LIFE IN MOVIES: After an unlikely evolution from fashion designer and junkie to top movie director, Joel Schumacher talks frankly to Michael Dwyer about working in Hollywood and putting his style on a new version of the Veronica Guerin story
Taking time out from shooting his new film dealing with the life and death of journalist Veronica Guerin, writer-director Joel Schumacher proved remarkably candid and informative when we teamed up for a public interview before an audience of more than 200 at the Irish Film Centre in Dublin last Saturday afternoon, in the first of a series of events to mark the IFC's 10th anniversary.
We began by discussing his latest project, which has "Veronica Guerin" as its working title. "We have a fantastic Irish crew and a great Irish cast, and we're almost halfway there," he says, with a beam on his face.
He is entirely undaunted by the fact that an earlier film on the same subject, When the Sky Falls, failed to secure a US release, despite the presence of an actress as established as Joan Allen in the leading role.
Unlike that film, in which the characters all had fictional names, "everyone has their real names" in his treatment of the story. So is he worried about legal problems? "No," he says. "I'm not worried about anything except doing my job. I'm not worried about what criminals think of us. I have other fish to fry. This is an attempt to try to really do honour to Veronica, and to try to do justice to her story."
What is his view of her? "There are many ways to view her," he says. "She certainly was wildly intelligent. I think she was very aggressive about getting her stories. I know some people think she was foolish and reckless, but I think you say that about any journalist who goes to the war - in her case, the drug war here, or in the case of the European and American journalists who have been covering Afghanistan. I know some people feel she may have taken her ego too seriously, but that would be considered very helpful in a man.
"We have the co-operation of her brother, Jimmy, who is representing the family. He is on a consultancy and he also made it possible for us to meet a great many people. Everybody was very forthcoming."
The versatile Australian actress, Cate Blanchett, who plays Guerin, bears a striking resemblance to her in the film. "She's a great actress and, like all great actors, she's a chameleon," he says. "Something happens to very talented actors where subconsciously they are becoming the person they are playing."
Schumacher's route into film was circuitous. Now 62, he grew up in a New York tenement. His father died when he was four, and he was raised by his Swedish mother, who "worked six days a week and three nights a week". He studied design and worked as a fashion designer for Revlon and other firms.
"I made a lot of money working in fashion, but I was also a drug addict at the time," he says frankly. "I wanted to make a lot of money for my mother, because we were poor, and I had that adolescent dream of putting her in a nice house and buying her things, but she unfortunately died before that could happen. I was working in an industry where I was very successful, but I hated it, and I was very young and crazy, and like so many of my friends in the 1960s, I became a drug addict. In 1970, I found myself weighing 130lbs. I was like a skeleton and I was shooting up six times a day. All the money was gone and I owed $50,000 in back taxes."
He hated the fashion industry, he says, simply because "it was hard to get excited about clothes". He always dreamed of getting into film. "When I got off hard drugs in 1970, I thought I would go to Hollywood and try and become a movie director. Ignorance is really bliss. All my friends thought I was back on drugs! Thank God I was that naïve, that I didn't know then what I know now, that the odds are so difficult."
His experience in fashion secured him work on a low-budget film directed by Frank Perry, Play It As It Lays, and this led to further work as a costume designer, including two very different films for Woody Allen, the zany Sleeper and the sombre Interiors.
"Interiors was his first serious film and he was really nervous," Schumacher says. "It was typically Woody Allen. The movie was supposed to take place in a hot summer atmosphere, and we didn't start until November, in Long Island, and it was bitterly cold. Woody was so nervous he would say every day that he would go upstairs and work on our comeback film. But it was wonderful working with him, and he encouraged me to do some sets and art direction, and he also really encouraged me to become a director."
Schumacher turned to screenwriting in 1976 with Sparkle and the exuberant, low-budget Car Wash, which became remarkably profitable, and after gaining experience as a director on two TV movies, he finally directed his first cinema film in 1981, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, starring Lily Tomlin.
"It was so difficult to make someone shrink then without the special effects we have now," he says. Three years later, he directed St Elmo's Fire, one of the key Brat-Pack movies and a film with great resonance now for audiences of a certain age.
"I'm very against those labels, because each of those people are individuals. They're not a pack of anything. I think there is a certain resentment in the media against people who are very young and very beautiful and who make a lot of money.
"But then it goes away. The danger is they're so highly paid and they get so much attention that they learn nothing about their craft as actors. Then, suddenly, they wake up and they're 25, and people are saying they're has-beens and they don't have the craft to fall back on."
The media obsession with box-office figures puts further pressure on young actors to become big movie stars, he believes. "Some kids come to the acting profession from very, very damaged backgrounds, and their parents have a lot to do with not training them to handle what's going to happen."
In the early 1990s, he worked twice with Julia Roberts, on Flatliners and Dying Young. "Julia is in great shape now, but it was tough for her," he says. "She was a young girl from a very small town in the south, from a very dysfunctional family. There was a very painful divorce and separation of the children, and she was struggling to find jobs in Hollywood. We were shooting Flatliners when Pretty Woman came out, and she suddenly became this huge box-office star. She was just 19 or 20, and that's a hard road. It does have many privileges, but it does mean you're going to be under a microscope for most of your life, and that's a tough place to be when you're that young."
In 1993, Schumacher made Falling Down, his finest film to date, featuring a riveting performance from Michael Douglas as D-Fens, an Everyman character who buckles under the pressures of everyday life. "The United States was split on that movie," he laughs. "Half the critics thought it was genius and the other half thought I should be killed. So I knew I had done a really good job! It really struck a nerve with everybody. The heads of Warner Brothers at the time freaked out when they saw the movie put together. They asked me if I could make it more user-friendly. I told them they should show it or burn it."
he went on to make two John Grisham adaptations, The Client, which marked a belated breakthrough for Susan Sarandon, and A Time to Kill. "Susan was nearly 50 at the time, and I had to really fight for her because the studio did not consider her a movie star," he says.
Tim Burton had made two Batman films starring Michael Keaton when Schumacher took on the task of directing Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. "I was asked to re-invent it because there were a lot of complaints about the second one, Batman Returns, because it was so dark and they felt it was destroying the franchise. Tim told me he almost had a nervous breakdown doing it. The pressure was enormous, because the Batman merchandising made more than the movies themselves. When I did my second one, it felt like the merchandising was the priority."
Schumacher replaced Keaton with Val Kilmer in Batman Forever, and I asked him if Kilmer proved as difficult as he is said to be. "We had a huge fight by the second week, where he threw me across his trailer," he says. "I can't believe I did this, but I picked him up and threw him back. He was afraid of me after that, but from what I've heard of what he did on other films, if there is a best of Val, then we had it."
Before we see his Veronia Guerin movie, two recent Schumacher films will be released this year. Bad Company is an action comedy with the unlikely pairing of Anthony Hopkins and comic Chris Rock, which, because of a terrorist strand in its story, has been delayed due to post-September 11th sensitivities. The other, Phone Booth, stars the young Irish actor, Colin Farrell, who was given his big break when Schumacher cast him in the leading role of Tigerland, his gritty picture of young US soldiers at boot camp before being shipped off to Vietnam in the early 1970s.
That low-budget movie was shot on 16mm in 28 days, and Schumacher decided to cast it with unknown actors. He recalls doing auditions in London when he got a call from Farrell's agent. "I didn't want a young actor to waste his money on paying for his own flight over from Dublin, but he did it, and I ended up giving him the leading role."
When Jim Carrey pulled out of Phone Booth, Schumacher gave the Irish actor the difficult central role of a young publicist who picks up a public phone and is told to stay on the line or he will be killed. Farrell, who spent most of the movie standing in a phone booth, will be reunited with Schumacher shortly when he plays a cameo in the Guerin film.
"Colin's going to hit on Cate Blanchett," Schumacher laughs. "I had to think of something for him to do in the film. He plays a young sports enthusiast who meets her, and Veronica was a huge Eric Cantona fan. It's a fun scene.
"Colin is really special. Now he's earning more money than all of us, and no one deserves it more."