Joel Schumacher

Joel Schumacher didn’t direct a movie until he was 42 years old, it’s never too late if happiness is good. The filmmaker was born in New York in 1939, to a Baptist father who died when he was only four years old, and a Jewish mother of Swedish origin, who did not survive her husband for many more years. Being orphaned would affect him, and he claimed to have gone through all the vices one can imagine, “except murder”; he looked like a survivor. An only child and sensitive to beauty from an early age, he studied design and fashion at the New Parsons School of Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. His first jobs were as a window dresser for fashion stores. And since he loved movies, he saw that this formation was the ideal channel to start working on them, which he did under the orders of Woody Allen .as costume designer in El dormilón (1973) and Interiores (1978). He claimed that the director was decisive in his decision to try to make his own films.

Because Schumacher was not satisfied with dressing the films. He wanted to contribute to the stories that were told there. And, why not, direct them. The process that led him to become the successful director of a large studio like Warner’s was slow but clearly ascending. He wrote the scripts for several films, including Sparkle and A World Apart , from 1976, and The Wizard (1978), the failed musical version of Sidney Lumet ‘s “The Wizard of Oz” with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson . As for directing, after working hard with two tele-movies, he debuted on the big screen with a B-series tape, The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), which he adapted toRichard Matheson , and featured Lily Tomlin .

The turning point of Schumacher’s career as a filmmaker occurred in 1985 with St. Elmo, Meeting Point , a film about students who are about to enter adulthood, and which put actors like Rob Lowe , Demi Moore in the limelight. , Emilio Estevez and Andie MacDowell . Warner bet on him right away and for the studio he made a young vampire film, Hidden Youth (1987) again with performers who strove to give the bell, such as Jason Patric or Kiefer Sutherland . And so popular titles continued with young actors such as a “beautiful woman”, Julia Roberts , one of the interpreters ofLínea mortal (1990), and that he later made Choosing a Love (1991), both films addressing, in different ways, the theme of mortality, we do not have a permanent home here below.

Perhaps the best film by the New York director is One Day of Fury (1993), because he knew how to capture the frustrations and derangement of an urbanite in an increasingly dehumanized society, in which we are permanently angry all day and with our nerves on edge. skin. Impeccably paced, he also got wonderful performances from Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall . Also, at the time when best-selling courtroom thriller writer John Grisham was riding high, he delivered two of the best adaptations of his works, The Client (1994) and A Time to Kill (1996) . .

At that time, Schumacher was the pretty boy from Warner, who did not hesitate to hand him the baton for the Batman saga, which Tim Burton had held until then . And there came a difficult moment in his career. With Batman Forever (1995) he was still given the benefit of the doubt to his kitschy look, but with Batman & Robin (1997) he was mercilessly pummeled. George Clooney, who played Batman, considered it the worst film of his career, and suddenly Schumacher fell from the cherry, he saw how easily the laurels of recognition could vanish; he even went so far as to apologize for the movie. In any case, he did not back off and he would manage to straighten the course. He was actually someone highly esteemed in the procession and would continue rolling without difficulties. Openly gay, he would deal with the subject in the imperfect Nobody is Perfect (1999), with Robert De Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman , while the smarties on duty would ensure that he had suggested something more than friendship between Batman and Robin in the second Batman film.

He began the 21st century by discovering a young actor, Colin Farrell , with whom he made his film about the Vietnam War, Tigerland (2000), and the harrowing thriller indebted – or so it would be said – to The Last Call Booth (2002). He would still have time to shoot notable titles such as Veronica Guerin (2003), with a splendid Cate Blanchett as an Irish journalist investigating the world of drugs, and the film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber ‘s popular musical The Phantom of the Opera (2004). From then on his star declined, with films of little interest, but his friends would not forget him, and David Fincher He would ask him to shoot in 2013 a couple of chapters of the popular television series House of Cards , his last work behind the camera.