`How hot is Julia Roberts right now?” Director Joel Schumacher puts a finger to his lips, then touches his knee and makes a sizzling sound. ”She`s the hottest, most exciting female star in movies since Marilyn Monroe,” he adds, ”and certainly the biggest box-office draw. No question.”
No wonder the 52-year-old director looks so happy as he sits in the airy living room of his Bel Air home talking about his new film, ”Dying Young,”
which opened this weekend. For the film stars Roberts (who last year appeared in Schumacher`s surprise hit ”Flatliners”) in a role that seems tailor-made to capitalize on her current extraordinary popularity.
The actress plays Hilary O`Neil, a young woman who is hired to take care of Victor Geddes (Campbell Scott), a wealthy, reclusive young man suffering from leukemia. Hilary nurses Victor through chemotherapy and back to health and the couple gradually fall in love, only to find that the cancer is no longer in remission.
”Dying Young” is definitely a tear-jerker. ”But it`s not a tragedy,”
the director points out quickly. ”With adult leukemia, as Julia`s character says in the film, the survival rate is 50 percent, so it wasn`t a death-sentence movie and I liked that. There`s hope at the end.”
Schumacher admits that ”the original script was very different. He commits suicide and asks her to help him.” So why did he change it? ”Because I`d just been through the real life death of a close friend from AIDS, and I wanted it to be more positive, more hopeful.”
The director stresses that ”Dying Young” deals with ”a universal experience-everyone has to deal with illness and death at some point in their lives. What I liked most about it was that they`re so young. I`m very attracted, as you can tell from my movies, to young people dealing with complex adult problems, making mistakes and pulling themselves out of it. Why? Perhaps because I made so many mistakes when I was younger. Movies solve problems the way we`d like to in real life. People say the right things, do the right things, and they handle the situations, as opposed to the muddle of real life.
”The sad reality is that today`s kids are dealing with death a lot more than previous generations,” he says. ”They`re very sophisticated about life and death, and they`re very aware of everything from AIDS and the war to suicide and drugs. I don`t think we live in an era where we hide those realities from the children.”
The director says he`s confident ”audiences won`t be put off” by the subject matter. ”It`s really a film about two very different people meeting and falling in love, not a disease,” he says. ”She`s this street-smart, outgoing, relatively uneducated person, while he is a rather shy intellectual who`s also imprisoned by his illness and father`s money and position. Their falling in love is the essence of the film to me, not the cancer. The illness telescopes the relationship and heightens it.”
Love story or not, ”Dying Young” has had audiences reaching for handkerchiefs. Does Schumacher worry that he`ll be accused of manipulating his audience? ”There`s always that fear when you deal with illness,” he says.
”There will always be people who view any movie about illness as maudlin or in the disease-of-the-week category. But I don`t think `Dying Young` is in any way maudlin or sentimental. In fact, I think the first 30 minutes and all the chemotherapy scenes are very hard-hitting. I don`t think there`s any attempt to romanticize it or make it more palatable. I tried to make it very honest, and as realistic as possible.”
Suggest that ”Dying Young” will appeal principally to women and the director shrugs. ”I honestly don`t know,” he says. ”I think it`s a love story that`s certainly told from a woman`s point of view, but I also happen to think that men are the biggest romantics. I think that women have to be very tough and strong and realistic to get through life, while most men are more romantic and idealized and sentimental about life, so who knows?”
If Schumacher is uncertain about exactly what kind of audience the film will attract, he is very aware of the predictions around Hollywood that
”Dying Young” will almost certainly turn out to be his first blockbuster.
”It`s a lot of pressure,” he admits, noting, not too unhappily, that
”when Premiere (magazine) called me up and announced they were making it their No. 1 hit for the summer I honestly didn`t know what to say-I was too shocked.
”I`m used to making inexpensive, relatively unnoticed movies at a studio where they have other, far-bigger fish to fry-until mine start screening,” he explains. ”That was the case with all my films like `St. Elmo`s Fire,`
`Cousins,` `The Lost Boys` and `Flatliners,` and although they all made money, the studio`s attention was always on the bigger films. But suddenly with `Dying Young` and Julia, everything`s newsworthy. People were even calling me about rumors of a title change.”
”Well, the fact is I`ve never worked on any movie where there haven`t been a million meetings about a title change, so what`s new? Sure, there was talk about changing this title. But when I was offered `Robin Hood,` there was no mention of Robin Hood in the title-it was just `Prince of Thieves.` So what`s the big deal?”
As Schumacher knows, the big deal this time is his leading lady. ”It`s been incredibly exciting,” he agrees, ”because Julia`s become this huge movie star since working with me on `Flatliners,` and I`ve seen her blossom in front of me, so I feel very much like a proud father with a daughter.
”I guess I fell in love with her on `Flatliners,` not only because she was beautiful, charming, sexy and delicious, but because she was a much more complex talent than she realized. Part of her charm is that she`s
unpretentious, and she had no idea about her potential. I simply didn`t have enough scenes to give her in `Flatliners,` so I jumped at the chance to do this where she could explore all these other levels-humor, rage, loss, tragedy-and it was very exciting because I knew she was ready for it. Also it was never a script looking for a cast-Julia wanted to do it with me and that was very exciting for me.”
With Roberts already attached to the project, Schumacher quickly realized ”it was very important who we cast as Victor because it was vital they played well together.” His first and only choice was Campbell Scott
(”Longtime Companion” and ”The Sheltering Sky”). ”Of course there were a lot of other names suggested, but the studio agreed he was the best choice, which is remarkable when you know there are all these other actors with big marquee names wanting the part,” he adds.
”It was a difficult part because you had to totally believe the aristocratic, cloistered, almost virginal life he leads, and yet feel he`s a handsome, sexual man as well, which is a hard combination, and Campbell Scott pulls it off,” he said. ”Plus I knew Julia was going to explode in this part, so I knew I also had to pair her with a very strong actor or she`d have blown him off screen.”
Having directed Roberts in both ”Dying Young” and ”Flatliners,”
Schumacher probably knows the actress as well as anyone in Hollywood. Does he think she`s come too far, too fast? He shakes his head firmly. ”She`s a real survivor and very smart and very strong. Of course, she`ll have her price to pay for all of the fame and stardom, because it`s a very mixed blessing. But I must say having been in the business for as long as I have, it`s phenomenal to watch it happen in just one year.”
But Schumacher sees another side. ”It`s also scary, not just to see all this heaped on the shoulders of a 23-year-old, but because of the media and public`s need to create an icon,” he says. ”It`s exciting and visceral and stimulating, but also kind of like a feeding frenzy. It`s like a microcosm of the entire American Dream-celebrity trip, and very strange to watch it happen in front of you. I mean, the day of the wedding postponement (Roberts was supposed to wed actor Kiefer Sutherland) a dozen reporters showed up outside here.”
The director admits he was ”very surprised when Julia and Kiefer called it off. I think everyone was. How could they be just two days away and not expect everyone to be surprised?”
But if Schumacher knows anything else, he`s not talking. But he does say that it had ”nothing to do with the pressure of her career-absolutely not. We`ve talked since then, and I think she is handling everything
fantastically.”
