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.
Q: Let's talk about a different kind of cinematic sex. You've had an especially keen eye in casting charismatic actors and making them look devastating on-screen.
A: I know I get a lot of credit for making people look a certain way, but I don't give them a makeover--it's how I see them. I see a lot of sexuality in both males and females.
Q: You directed Demi Moore in St. Elmo's Fire, long before she became a sex symbol. Is it true she wanted to be nude and you stopped her?
A: She did want to be nude, and she had a reason for it. Her character was freezing herself to death in an apartment with huge windows open. If she's freezing herself to death, why would she be wearing something? Well, she's wearing something so the scene can be in the movie. But Demi wanted to be nude, and of course Rob Lowe was happy to drop his clothes at any moment. I had to talk both of them into not being naked.
Q: Demi Moore seemed sexier in St. Elmo's Fire than she did when she got $12.5 million for Striptease.
A: She was 21 years old, extremely approachable, with a little baby fat, very female with that sexy throaty voice, long thick dark hair almost down to her waist, her face maybe not as perfect as it is now, and she was bawdy and vulnerable. She was still a baby, and she didn't know if she was going to -have a career or where her life was going. Sometimes, I come home late and that film is playing on cable and I think she's adorable. What happens with, quote, "sex symbols," is that it becomes their business to be sexy, and sex as a business becomes very unsexy. I was watching Rear Window recently, and Grace Kelly is fully clothed, with gloves on. That beautiful hair, those radiant looks she's burning up the screen she's so sexy, just because of who she is. Marilyn Monroe kept her clothes on for the most part, and so did Marlene Dietrich, Gene Tierney, Veronica Lake. I don't think everybody taking their clothes off is sexy. We've come to accept that males have to be pumped up and women have to have zero body fat with enormous boobs and perfect teeth, right out of Baywatch. I think that Helen Mirren and Susan Sarandon are two of the sexiest women on film.
Q: Why are Helen Mirren and Susan Sarandon so sexy?
A: They are just born sexy. They're not trying. A lot of it has to do with good acting. If you're lucky genetically, work on your acting. Helen Mirren just has to show up to be sexy, period. Susan Sarandon was 47 or something like that in The Client. The reason she's one of the sexiest people in the world is she hasn't tried so hard. She doesn't try to look like a 30-year-old. She allows her aging to show. Her beautiful breasts are not like a 20-year-old's. She has womanly hips. I think she's much sexier than women her age who try to look like bimbos.
Q: You've done two movies with Julia Roberts, Flatliners and Dying Young. How would you define her sexual appeal?
A: Falling in love with an actor or actress you're going to use in a film is like that very early stage of falling in love, where there's a sweeping infatuation, a chemical reaction. I first saw Julia in Mystic Pizza and thought what was wonderful and extraordinary about her was she had this baby Sophia Loren quality. Both Sophia and Julia have this incredibly incongruous combination of features. If God had made one little mistake, it would have looked a bit grotesque, but God's plan worked here, and the result is something you never get tired of looking at. Julia had this zaftig, full-blown womanness about her in that movie which I hadn't seen in a long time. She didn't look like an anorexic boy with a pixie haircut--she was a girl in the body of a young woman. Sexy, mixed with that humor and charm, is irresistible. She first came to see me at my house when she was shooting Pretty Woman, and had this phenomenal red hair piled on her head, no makeup, an old T-shirt, cutoff jeans and barefoot. I thought, "How have I lived without this person in my life?" And that is how she comes off on-screen.
Q: You've done pretty well with the guys, too. Jason Patric never again looked like he did in The Lost Boys.
A: He was 18 and devastatingly sexy, and I captured that onscreen. It took six weeks for me to talk him into that film. He was a good sport about it. He was one of the first young men I'd met casting The Lost Boys, and I said, "Let's stop right here--there's nobody 18 with his talent and those looks." He's still extraordinarily handsome and there's so much to Jason that I wish he would work more, explore more, because he's so richly talented. But when he was 18, well... Andrew Lloyd Webber once told me that the greatest lyrics in the English language come from the Beatles: "She was just 17, you know what I mean."
Q: Matthew McConaughey is another actor who became an instant sex symbol when you directed him. How did you go about that in A Time to Kill? And why hasn't any director since been able to do it?
A: At heart, Matthew's a genuine Texas shitkicker. He has a white van named Cosmo that plays blaring rock music and has a disco ball and a cooler for his beers. He's a guy who can party till he pukes. I just played that up. He's got an incredible profile, great bone structure, and he worked out. I'm guilty of choosing certain garments that enhanced his looks. I sometimes wonder why actors come off differently with other directors, but I think they just see them in a different way. But let's face it, it would have been inappropriate for him to look that way in Contact or Amistad.
Q: A Time to Kill presented a transformed Sandra Bullock and Ashley Judd, too. That sweat thing worked well.
A: When I think of Sandra in A Time to Kill, I see her in that little white tank top and skin-tight black jeans with cowboy boots, that beautiful face all sweaty, and that overheated scene with Matthew where they're licking lemon and hot sauce off their hands and drinking shots of tequila. But when you mention the sweat content in A Time to Kill, I say you mean Ashley Judd. Ashley is just one of the sexiest people I've ever met in my life, beautiful and smart. That scene with her painting the floor with with her skirt pulled up is pretty good. I just put sweat on her, the rest was Ashley. There was no makeup, just this little tank top hanging off her, and that beautiful face. But when I talk about women like Sandra and Ashley, I think of their kindness. Kindness and beauty is so appealing.
Q: What's your vote for the sexiest scene you've ever directed?
A: Well, it's not a sex scene per se, but I love when Nicole Kidman turns on the Batlight and gets Batman to come to the roof. I like the scene in St. Elmo's Fire where Ally Sheedy and Andrew McCarthy are drunk and Andrew tells her he's always been in love with her and they just make love all over this apartment. I don't know if that was the sexiest scene, but it was the most emotionally pleasing. Also, the moment Andie MacDowell rejects Emilio Estevez and he just bends her over this car door and kisses her, and she gives in. The first time we showed that scene it got great cheers.
Q: You mentioned Nicole Kidman. She's beautiful, but maybe because of To Die For, she's known more for her icy side. Yet you got her seductive side in Batman Forever.
A: All I really did in Batman was give her Veronica Lake hair, which doesn't make someone sexy. That comes from inside. I'd first met Nicole when I cast Flatliners. She'd just done Dead Calm and if you want to see sexy, fast-forward in that movie to the scene with Nicole in a lime-green bikini, shooting the harpoon on the deck of that ship. She came to my house to meet me, and I knew in three minutes that I was meeting one of the most beautiful people in the world, and that she was totally unaware of it. That skin, those eyes, that hair and that body. I think Tom Cruise wanted Julia Roberts to be in Days of Thunder, and that's why I was considering Nicole for Flatliners. Then Julia came back into Flatliners and Nicole did Days of Thunder and she and Tom fell in love. So I guess I'm responsible for that marriage. [Laughs]
Q: How do you coax the sexuality out of an actor? Do you bolster their confidence, show them dailies, tell them they're sexy?
A: If there were a secret, I'd sell it and make money. I swear, it's just how I see people. My tombstone will read "Here lies Joel Schumacher, a fool for beauty." I tell people how beautiful I think they are, but I don't emphasize it because I don't think it's healthy. I've seen too many people suffer from self-image and eating disorders. If they believe too much that they're beautiful, they're more insecure because their security is based on their looks and they know that can evaporate.
Q: When you direct love scenes, do you think it's sexier to show as much as possible, or imply it?
A: Love scenes are very difficult. Most are shot in a very self-conscious way, and I'm always aware of that and try to steer away. It depends on the actors and how comfortable they are.
Q: What are some scenes from recent movies that stand out in your mind for being flat-out sexy?
A: A great example is Kim Basinger in L.A. Confidential. Her performance is just overwhelming sexuality, in a role that -would never have worked with a 25-year-old. Now, she was born beautiful but was never as sexy as she is in Confidential, where you see lines on her face. She plays a woman who's lived and been used and seen the other side of midnight, and all of it makes her seem more sexy.
Q: More, please.
A: Jennifer Lopez in Money Train. She's out in an alley outside a bar doing salsa all by herself... Sean Young's opening scene in Blade Runner, where she's fully dressed and they're doing an eye test on her... Cameron Diaz's entrance in The Mask... Gwyneth Paltrow in Flesh and Bone, 19 and a dark soul, hard as nails... Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, as soon as you hear her voice over the intercom, you know John Travolta's dead meat. That dance in the club, very sexy... Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe in The Last of the Mohicans, a lot of chemistry ... George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight, sexiness that's not at all forced... Interview With the Vampire, deeply sexual... Nic Cage and Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas, profoundly sexual in that desperate-need-to-connect kind of way--you see romantic sex a lot, violent sex, but that was the kind of sex where disconnected, dysfunctional and damaged people heal themselves... Brad Pitt and Geena Davis in Thelma & Louise....
Q: Are there actresses out there you've not worked with who you find sexy?
A: I'm dying to work with Cameron Diaz. As hilariously entertaining as the Farrelly brothers were with There's Something About Mary, Cameron was the glue that held the movie together. You buy the whole movie about every man being in love with her because you're in love with her, too. I think that some of the European actresses, Irene Jacob and Emmanuelle Beart, are beautiful. Lauryn Hill is a world-class beauty, and she's also so smart. Jennifer Lopez, Liv Tyler, Helen Mirren.
Q: You spent your childhood and teens watching every movie you could. Which films were instructive to you in how to make people indelible on-screen?
A: I grew up during that era of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift. They were still making Rita Hayworth movies. Imagine being a poor little kid in Queens, no TV, going into a huge movie palace and watching Marilyn Monroe in Niagara, walking out of a bungalow in that pink dress; Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun; John Garfield and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice ; Brando and Anna Magnani in The Fugitive Kind; Silvana Mangano in Bitter Rice, James Dean in East of Eden-- the narcissistic mortification that has to do with his mother being a whore, him outside the hall watching; Patricia Neal and Paul Newman in Hud; the original film Les Liaisons Dangereuses with Jeanne Moreau and Gerard Philipe. In fact, all Jeanne Moreau's early movies--like The Lovers, where she keeps her pearls on during sex. I borrowed that for Ally Sheedy in St. Elmo's Fire.
Q: Warner Bros. seems to have snuffed your movie Dreamgirls, which would have given you an opportunity to put some gorgeously sexual images on-screen.
A: It's a big disappointment. The first screenplay I wrote was Sparkle, and it was made at Warner Bros, for $750,000. It was always my naive dream to direct Sparkle because I grew up watching those shows in the Brooklyn Paramount. When David Geffen called me up two years ago and asked, "Would you direct Dreamgirls for me?" it seemed like a dream come true. I leapt into it and have spent the last two years preparing it. I still don't know what happened, but as far as I know right now, it's canceled.
Q: Do you take that personally? Warner Bros. indulged Clint Eastwood on Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Kevin Costner in The Postman. You've put out as many hits as either of them.
A: I think it would be extraordinarily unenlightened to take a business decision in a corporation personally. If they fired me as a director and hired somebody else, I might take that personally. But I don't think you should make movies because the director made a lot of money for you on other movies. I'd rather a studio pull the plug because they're not excited.
Q: What's going on with Batman? Rumors have Kurt Russell as the next Caped Crusader. Are you coming back, and if not, does that mean Howard Stern has a shot at playing the Scarecrow?
A: [Laughs] Part of the agony and ecstasy of inheriting the Batman franchise is the gossip/rumor Internet. There was a rumor on the Internet that with Superman being canceled, Warner Bros, was rushing me to do Batman Five with Kurt Russell as Batman. No one at Warner Bros, knew about it, I didn't know about it, I don't think Kurt knows about it.
Q: You were credited with reviving the Batman franchise with Batman Forever, then taken to the woodshed by critics for Batman & Robin. Would you have done anything differently?
A: I thought we were doing the right thing then. I think the mistake I made was in trying to please everybody. On Batman Forever, I tried to please myself. And my godson, who was five. On Batman & Robin, I tried to please the studio, the Warner stores, the manufacturers, the licensees, everybody who'd been very supportive to me on Batman Forever. But I don't have any regrets.
Q: Batman & Robin was supposed to be the film that elevated George Clooney from TV to movie star. Is he a movie star?
A: Only God knows. I don't know, the studio doesn't know and the press doesn't know. The public will tell you if someone's a movie star. But is he a handsome, charming actor with chops? You bet your ass. I think that because of George's looks and charm, and the basic stigma that people put on TV actors, George is overlooked for his acting chops. That will change.
Q: You just shot Flawless with Robert De Niro back in New York, where you once ran wild. Ever go back to that place in Central Park where you buried all your drug equipment?
A: I buried all my syringes and all my works in January of 1970 with a friend of mine who died of AIDS years ago. There was a very heavy snowfall and we dug under the snow and buried everything. I wish I knew exactly where it was because it would be nice to go back there. But I don't live in the past for regret or nostalgia very much. I've always been afraid I was going to miss something, so I'm pushing forward.
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Michael Fleming interviewed Drew Barrymore for the April 98 issue of Movieline.