Watch James Franco as The Room's Tommy Wiseau

Ever wonder how the now legendary “Oh, hi Mark” scene from Tommy Wiseau’s ridiculous melodrama The Room came about? The hilarious first trailer for The Disaster Artist, James Franco’s feature-length tribute to Wiseau and his spectacularly terrible movie, draws the curtain behind that scene. The clip above dissects the effort it took for Wiseau to deliver his own terrible dialogue, and if Franco's film is to be believed it took him 60 takes to deliver this awful line.

This isn’t simply Franco's comic imagination of what might have gone on on set, however. The Disaster Artist is based on the true-life account by Wiseau’s costar Greg Sestero of his experience of making the 2003 film, which has now gone on to become a cult hit celebrated for being “the greatest bad movie ever made”.

Franco stars as Wiseau, alongside his regular collaborator Seth Rogen, who we see in the clip feeding Wiseau his lines, and Franco’s younger brother Dave as Sestero. Alison Brie, Zac Efron, Josh Hutcherson and Jacki Weaver also appear in this affectionate take on Wiseau and his film.

This may be a comedy, but Franco is taking playing Wiseau seriously. “I studied the role of Tommy the same way I played James Dean,” he said recently in a Q&A following an early screening of the film, “just sort of obsessively driving around in my car listening to the voice all the time. So it was basically the same thing, playing James Dean and Tommy Wiseau.”

Brilliantly, he also borrowed from Dean's prefered school of method acting, as Rogen reveals in the same Q&A. “But he [Franco] did direct the movie in character as Tommy," says Rogen. “So there are scenes where you are playing Tommy directing a movie as Tommy directing a movie as Tommy. We've done a lot of weird shit in our day, but that was fucking weird.”

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The Disaster Artist is due for release Dec 2017

Read our take on Tommy Wiseau and how Hipster Irony Created a Monster