Published on January 31, 2005

Joel Schumacher’s new film “The Phantom of the Opera” can get raves or pans – he doesn’t care.

Asked about the possibilities while in town last week to pick up a career achievement award at the Bangkok International Film Festival, the American director just shrugged.

“If you read the reviews and you believe your good ones, you have to believe your bad ones,” he said, then quoted Woody Allen: “When they hate you, you’ll remember what they say ‘til you die. And when they love you, they can never love you enough – so don’t read them.”

“The critics go from ‘You’re a genius’ to ‘You should be killed’,” Schumacher said. “If they love your movie, it’s very nice, but you don’t learn anything from it. You just know you got a great review. If people are against the film, you can’t change the film to please them.

“I’ve never learned anything from a bad review that I could take to my next work. They’re not constructive reviews. They’re just this person who hates the movie. I make movies for the audience.”

Visiting Thailand for the first time to tout his silver-screen version of Andrew Lloyd’s Webber’s “Phantom”, Schumacher had an arm in a cast, but was full of smiles.

“This? – I was a stupid old man. I fell backward on a machine at the gym. All my fault,” he laughed.

Clad in a white Abercrombie and Fitch shirt, blue jeans, black beach sandals and multiple bead necklaces and bracelets, he looked like he was ready to hit the town. In fact, he’d had little chance to look around, but had met plenty of folks, especially young people.

“To me the culture of the city is always the people, especially young people,” said Schumacher, 65.

“If you want to know the true culture of the city, it’s not in the museum, not the library. I think you have to go to the street and go to the young people – that’s where the culture really is.”

He’s lately found plenty of culture in musicals. Fans of his movies, like “Bad Company”, “Phone Booth” and a couple of the Batman films, might wonder why he’s done a musical. But Lloyd Webber actually approached him in 1988 after seeing his music-heavy film “The Lost Boys”.

Various obstacles arose, until the two revived the idea in late 2002.

“This movie is totally an escape, and that’s one of the reasons to do it,” Schumacher said, citing the challenge as well.

“Just because you climbed the Mount Everest last year doesn’t mean you’re going to even get close this year, because you’re different, the mountain is different, the conditions will be different. Also, it’s dangerous. You can die at any moment.”

Schumacher is known for introducing nameless actors to fame, but he claims it isn’t intuitive.

He cast Julia Roberts in “Flatliners” in 1990 at the same time she was shooting “Pretty Woman”, which rocketed her to stardom. You’d have been crazy not to hire her, he said.

“She came to my house in her cut-off jeans, barefoot, red hair, no makeup and an old baggy T-shirt,” he recalled.

“My God! It’s like falling in love casting: ‘How do I live without this person in my life? Who are you? You’re fabulous’.”

He also cast “ a poor Irish kid”, Colin Farrell, in “Tigerland” in 2000. “You never know – I didn’t know Colin was going to end up making more money than I do!”

It remains to be seen if “Phantom’s” little-known stars share the same good fortune. Gerard Butler, who has the title role, may have had lead billing in the second “Lara Croft” adventure, but he was utterly overshadowed by Angelina Jolie.

Newcomer Emmy Rossum, just 16, was picked to play Christine over many famous candidates. “She’s so beautiful, so intelligent, a wonderful actress – and she’s been singing in the opera since she was seven years old,” Schumacher enthused. “She was like I ordered her, like I made her up.”

Sometimes, of course, the casting choice falls to the people who write the cheques – the studio. He was going to put the still-little-known Russell Crowe in “8MM”, but the studio wanted the bigger commercial appeal of Nicholas Cage.

Did the Oscar-winning success of “Chicago” start a trend in turning stage musicals into movies? People look for new material everywhere, Schumacher said, and the theatre is a good source.

A lot of people can’t afford to go to the theatre, he noted, and many won’t have been to the cities where the likes of “Phantom” have been staged.

“I grew up very poor – it was just my mother and me and we had no money – and the way I saw ‘West Side Story’, ‘My Fair Lady’ and ‘The Sound of Music’ was because of the movies. “Films are forever. People can watch it with their kids. DVD is such an important part of film now. Trends and critics are only the media thing. It’s the audience that make people a star or make the movie successful.”

Kreangsak Suwanpantakul

The Nation

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