The director who called Val Kilmer a “psychologically disturbed human being”
Any actor who is called difficult once can, more often than not, make excuses and explain it away as long as it remains an isolated incident. However, Val Kilmer had no such luck when the term was repeatedly used to describe his experience of working with him.
Thespians tend to be a prickly bunch at the best of times, and while the list of stars to have blown a gasket on set or been intentionally troublesome is longer than Hollywood Boulevard, it can be hugely detrimental to the career of anybody to have it follow them around over a number of years.
For Kilmer, he’s generated bad buzz and negative publicity for brawling with Tom Sizemore behind the scenes of sci-fi flop Red Planet. He made life miserable for John Frankenheimer after he’d stepped in to replace the original director of The Island of Dr. Moreau, who’d already suffered his fair share of professional maladies. His co-star Michael Douglas also called him out on his behaviour in front of the crew of the historical adventure The Ghost and the Darkness.
There are filmmakers and on-camera colleagues who’ve got nothing but nice things to say about Kilmer, but being a prick tends to live longer in the memory. Even the biggest year of his career wasn’t immune from a tense atmosphere, even if Michael Mann’s Heat did go off without a hitch on its way to classic status.
The actor’s other 1995 release saw him replace Michael Keaton as the ‘Dark Knight’ in Batman Forever, although at least he wasn’t alone in getting caught up in bad blood. Tommy Lee Jones couldn’t stand Jim Carrey’s antics, but for Kilmer, it was director Joel Schumacher he kept rubbing the wrong way, to the point the director called him both “childish and impossible” and a “psychologically disturbed human being”.
Responding to that assessment in an interview with Gavin Edwards, Kilmer skirted around any personal issues between them in favour of outlining how he’d done exactly the job he was hired for. “He’s very smart. He can’t say anything about work because then I can sue him for slander,” he said. “The idea is that I’m not responsible. About what? Doing homework? Representing the character? Making money?”
Kilmer explained that because he’d “made my employers over a billion dollars” and was “very proud that I’ve consistently made money,” he ticked all the boxes asked of him over the course of his career. He didn’t exactly address Schumacher’s accusations head-on, but that was more than likely intentional.
The filmmaker was neither the first nor the last person to work with Kilmer to paint him in a negative light. Since the possibility of being sued for slander is a two-way street, the smarter option was to simply point at the box office numbers as an easy response.
