Born and raised in New York, Joel Schumacher began his movie career as a costume designer before turning his talents to screenwriting, enjoying an early hit with "Car Wash". He made his directing debut on the 1981 film "The Incredible Shrinking Woman", and subsequently enjoyed great success with "Falling Down", "A Time to Kill", "Batman Forever", and "Tigerland". Now he's phoning it in for sniper thriller "Phone Booth".
Is it harder for you to do an intense, low budget movie like this rather than a major studio production?
It is, but then again when you're doing a big franchise, like a Grisham bestseller or a Batman movie, you know that the expectations are going to be very high. So that's a different kind of pressure.
Colin Farrell's character in the film is an amoral showbiz publicist - is this your revenge on them in any way?
I don't have a publicist, so I definitely had a lot of fun with it. But the writer, Larry Cohen, has a sister who is a publicist and his first wife was a publicist, so I think we know whose revenge this is. I'm happy to say I have none in my family.
The tension on screen in "Phone Booth" must have been reflected off screen in trying to make a feature film in just under 12 days, wasn't it?
The great thing was that we got all our work done on the first day. There's a team thing that happens on a movie when morale can start going down for one reason or another, there's an energy-suck because everybody wonders why the hell they're running around. But we sort of became the little engine that could. We were backed up to Christmas and no one wanted to work then, so there was a feeling of "Let's get this done". I think that started to form its own energy.
You effectively discovered Colin Farrell when you cast him in "Tigerland". Has he changed at all?
Not a bit. In the beginning people would call me and say, "You've got to tell him to watch his language, not to say this and that." And I said, "I certainly will not, and why would he listen to me anyway?" I love the scandal about Colin Farrell. Here's the scandal: he's 26-years-old, he smokes, he drinks, he likes women, and he says f***! I mean, it's so refreshing to me that he's not this Stepford Wife being schooled in how to do interviews, and hiding things. Let him be.
