COURTESY OF DISNEY

This Friday, the latest addition to Hollywood’s profit-driven obsession with reboots, remakes and remixes will come to a theater near you. “Oz the Great and Powerful” gives the origin story for the wizard from the beloved 1939 classic. Revisiting a fictional world through a new lens can be entertaining without being manipulative, and the talent involved in this project does give some promise for the film. Recently I had the chance to take part in a conference call with director Sam Raimi (“Spider-Man,” “The Evil Dead”) and actor James Franco, who plays a circus magician from Kansas named Oscar.

My fellow journalists and I were put on mute during the interview while a moderator asked questions we had submitted. The deep, probing questions left Raimi outraged—he did not appreciate being reminded that he dropped out of college to create “The Evil Dead,” and it is obviously a sore point for him that he has not finished his degree. He did offer an insightful look into the process of making this particular movie, though, and his thoughts on being a filmmaker.

Raimi took the journalists on a journey through the casting process and what he looked for in his actors and actresses. Specifically, he thought Mila Kunis’ performances in “Black Swan” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” showed the two sides he wanted the character Theodora to have.

“I wasn’t looking for necessarily the very best actor or actress in the world. I was looking for that actor or actress that had the qualities of the character they’re going to portray,” Raimi elaborated.

Raimi also got into some of the nitty-gritty details, speaking about the difficulties of making a movie with a number of characters and finding ways to give the audience enough backstory to care about all of them.

Franco talked at length about the acting process and how he approaches it for different movies.“I had to be able to carry myself as a magician because my character, Oscar Diggs, starts off as a traveling magician in a circus, and we even see a bit of one of his shows. So I needed to be able to do those tricks convincingly and to hold myself on stage like a magician. So they hired one of the best magicians in Las Vegas, Lance Burton, to come to Detroit, and I was fortunate enough to have private lessons with him.”

Franco also added how his previous filmography had prepared him for this role. “I’d been doing a fair amount of comedies recently, and I saw this movie and this role as a chance to use some of the comedy chops that I had been developing in some other full-out comedies. I like this idea of a comedic character within an epic movie,” he said.

Both men spoke of their respect not just for the original “The Wizard of Oz” but also for the original books by L. Frank Baum. Franco especially was concerned that the story be true to the originals because the books had been important to him as a child. Out of this respect there also came inspiration which led both men to want to be involved in the product. “I wanted to be sure that they were being loyal to certain things about Oz that people expect and then also had a fresh take on it,” Franco said.

Raimi ended with his vision for the audience: “Ideally, I’d like them to feel uplifted. The best thing that stories can do for us is reverberate with truth and show us the way in a way that is not pushy or preachy. There’s a simple beauty in loving another person and friends coming together, in being selfless. And that’s what this movie’s message is, and that’s what I’d like the audience to come away with.”

On Friday, we will see if Raimi’s vision for “Oz the Great and Powerful” is carried out successfully.