Director Joel Schumacher was always a hardy Hollywood organism, never paralyzed long by bad reviews, and for decades spared movie jail thanks to a streak of solid earners
Photo: Matt Carr/Getty Images Speed couldn’t kill Joel Schumacher, and neither could AIDS nor brutal Batman & Robin reviews, so his personal trainer apparently did his best to finish him off with a brutal workout. On a recent Wednesday, the 79-year-old director, sitting in a chair in his Greenwich Village loft, is unable to get up and not entirely certain he’ll live to see Thursday. “It was a leg day yesterday,” he says woefully. “Oh my God, it hurts so much. The glutes.
One of your first breaks in movies was when Woody Allen hired you as a costume designer on 1973’s Sleeper. I understand you became friends and went out together a lot. But I think sometimes when people cheat, there’s a motel receipt and their significant other says, “What is this motel receipt?” I think it’s a way of not having to sit down and tell them.
I didn’t even think of it. I had no supervision. So I crashed and burned in fashion, which was well deserved, because I hated it. Well, I mean, with all great respect for Ewan, but he doesn’t look anything like Halston. Armie Hammer should have played Halston. He’s perfect. His father was the writer and actor Jason Miller, who played Father Damien in The Exorcist. He died at 62 of a heart attack.
I was not there. I think Richard Stanley told me he had a nervous breakdown. I do know Marlon Brando threw Val’s cell phone in the bushes and said, “Young man, don’t confuse your ego with the size of your salary, ever.” Here’s the difference between Val Kilmer and Tommy Lee Jones. I don’t care what state Tommy is in emotionally, when that camera rolls, there is no bad take. Val is a different story. But he was a fabulous Batman.
I did not grow up with God and wall-to-wall carpeting, the standard middle-class values. If you’re an only child, your father is dead, and your mother is at work six days a week and three nights a week, you are free. I was on my own. The street was my education. You could ride your bike over the 59th Street Bridge then. So I rode my bike everywhere. I was in Manhattan all the time and all over Queens. If you’re a kid on a bike, anything can happen, and predators come out of the woodwork, my God.
But I think if anybody reads about any kind of assignation that involves an older person and a younger person, it automatically seems creepy, correct? The Atlantic ran a big story about Bryan Singer taking advantage of young kids. I see these pictures of these parties that he threw with all these boys, and they all look like victims to me. But as we’re talking, I just wonder if somebody at a certain age should have the responsibility to understand that they are in danger. Am I looking at the issue the wrong way?
Corey Feldman said nothing but good things about you and Spielberg, but it was a loaded question. In your case, do you think these rumors persist because you’re gay? When I read that story about the Speedo, all I could think of was, I hope you had a sweatshirt, too, because it gets cold at night. You know what I think? I shouldn’t have made a sequel, and that’s all there is to it. I learned that sequels are only made for one reason. I’m sure that Batman Forever was the cheapest Batman movie ever made because Val didn’t get a lot of money, Nicole [Kidman] didn’t, Chris O’Donnell didn’t, and I didn’t. Tommy got a bit of a payday because he’d just won the Oscar for The Fugitive and Jim Carrey had already done Ace Ventura.
It was too big for a first movie, because the way to make a person tiny then was so difficult. Visual effects were not at that level. It was so technically complicated. It took hours and hours and hours to get each shot.Because of advice Woody gave me, I didn’t read reviews. But you just knew the audience loved it. I was never out of the box as the critic’s darling. St. Elmo’s Fire had not one good review in the United States of America.
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