Joel Schumacher is best known for directing a pair of Batman sequels (1995's Batman Forever and 1997's Batman & Robin) and a pair of hit John Grisham adaptations (1994's The Client and 1996's A Time To Kill), but his career is more eclectic than his most famous credits suggest. Schumacher, who broke into film as a costume designer for Woody Allen, directed and scripted 1974's The Virginia Hill Story, then followed it with screenplays for Car Wash, Sparkle, and 1978's ill-fated adaptation of The Wiz. The success of his second television film, Amateur Night At The Dixie Bar And Grill, led to gigs directing features as disparate as The Incredible Shrinking Woman, D.C. Cab, The Lost Boys, the Brat Pack vehicle St. Elmo's Fire, the tearjerker Dying Young, and the controversial Falling Down. Since the disastrous release of Batman & Robin, Schumacher has focused on grittier, smaller projects: Flawless marked his return to screenwriting after a 14-year hiatus, while 2000's Vietnam War drama Tigerland earned Schumacher some of the best reviews of his career and helped make Colin Farrell a star. Schumacher and Farrell recently reunited to make Phone Booth, a thriller set largely in a New York City phone booth. Schumacher recently spoke to The Onion A.V. Club about his eventful career.
The Onion: Have you always been interested in film?
Joel Schumacher: Well, I grew up before television. This is going to be very difficult for you and your audience to understand, but I grew up before TV. I was born in 1939, so there was no TV for a long time, and even when there was, we were too poor to get one. But in our poor neighborhood, there was a huge movie palace. So, like the little kid in Cinema Paradiso, I spent all my time in the movie theater, and had to be constantly dragged out. By the time I was 7, I decided that I had to be part of it on some level—never as an actor, but to make this fabulous thing that had become my best friend. I think it really happened with Great Expectations. My father died when I was 4, and David Lean's Great Expectations begins with Pip skipping through a graveyard, and I think it was probably the first image I saw on the screen that I could relate to as a child, because my father was dead and I had been to graveyards. My mother was still alive, but she was at work all the time, so I felt like that kid with no family. And also, he had great expectations. It happened around then. Movies were all there was for me.
O: How did you become a costume designer?
JS: I had this crash-and-burn life in the fashion business after I got out of art school in the '60s. Like a lot of people my age, I survived the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll madness. I shot drugs from 1965 to 1970, and when I got off the needle in 1970, I had no family—my mother died in 1965, and I realized that I had fucked up everything in my life, and I had to start from scratch. I went back to my childhood dream and started telling all my friends I was going to go to Hollywood and become a movie director. They were all sure I was back on the needle again. A friend of mine who was a TV commercial producer knew Dominick Dunne, who has now become a very successful novelist, but at the time was a producer. His sister-in-law was Joan Didion. He was producing a film called Play As It Lays from her book that Frank Perry was directing, and I stalked him. Because of my fashion background, they let me be the costume designer for 200 bucks a week on an independent movie. So that's how I started, doing costumes and sets, and then art direction and production design. I couldn't become a director that way, but writers sometimes got an opportunity to direct, so I started writing, hoping that someone would let me direct one of my scripts. I was naïve, but the scripts sold. But they wouldn't let me direct them. Sparkle got made, Car Wash got made, a lot of them got made, but I couldn't get arrested. Car Wash was one of those little movies that cost nothing and really hit the zeitgeist. There was a wonderful woman at NBC, and she fought for me to write and direct two TV movies, and the second one was so well received by the critics that I started getting offers to direct features. I've just finished my 18th feature as a director. So I'm one of the luckiest people I know—lucky to be alive, lucky to have this great career. That's sort of me in a nutshell.
O: Car Wash is a really interesting film, in part because it was so influential.
JS: Well, I think it was the first disco film, if you look back at it, because the score by Norman Whitfield was one of the first to incorporate that kind of disco dance music that became so popular. He had done all the Supremes and Four Tops stuff at Motown. I was very influenced by [Robert] Altman in those days, and a lot of my movies are still ensemble. That was just a day in the life of a car wash. What happened was, Art Linson and Gary Stromberg, the producers, went to go see Ned Tannen, who ran Universal, and they wanted to do a stage play called Car Wash. They wanted to build a car wash onstage and do a musical comedy called Car Wash. Then, if that became a success, they would make that into a movie. Ned Tannen said that was the worst idea he'd ever heard in his life, but he had read the script for Sparkle, and if they could get the writer, he might make a movie called Car Wash. That's how the whole thing started.
O: How did you end up writing movies with predominantly black casts?
JS: Well, because I didn't think of them that way. When I first started Sparkle… They always tell you to write things you know and love, and as a kid, I was always obsessed with rhythm and blues. We used to stay out all night in front of the Brooklyn Paramount to see these Alan Freed rock 'n' roll shows, so I just wrote about that era, and about those great teenage kids who would come along from the street and become record stars. Then, when I was asked if I wanted to do something called Car Wash… I had seen an African-American hooker on a Sunday morning, strung out on drugs, with a beer in a paper bag and a blonde wig, trying to make a phone call outside a car wash. Actually, Michael Schultz, who directed Car Wash, his wife played that part. I realized that a car wash was kind of a place where you could have a lot happen. But there's a lot of celebration of the downtrodden minority in Car Wash, and how often people who've suffered use humor to get along. It was probably something I felt from the '60s, and my own childhood, and growing up in New York on the streets. I think I've always been comfortable on the street. There's a lot of street in Phone Booth.