The idea has been kicking around for 30 years; Alfred Hitchcock had once considered it. The script, about a shady publicist named Stu who is deliberately targeted by a sniper (if Stu hangs up, he dies), is dirty with fingerprints from the many directors and actors who have been attached, including Jim Carrey.

The director who finally made it, erstwhile blockbuster maven Joel Schumacher (A Time to Kill, Batman & Robin), had once walked away from it, opting instead to make Tigerland, a minuscule war movie starring an unknown Irish kid named Colin Farrell. Two years ago, Phone Booth circled back to Schumacher, who hired Farrell again. But his timing continued to be off.

First of all, New York had pretty much done away with its Superman-style phone booths, replacing them with low-maintenance kiosks. Schumacher begged the city to let him shoot in one of the last remaining booths, on West 53rd Street, but they waffled on shutting down the street for the 10 days that Schumacher needed. As negotiations dragged on until Christmas time, it got too cold, and the production moved to downtown Los Angeles.

By then Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom Schumacher wanted to play the sniper (they'd made Flawless together) was directing a play in New York and couldn't go to L.A. Schumacher asked Kiefer Sutherland (with whom he'd made The Lost Boys; Schumacher is a serial employer), but he was shooting 24. Ron Eldard (ER, Ghost Ship) tried the part, but without his hunky physical presence, his voice sounded too thin and unthreatening. Which turned out to be a bit of good timing: Sutherland, now free, signed back on.

Then there was the shoot itself. With a tiny budget -- $1.5-million (U.S.), his smallest ever -- and a host of extras, Schumacher shot in continuity, 10 days in a row. "We had to stop shooting by 4 p.m., because we lost the light," he says. "So we would get there at 6 a.m. and roll by 6:45. "We did 'French hours.' You don't break for lunch, you just keep passing food all day. Colin's confession at the end, that's the ninth day of shooting -- it's the first take and the only take. He was exhausted and you can see it."

Throughout Stu's ordeal in the booth (people mistake him for the sniper), crowds of cops and onlookers gather. The extras never read the script, "so every day was like a soap opera for them," Schumacher says. "When Colin shouts out to everybody, people were genuinely stunned. When he jumps out and falls to the ground, they were screaming.

"So much of it was spontaneous," Schumacher says, grinning. "We rehearsed for two weeks, but when you're shooting, things happen. Paula J. Parker, who plays a stripper, had a line: 'Hang up the phone.' She said, 'Hang up the phone, nigger.' Well, I was so glad I had the camera on Colin's face. He's an Irish kid, he's never heard this in his life. You can see the real shock in his eyes."

However, bad timing plagued Phone Booth's release, too: It was set to open last November, smack in the middle of the sniping spree around Washington; today it opens in the middle of a war.

But Schumacher was prescient about a few important points. Thanks to Minority Report and Daredevil, Farrell is a bigger star now. (He's been on the cover of Vanity Fair, and Steve Martin introduced him at the Oscars by saying, "He's young, talented and handsome. Next stop: rehab.")

"I also think the ideas in the film are more timely than ever," Schumacher says. "We all live with this urban paranoia, that our privacy is invaded. We know if we've ever taken a loan, gone on the Internet or ordered things from catalogues, that strangers have a lot of information on us. If that got in the wrong hands -- that's a scary thought. So the idea of somebody holding you hostage over the phone, you wonder why it hasn't been done before. Especially when you try to call the phone company." He laughs.

As well, Schumacher made Stu a publicist because "publicists are paid liars," he says. "Their job is to lie. Karen Hughes, James Carville, they're very good liars. We're being spun to all the time; I think we've been spun into this war. We don't have any real information -- how would we? I have this terrible feeling that all this jingoistic nationalism, and pulling on every emotional, paranoid, national feeling around 9/11/01, is because the White House doesn't want anybody to notice the economy sucks. The U.S. does well economically when we're at war. So to me, Stu stands for, as he says, 'a whole network of lies.' He even says: 'I should be President.' "

Phone Booth's time has finally come. Schumacher's next film, Veronica Guerin, is looking equally timely. Starring Cate Blanchett, it's the true story of an Irish journalist who was murdered by one of her subjects.

"It's quite staggering, the number of journalists who are killed on the job every year," Schumacher says. "Because they cover war and crime with only a pencil and tape recorder. They go to the same places the army goes, but without any guns. A lot of them are jailed, 19 in Beijing in 2002."

But while the press is embedded in Iraq, Veronica Guerin languishes in a timing lull of its own. Its scheduled spring release has been postponed.

Read complete John T.D. Keyes review of this movie.