Special to The Globe & Mail

by Jennie Punter

Tuesday, April 1, 2003 - The Globe & Mail, Page R3

AUSTIN, TEX. -- In Phone Booth, director Joel Schumacher's latest film, The Sweet Smell of Success meets Dial M for Murder on a bustling afternoon in midtown Manhattan. The hot Irish actor Colin Farrell stars as Stu Shepard, a slick hack publicist trapped in a phone booth after answering a call from an unseen sniper who has his number, so to speak. If Stu hangs up, he's dead. Ditto if he doesn't come clean on some minor moral transgressions. The booth becomes a bizarre confessional as police erect barricades and the media gathers, everyone believing Stu is the nut with a gun.

The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and was set to open across North America last fall. But when a real-life sniper crisis in Maryland and Virginia began to unfold in October, Schumacher's hip psychological thriller suddenly seemed a little too close to the headlines. Phone Booth was put on hold (it finally opens on Friday).

At the annual 10-day South By Southwest film festival and conference, held last month in Austin, Tex., the war with Iraq is still in the future, but looms in the headlines. Schumacher has come to town for a special screening of Phone Booth, which now looks like escapist entertainment again -- albeit a slightly subversive variety.

In the morning, we sit down for an interview in a suite in the Four Seasons, and Schumacher explains why his urban, ultra-modern flick (split screens reveal simultaneous real-time action, for example) has a film-noir kick: "Larry Cohen's original screenplay had a very Broadway show-bizzy feel and the characters were older. Larry said that when he first got the idea, he discussed it with Alfred Hitchcock, so that's how long this notion of his has been around. I made it younger, in the references and the casting."

Schumacher speaks most affectionately about his films that feature an ensemble of mostly younger actors (the vampire bikers of The Lost Boys, medical students experimenting with life and death in Flatliners, boot-camp youths in Tigerland). His reputation as a director who "discovers" emerging talent -- he says it's just lucky timing -- is one subject touched upon that afternoon, when a standing-room-only crowd takes in his conversation with New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell at the Austin Convention Centre. For almost two hours, Schumacher has the audience enthralled with candid commentary on his life, films and the business of movie making.

Schumacher's charisma is the kind that makes you feel he is taking you into his confidence. He speaks quickly, articulately and from the heart, tossing his mane of grey hair back and laughing at your jokes or, at his own self-deprecating remarks, all the while peppering his conversation with jolts, tantalizing behind-the-scenes glimpses of the good, the bad and the ugly in Hollywood.

Born in New York in 1939, Schumacher left home at age 15 and was a street kid before landing at art school in the 1960s. "I started off in Manhattan as a window dresser and got into hard drugs," he says. "I got over that and started my life over, and when I said I wanted to become a film director my friends thought I was still on drugs!"

He began as a costume designer and art director on films like Woody Allen's 1973 comedy Sleeper. "It was a futuristic comedy on a $2-million budget. Those robots were so much fun -- the faces were hockey masks, they had metal bowls on their heads, old microphones for the mouthpieces and white gloves from the cheapo store," Schumacher recalls. "Woody encouraged my dreams, and he said if I wanted to become a director then I should start writing." In the mid-1970s, Schumacher wrote the screenplays for Car Wash, Sparkle and The Wiz, and did some TV directing before landing his first feature gig, directing Lily Tomlin in The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981). "The problem was Lily thought it was this metaphorical story about women's rights," he says with a laugh. "That's when I should have left."

After proving he had an eye for spotting new talent with late-1980s films like St. Elmo's Fire, The Lost Boys (the first of four films with Sutherland) and Flatliners, Schumacher vaulted into the big leagues, directing two Batman movies and adaptations of two John Grisham novels (The Client and A Time to Kill) in the mid-1990s for Warner Bros. "Look, the job of the Batman movie is to make gazillions of dollars," he asserts. With a gift for creating a eye-catching visual look for each of his projects, Schumacher has also made his fair share of style-over-substance movies. The high-flying world of Batman blockbusters saw the director hit a new low, as discussions about characters and art direction mostly revolved around the development of toys. "I was so naive. During Batman Forever, it was the world of private planes. When you're the guy on the lot making the most money for the studio, you start thinking like the studio, and that's dangerous. While I was making Batman and Robin, I realized I had stayed too long."

While on the European press tour for his 1999 film 8MM (starring Nicholas Cage), he met some of the Dogme directors (Lars von Triers, among others). "It was like I had been eating non-stop for years and now it was time to purge," he recalls of his epiphany. "Soon after that I wrote the script for Tigerland, about guys in boot camp, and we did it all with handheld cameras, and had an intimate, fast way of working." Tigerland marked Colin Farrell's first U.S. feature and a breakthrough performance. Schumacher was only too happy to put the actor on screen for the entire running time of Phone Booth.

"For [Farrell] to sustain that performance at his age is quite phenomenal," Schumacher says. "[His character] goes from being the cockiest asshole that ever lived to the most humble person in the world, although whether it will last we don't know.

"We used multiple cameras on Colin and the rest of the cast, so everyone was working their butts off because they often didn't know where the cameras were," he continues. "The whole point is to make you feel like Colin does, trapped in that phone booth. Sometimes we see a thriller, but the plot is about spies or monsters or serial killers or something that wouldn't normally happen to one of us. But this is about that primal fear everyone has that you'll pick up the phone and it'll be that voice, which knows more about you than a stranger should know."

A book could be written on the role of the telephone in movie history, but suffice it to say when a stalker calls, the person who answers is usually home, alone, on a dark and stormy night. "I think it's even more frightening in broad daylight in a city like Manhattan," Schumacher says. "In Phone Booth, you get that feeling because [the sniper] character does not think of himself as merely a sniper. He puts a great deal of time and effort into who he chooses. He follows them for weeks and when he decides to get them, it's more like a public execution. He doesn't feel his victims deserve any privacy, because he thinks he's God."

Just like some film directors, I suggest. Schumacher almost falls off his chair. "Oh my God, I am so glad you think that," he says, laughing, and adds with a wry smile, "I got to play God making Colin's character younger and making him a publicist. I had so much fun picking on PR people."