a larger and more mainstream audience. "You could call it dark, but the story to is about memory, it's about life, it's about relationships," Heard said. "It didn't seek to taper that to make it more palatable."

If you're wondering if Franco has had any real-life experience with Adderall, he made it perfectly clear he doesn't. "I don't. I don't," he said. "I can't say that I do."

We are very happy to hear that.