Joel Schumacher has fucking lived, man

You know you’re in for a real treat when, in the first paragraph of an interview, the subject drops a galaxy-brain-inducing life lesson like, “When you’re a very active person and you make movies, shit will happen to you. What I say to film schools is making movies is not all blow jobs and sunglasses.” From Joel Schumacher’s lips to your computer screen. The veteran filmmaker sat down for a quite lengthy interview with Vulture, in which he takes the interviewing journalist on what can only be described as a straight-up odyssey through his life and career—and Schumacher has fucking lived, man. In a wide-wide-wide-ranging interview, Schumacher touches on everything from collaborating with Halston to losing five years in a drug-induced stupor, discovering young actors who would later succumb to tragedy, Michael Jackson, Bryan Singer, Val Kilmer and Tommy Lee Jones, the AIDS crisis, his sex life, and bad reviews.
Throughout the interview, the filmmaker proves incredibly nimble at dancing around touchy subjects like his old pal Woody Allen (with whom he remains friends) and the accusations against Michael Jackson in the Leaving Neverland doc. Schumacher is also wildly skilled at casually dropping opinions and controversial items alike—were this any other interview subject, each of these answers could command sensational coverage independent of the rest. Take this exchange, regarding Schumacher’s collaborations with Tommy Lee Jones and Val Kilmer:
Another one of your talents has always been your respect for actors. You very infrequently said terrible things about them in the press.
No, I said Tommy Lee Jones was an asshole in People magazine.
But you hired him twice, in The Client and then Batman Forever.