Blood-Sucking Vampires? No Way!
From Ottawacitizen.com
According to Ottawacitizen.com , director Joel Schumacher is off to Romania to make a horror movie. Everybody?s assuming that because he is going to Romania -- fabled venue of Count Dracula, Vlad the Impaler and other blood-sucking monsters from fact and legend -- that he's making a vampire movie. Not so.
"There is blood in it, but it's not really a vampire movie," the shaggy-haired filmmaker says. But it is about monsters -- the monsters of the Third Reich. "It's about Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels' association with the occult.... This is what they based the Master Race on.
"The one thing about the Nazis is that they so loved themselves that they documented everything, and there are these great documentaries on Hitler's obsession with the occult. So it's a 'horror' movie based on that by a very intelligent young writer."
The first part of the film is set in 1936 at the height of the Nazi regime and the second half is set in the present -- with the ghosts of the past rising up to confront today's world. "I love horror movies and I've never been offered one that was original, and this one I thought really was," Schumacher says. So Town Creek promises to be controversial, like so many of Schumacher's films -- including The Number 23, which has just opened in theatres and stars Jim Carrey as an ordinary guy in danger of destroying himself through numerological obsession.
At 67, this affable and disarmingly candid filmmaker is resigned to the fact that he's viewed as something of a subversive within the industry and a guy who enjoys making waves. He doesn't consider himself controversial -- but, he admits, "sometimes my movies have caused a lot of controversy." That's been going on for more than a quarter of a century. Schumacher began his career as a costume designer for major directors like Woody Allen and Herbert Ross. It was Allen who encouraged him to move into set design and art direction and to try writing.
It was an early screenplay, Car Wash, that established Schumacher as something of a maverick."I remember one of the biggest people in Hollywood saying, 'What's this little movie you've written?' When I tried to explain, he said, 'Wait a minute -- you haven't written a movie about some black people washing cars, have you? People don't go to that sort of thing. They go to see Lawrence Of Arabia or Gone With The Wind. They don't go and see black people washing cars.' "
Despite such skepticism, Car Wash managed to get made and was a success. But in the context of Hollywood it was considered radical.It wasn't long before he started directing and unloaded a ton of controversy with the 1987 St. Elmo's Fire, a movie that was adored by young people and furiously condemned by critics."When St. Elmo's Fire came out, it did not get one good review in the United States of America. People were outraged at the behaviour of the young people -- so outraged that Gene Siskel commented twice two weeks in a row over how furious he was. And Janet Maslin of the New York Times -- who had been very kind to me in the past -- was infuriated that the movie was a success."
