Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

April 4, 2003

When's the boom going to fall? When is there going to be a two- or three-week period when movies go all Scooby-Doo all over again and simply stink? I'm still haunted by several scenes in Steve James' Stevie, which can make my eyes sting just by remembering them. Same with a couple of other movies out there, including Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's magnificent minimalist gem Ten, which I'll write about next week, and Abbas Kiarostami's tender deadpan in The Man Who Wasn't There, more about which as it goes into wider release. Then there's Neil Jordan's The Good Thief, which I like as a cosmopolitan goof, despite a few sourpuss dismissals by the likes of Kenneth Turan in the L.A. Times. Surprise, surprise: I even enjoyed Phone Booth, with the bonus of talking to the always-genial Joel Schumacher when he's got a good movie under his belt instead of an insincere, uninspired work-for-hell like Bad Company

The Enthusiast

Stu wept.

In Phone Booth, a jittery riff on both Hitchcock's love of limited locations and the gaudy Gotham patter of Alexander MacKendrick's The Sweet Smell of Success, Colin Farrell plays Stu Shepard, a p.r. hustler in today's New York, who, despite having a lovely and forgiving wife (Radha Mitchell), is inching his way toward an affair with a young waitress (Katie Holmes). But someone's got his number: a "moral adjuster" (Kiefer Sutherland) who wreaks havoc on the life of those whose venality aggravate his sense of justice. The mechanics are efficient: In midtown Manhattan, Stu is told he must stay in one of the city's last phone booths: if he hangs up the phone? He dies. He must confess his sins, even the ones in his heart, and perhaps he will be let go. Or perhaps a troubled cop (Forest Whitaker) with his own "intimacy issues" will have to take him down.

Cheekily vulgar, Phone Booth starts as an unlikely B-movie high-concept from the hand of out-there screenwriter Larry Cohen (It's Alive, Q: The Winged Serpent) but it quickly reveals itself as an energetic thriller that's both tart and taut. Shot in just over ten days by the ingenious Matthew Libatique, cinematographer of Schumacher's Tigerland as well as Darren Aronofsky's Pi and Requiem for a Dream, with four cameras rolling at most times, the inventive cinematography insures that the script's one-man morality play doesn't turn stagy. Instead of cross-cutting, some scenes are superimposed over the brightly-colored Panavision frame, resembling an enormous example of picture-in-picture or maybe just a snazzy coming attractions trailer that grew up to be a movie.

Schumacher also plays to one of his virtues that can also be a vice: capturing the memorable features of gorgeous faces: Farrell, Mitchell, Whitaker and Holmes all look great. And Farrell soaks up the energy of the production: this is the most sympathetic he's ever seemed in a movie. A morality play in just over eighty minutes from the director of Batman and Robin? Yup.

When he retreats from big budgets, Schumacher is an interesting and excitable talent. He says "any and all questions are valid," but finds no parallel with last fall's sniper shootings in the D.C. area. "Kiefer's character would be insulted if he was called a sniper," the 62-year-old writer-director says. "He would consider himself a moralist. A sniper would be the last thing he would think he was because, think of the weeks of research he does and how he chooses his people. It's thought out and planned out and in his mind, totally justified."

A Playboy editor preceded me in the interview rotation and left behind black-and-white photocopies of 1970s "erotica" layouts designed by Louis Malle and Federico Fellini. "Oh yeah. I'm your guy. I love it. I love it. I'm yours. I'll do this any time," Schumacher had enthused.

As we settle in at a conference table with a forty-fourth floor view of Chicago's prairie, he teases me for being a little late. "So you want to say, 'I'm sorry?'" he asks with a twinkle. He shows me the layouts. "So Playboy wants me to do erotic fantasies for them."

PRIDE: He doesn't seem to have brought any of the current ones shot by rappers.

SCHUMACHER: Oh, they're only showing me the good ones then! I'll find out what the current ones are before I do this. Thank you for clueing me.

PRIDE: Did they use the word bee-atch in the seventies?

SCHUMACHER: They did. Fellini made it famous.

PRIDE: I was happy to discover Phone Booth was as much about public relations as anything else. "The sin of spin, avoidance and deception," as the line in the movie goes. Kiefer's the moral adjuster.

SCHUMACHER: "The moral adjuster" is perfect.

PRIDE: Despite this having been shot ages ago, the script speaks to a kind of moral absolutism in our time.

SCHUMACHER: I think also we are all spun to all the time. We live in it so much now that we don't know where it begins and where it ends.

PRIDE: The art of seduction should be more artful. Instead of the craft of seduction.

SCHUMACHER: Well, it's become a noble profession. (Laughs) In a lot of people's minds. That it's okay that you spin. Which means that you're going to lie, y'know, so if the Exxon Valdez spills a lot of oil, if you're the spin person, you're going to say, 'Well, it's really not like that at all. Actually, all that oil did good for everyone.' Like the Phillip Morris ads telling you how great they are for the community. My favorite is McDonald's with their cancer centers for kids when they probably... haven't given a diet that would discourage it.

PRIDE: Having Colin and his assistant going through Times Square at the beginning evokes 'Sweet Smell of Success" and Sidney Falco.

SCHUMACHER: Although Sidney Falco, one of my favorite characters of all time... and I admire you for knowing the movie because many of your generation don't, but Sidney Falco is so high-rent compared to Colin. Colin is such a low-rent little scumbag! I mean, Sidney Falco is Walter Winchell. He's a real powerhouse. Colin... I love it when he calls Page 6 and the woman says, "Is it you or is it your boss calling?" Which shows exactly what his place his. Yeah. He's just a shmiekel artist. He's lied to himself about himself, about everything else, for so long. He wouldn't even know what the truth was at the beginning of the movie. And it's all accepted. I mean, what's the difference between Colin's character and Ari Fleischer? Just Ari Fleischer's better-educated, better intellect, better pay and admired in many circles, I'm sure.

PRIDE: That confession is particularly well-earned. You feel it sweating out of Stu, out of Colin's every pore, my god, I am a shitheel.

SCHUMACHER: And also, such human sins.

PRIDE: They're not extravagant, reductionist cop show pathologies...

SCHUMACHER: He hasn't even slept with Katie Holmes yet. Yeah, I think that's what makes it interesting, about Kiefer choosing him, because he isn't a child molester, he isn't the CEO that, y'know, destroyed everyone at Enron. He's really this guy who is a habitual liar, and worse than that he's very insensitive to other people, so he treats people really badly.

PRIDE: He talked loud on a cell phone one time too many.

SCHUMACHER: Well, there are people who have admitted to me when they hear people too loud on the cell phones, they want to kill them. How about in the movies? When you're watching a movie and a cell phone goes off and these people have a conversation!

PRIDE: Everyone thinks they're a studio executive. The script has a snappy, nervy, vulgar pulse. Was Larry Cohen's script always that way?

SCHUMACHER: Well, it was always very vulgar because the character of Stu was very vulgar.

PRIDE: I'm thinking of the side characters, too, like the dancer or prostitute or whatever we can call her who's working the other side of the street who he keeps out of the phone booth and she says, "Goddammit, you made me hurt my dick hand."

SCHUMACHER: Well... there had to be some very specific urban humor in it or else I would have gotten bored myself. Those three girls and John, who plays Leon, they did a great job. That is one my favorite scenes in the movie. And I love the way Mattie shot that, too, because they camera is sort of going around them all the time. It's got its own rhythm and the music's great there and I love that section of that movie.

PRIDE: The actors are having a lot of fun.

SCHUMACHER: For those girls to commit that way... They had a lot to do with their own costumes and they worked it out and y'know, they had a lot of fun. We rehearsed it for two weeks. Everybody's on camera all the time, there are four cameras going.

PRIDE: This script's gone through so many permutations over the decades. I'm particularly curious what happened with Jim Carrey.

SCHUMACHER: Jim was ready to do it. Jim was having a suit fitted. Then he called me on morning and said, I have cold feet, I can't do it. That felt very real, because I kept saying to Jim, y'know, Jim, this is going to be a very tiny shooting schedule. He likes to do a lot of takes. I said, also you can't do any shtick in this, you've just gotta be a guy. And do this. I could tell it was making him uneasy. Y'know, actors never give up a role that's really their role. It doesn't happen. You have to listen. When someone turns down a role? They're right. It's just not their role.

PRIDE: So what about the schedule?

SCHUMACHER: It was ten days in the phone booth. Half a day in New York in Times Square. And half a day for some of the pieces like Katie in her restaurant. So you could really say it's eleven or twelve to be totally honest. I'm always thinking of the ten days we spent in the phone booth as the movie, because that's where the pressure was so dynamic.

PRIDE: I don't think Michael Bay's version would have been quite so run-and-gun.

SCHUMACHER: Fox showed me the other drafts. The Michael Bay version was much more of an action movie as you can imagine. The Steve Gaghan one was very dark. Beautifully written, because Steve is very talented. The sniper was a child molester and wanted the Stu character to bring his son there for him to molest. It was a different movie. So we went back to the first draft. The difference was it was very Damon Runyonesque. The Stu character was middle-aged and kind of this Broadway low-rent-

PRIDE: Broadway Danny Rose-

SCHUMACHER: Yeahhh, in the P.R. world, right? The girlfriend was a gum-chewing manicurist who was very loud and vulgar and cheap. It felt like another era. When Larry told me he had talked to Hitchcock about writing it, it felt to me that there were still vestiges of that.

PRIDE: This is cast the way you cast most of your films, you have young--

SCHUMACHER: A lot of my movies have very young protagonists in them, they're about young people. I always think, no matter how flawed young people are in movies, there's always a chance for them. I think if you're middle-aged and you still haven't learned anything, chances are you may not. I think there's more hope. Listen, I think if you're 45 years old and you get in that phone booth and you don't know that if your wife finds out you're cheating with some waitress and you're lying to the waitress and telling her you're going to make her a movie star and you're lying to everyone else and you think you can get away with this, fuck you, I have no sympathy at all.

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