Joel Schumacher, eclectic film director who ranged from blockbusters to low-budget thrillers – obituary

Joel Schumacher, the film director, who has died of cancer aged 80, saw himself as walking “a tightrope between art and commerce”, and was described by one critic as the kind of director who could “take on nearly anything and make it watchable”.

Schumacher rose to fame with Hollywood blockbusters such as the coming-of-age Brat Pack classic St Elmo’s Fire (1985) and the stylised teen-vampire romp The Lost Boys (1987). He capitalised on his success with the hugely lucrative and well-made John Grisham adaptations The Client (1994) and A Time to Kill (1996), as well as the $300 million-grossing Batman Forever (1995).

But he also challenged the studio suits with the edgy, uncomfortable Falling Down (1993), featuring Michael Douglas’s middle-class white Everyman running amok on a hot day in downtown LA; 8mm (1999), with Nicolas Cage on the trail of a snuff movie gang, and the ultra low-budget Phone Booth (2002) with Colin Farrell as an adulterous low-rent New York publicist trapped in a public telephone booth by what might or might not be a rooftop sniper. Shot in what Schumacher called a “12-day amphetamine blur for $1.98”, the film made it to the No 1 box office position on its US release.

Schumacher was credited with discovering young stars of the likes of Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, Matthew McConaughey and Colin Farrell, yet to many critics he was the devil incarnate, the whip-thin king of the slick multiplex jackpot-winner. Village Voice once described him as a “well-oiled toxic-waste machine”, and during an advance screening of the admittedly overblown Batman and Robin (1997, starring George Clooney and Chris O’Donnell as the camp and rather sheepish-looking caped crusaders), an anonymous pundit stood up and yelled “Death to Joel Schumacher!”.

Yet sniffy reviews seldom affected his success at the box office. Even Batman and Robin grossed more than $100m in the US alone.

By Schumacher’s account he started out as “drugged-out New York street kid”; like his art, his life was a roller-coaster that might have inspired one of his grittier films.

An only child, Joel Schumacher was born on August 29 1939 in a poor area of New York to Francis Schumacher, a Baptist from Tennessee, and Marian (née Kantor), a Swedish Jew. His father died suddenly when he was four, and to make ends meet his mother went out to work six days and three nights a week.

By the time he was seven young Joel was out on the streets: “I started drinking when I was nine, smoking when I was 10 and experimenting with sex when I saw 11.” By his early teens he was doing drugs. In later life he reckoned that he should have been dead by the age of 18.

He and his mother lived in a tenement across the street from a movie theatre, where films offered an escape: “I was the Cinema Paradiso kid,” he said.

Unable to break into movies directly, Schumacher put himself through the Parsons School of Design at New School University, and the Fashion Institute of Technology, paying his way by designing clothing and packaging for Revlon, and by working as a window dresser at the high-end department store Henri Bendel.

There, on one occasion, he got a piece of glass the same size as one of the windows, backed it up to the real window and then shattered it to make it look like a break-in – with the mannequins cowering in a corner.

His mother’s death in 1965 marked the beginning of a destructive period in Schumacher’s life: “I was shooting speed from 1965 to 1970, six times a day. I was 130lb. I lost five teeth and I was $50,000 in debt.”

Managing to kick his drug habit, “more or less”, he left New York for Hollywood, where he lived on $2 a day for a year and a half then found employment as an art director for television commercials and as a costume designer on Woody Allen’s movies Sleeper (1973) and Interiors (1978). He was also a production designer on the 1974 disaster film Killer Bees.

After deciding to write a screenplay as way to get into directing, his second effort, the low-budget Car Wash, became the surprise hit of 1976. Directing was always his real aim, and in 1974 he got his chance to make a television film, The Virginia Hill Story, starring Harvey Keitel and Dyan Cannon. Seven years later, in 1981, he got his big-screen debut with Lily Tomlin in The Incredible Shrinking Woman, which won positive reviews.

Then came the hits. St Elmo’s Fire (1985) was a coming-of-age film, introducing cinemagoers to Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Ally Sheedy and Demi Moore. The Lost Boys (1987), a sort of precursor to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, featured Jason Patric and Corey Haim in a satirical picture about the trials and tribulations of youth.

Flatliners (1990) featured Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Jason Patric and Kevin Bacon as fledgling medical students investigating what lies beyond by giving themselves near-death experiences.

In the 1990s Schumacher took over the Batman franchise from Tim Burton, and made it faster and sexier in Batman Forever (1995), with Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Nicole Kidman, Drew Barrymore – and Jim Carrey in spectacular form as the Riddler.

The previous year he had made The Client (1994) a John Grisham vehicle starring Susan Sarandon as the lawyer acting for a little boy squeezed between the Mob and the FBI. His second Grisham movie, A Time to Kill (1996) starred Samuel L Jackson as a black man on trial for killing two white men who raped and killed his daughter.

Although Schumacher had stopped injecting, until the mid 1990s he was still doing drugs and alcohol: “Before filming, I would stop everything. That’s how I lived for many years. Work, party. Work, party.” But then the drugs stopped working and he got depression and became suicidal. At the age of 52 he sought medical help and managed to sober up.

But the big epiphany in Schumacher’s career was coming a critical cropper with Batman and Robin (1997), a film mauled for its corny gadgets and the supposed homoerotic elements that the openly homosexual director had introduced to the relationship between the title characters.

Turning his back on a third Grisham and a third Batman because he felt he was getting “blockbustered out”, Schumacher set about repositioning himself in the lower-budget end of the movie industry in what he jokingly described as “a public search for redemption”.

The first fruit of this epiphany was the quirky buddy movie Flawless (1999), starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Robert De Niro as a drag queen and a homophobic stroke-victim respectively, both tenants in a run-down New York residential hotel.

In his follow-up, the impressive Tigerland (2000), Schumacher cast a completely unknown young Irish actor by the name of Colin Farrell in a boot-camp drama set during the Vietnam War.

Not all his later films were hits with the critics. Bad Company (2002), a post-Cold War thriller starring Anthony Hopkins, was “as bad as the name suggests” according to one reviewer; Veronica Guerin (2003), the true story of a murdered Irish political journalist, played by Cate Blanchett, “didn’t quite work”, while his 2004 adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera was critically derided, though it was nominated for three Oscars.

In his last directorial credit, in 2013, he made two episodes of the Netflix series House of Cards.

Joel Schumacher, born August 29 1939, died June 22 2020