James Franco (Picture: AP)

Marina Abramovic, the Grand Dame of Performance Art, is making a new film about the life of 34-year-old Oz The Great and Powerful star James Franco.

The Serbian artist is a personal friend of Franco, a modern day ‘renaissance man’ who juggles life as a poet, painter, photographer and PhD student alongside a successful Hollywood career, and has dubbed him ‘the most interesting actor of the moment.’

Last year Abramovich was herself the subject of the film documentary Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, which focused on her life as she prepared for a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition included a 736.5 hour performance in which she sat totally still and silently at a table, while visitors including Lady Gaga lined up to perch opposite her. Some callers, including Girls star Jemima Kirke, were moved to tears by the experience.

Abramovic has previously joined forces with Antony Hegarty, Willem Dafoe and legendary avant-garde director Robert Wilson to create an autobiographical piece of musical theatre, The Life and Death of Marina Abramovich. It remains to be seen if she will collaborate with any big creatives names on this new project, which will be her first film.

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