It’s just three days into the New Year, and happily many of the major characters of 2010 are already showing great initiative with respect to 2011, James Franco among them. The soon-to-be Oscar host is reportedly in talks to take on two directorial projects: an adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying for Fox Searchlight, and one of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian with super-producer Scott Rudin. Both films would be based on scripts that Franco wrote himself. Though he does have some directing experience — he just finished shooting The Broken Tower, about the poet Hart Crane — taking on two of the great novels of the twentieth century is remarkably ambitious, even for the endlessly ambitious Franco. Should he opt to act in the films as well, we hope he saves the part of Addie Bundren for himself, because playing a dead wife and mother narrating stream-of-consciousness-style from beyond the grave seems like it would really round out his résumé. [Showbiz411]