Joel Schumacher: Radiance and Shadow

When Matthew McConaughey lit up screens and delivered on the unreasonable hype that had preceded his starring role in 1996's A Time to Kill, he'd already appeared in a number of films. But he might as well have been making his film debut, because we were, in some respects, "seeing" him for the first time. He looked the way director Joel Schumacher knew he could look, radiant with the sexual presence Hollywood has always sought to capture on-screen. Cinematic sexual glamour is something Joel Schumacher has an uncanny knack for.

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He demonstrated that early on in the Brat Pack orgy St. Elmo's Fire, and he proceeded, in The Lost Boys, Dying Young, The Client, Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, to make some of the most beautiful actors in Hollywood look about as beautiful as they're ever going to.

Partly because Schumacher's extravagantly budgeted Batman & Robin was critically lambasted, the director is now turning to the kind of projects presaged by his 1993 film Falling Down, in which Michael Douglas vented his late-20th-century frustrations on the streets of a decidedly unglamorous Los Angeles. Schumacher's new film, 8mm, may be about sex, but it isn't the pretty variety, and glamour has no place in it. In a story scripted by Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, Nicolas Cage stars as a private investigator who dives into the pornography underworld looking for whoever made the snuff film found in a safe by the widow of a wealthy man. It's surprisingly ugly stuff, but then, Schumacher, for all his love of Old Hollywood magic, is no stranger to shadowy worlds. Long before he directed a film, before he worked as a costume designer, before he wrote Sparkle or D.C. Cab, before he hit success in the New York fashion world, before he dressed mannequins in the windows of Henri Bendel, he led a wild life on the streets of Manhattan. He found sex, alcohol and drugs very early, and it took a long time for him to escape the world he'd stumbled into.

Tall and thin, with his trademark long hair, dressed elegantly in khakis, a sweater and a leather jacket, the Schumacher before me today bears no hint of that earlier existence. As he takes a break from preparing the film he's making with Robert De Niro, Flawless, we sit down to talk about the grim realities of 8mm, and about the lovelier wonders of sexual charisma he has put on-screen.

MICHAEL FLEMING: Let's start by talking about why you've taken on the commercially dubious subject matter of snuff films.

JOEL SCHUMACHER: I was dying to get out of the blockbuster corridor. It was very good to me and I'm very grateful for it, but the pressure has grown every year. Movies used to make a hundred million dollars and become legends. Now that's chump change. I got a little burnt out on Batman & Robin. I chose to do 8mm because it was the most interesting, original script I read last summer.

Q: You're dealing with a seamy element here--have you glamorized it at all?

A: With 8mm, I felt it important not to glamorize the world of illegal porn and smut. Not to make it seem in any way alluring. The movie is about a relatively normal man, played by Nic Cage, who spirals down into a world of such human degradation that it changes him forever. Joaquin Phoenix's character, Max California, always says to him, "Are you sure you want to go further, because there are things that once you see them, you can't un-see them."

Q: Is 8mm, a film about sex, sexy at all?

A: Not at all. I'm sure there are people with aberrant taste who'll find some of the lurid things exciting, but it's perversion.

Q: Snuff films are a rather obscure phenomenon. Is the subject matter relevant?

A: During the course of making the film, someone sent my godson, who's nine, pornography on the Internet. I don't know how many parents or families have had to deal with this, but it's pretty shattering. The point is, it's out there, and that's what the movie is about too. There are billions of dollars spent every year on the sex business. It's not some dirty old men in raincoats.

Q: It seems a lot of young matinee idols want to do dark material--DiCaprio flirting with American Psycho, Brad Pitt with Se7en, now Cage in 8mm. What's the attraction?

A: A lot of the roles written for young people are vapid and stupid. And many young actors are terrified of being pinup boys. They want to emulate the path of De Niro, Pacino, Marlon Brando. I admire them for that. Now, I think some of them have their heads up their asses and take themselves too seriously. Just because you don't bathe and you smash up hotel rooms, and you mumble a lot or smoke in every scene, it doesn't mean you're a great actor. In Brad Pitt's case, he'd been around awhile, and got all that attention when he took his clothes off in Thelma & Louise. I think he made a decision that he was not going to be that guy, and whether it disappoints his fans or not, he's kept his clothes on for the most part. I think he has stretched himself to become a spectacular actor.

Q: How difficult was it to get 8mm an R rating?

A: It wasn't. The ratings board was very, very sane and helpful. I think it also helped because this is my 14th feature.

Q: You don't seem to resent the ratings board the way many directors do.

A: I don't love it, but I'm a realist. I've lived a crazy life as a crazy person. At a very early age, I was unsupervised and had all the dysfunction that comes with that. I left home too young and went right into the fast lane, over the bridge into Manhattan. I started drinking when I was nine, started drugs in my early teens, started having sex when I was 11. I got off hard drugs in 1970, after I'd crashed and burned in the fashion world, but I didn't really get sober until I was 52, which was seven years ago on December 3rd. I work in a crazy industry, a crazy city and a crazy world. I try hard not to add to the insanity. If you're going to work in the movie industry, you're going to have to deal with the people who write the checks. If you make movies that you want to play in theaters, you're going to have to deal with the ratings board.

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