'When you’re a very active person and you make movies, sh*t will happen to you. ' After five decades in Hollywood, director Joel Schumacher has plenty of stories — but don’t expect him to kiss and tell. andrewrgoldman reports
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. Do you know why some actors you’ve cast young went on to have really long careers, and others, like Jason Patric, whom you cast in The Lost Boys, kind of disappeared?
Another one of your talents has always been your respect for actors. You very infrequently said terrible things about them in the press.But you hired him twice, in The Client and then Batman Forever. Well, you know, that’s very George. First of all, Batman has survived since 1939 — we’re the same age. Nothing has ever stopped Batman.
I just wanted to get her an apartment, to get her out of that teeny apartment. She saw a lot of praise for me. She knew I got the scholarship to Parsons, and she knew I got the job at Bendel’s. I was getting photographed for Vogue and all over the place. And those were very big. She worked in a dress store, so she could show the other ladies, “This is my son.” When you have diabetes, it can turn to gangrene very rapidly and go straight to your heart. It happened overnight.
I found the Michael Jackson documentary, Leaving Neverland, very affecting. These guys didn’t initially consider themselves victims. But it took them years to process this. I wondered if there’s a possibility that there might be an overlap between what would seem to be consensual and enjoyable, and abuse?
I hesitate to even go into some of this, but some of the unsourced, gossipy stuff about abuse in Hollywood from message boards like Crazy Days and Nights has seeped into the mainstream. There was an interview in The Hollywood Reporter with Corey Feldman, who has been vocal about both he and Corey Haim being abused by various players. You directed both of them in The Lost Boys.
BuzzFeed recently did a big story, “How Hollywood Failed Brad Renfro.” Do you think that Hollywood does this to children?Yes. But if you knew Brad’s background in Knoxville …[His parents] dumped him at a very young age with his wonderful grandmother Joanne, who couldn’t control him. And, like me, he was the scourge of his neighborhood. I didn’t want a child actor for The Client.
A friend who was not promiscuous was the first person I knew that had it. I think he was diagnosed in ’83. And I was extremely promiscuous, so I thought, “If he has it, I must have it quadrupled.” I went to get tested. I was sure I had it, I was planning my death. In those days, the test had to be done by the Centers for Disease Control. So it was sent away, and it took three weeks or more until you got the answer.
This all started way before me. Long before I came along, someone wrote a whole thing about what the real message of fairy tales and children’s stories are. Snow White was all about having bad stepmothers. And Batman and Robin are two homosexual men living in a cave, living together. There’s always been this thing about Batman and Robin being gay.No. Nor do I ever think Batman and Robin are gay.
It is the greatest thing that can happen to you. Because it reminds you who you made the movie for. And if you want to make movies just for the critics, they will fuck you anyway. It’s like people who have a genius first novel. And then they do a second one, and then a lot of critics will be, Oh, did I give them too much power? This one isn’t as good, so now I will eviscerate you and make you scum. The biggest case of that was Steven Soderbergh.
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