Joel Schumacher’s 10 favourite movies of all time
A few years back, the world of cinema sadly lost Joel Schumacher, one of the most beloved filmmakers of his generation. The American director had initially started his career as a fashion designer but soon turned his attention to the realm of movies and gained notoriety after he directed St. Elmo’s Fire and the widely beloved The Lost Boys.
The New York-born icon was eventually chosen to replace Tim Burton to oversee the Batman franchise and took the reigns on Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, while his later works typically used a smaller budget. To get some clues as to Schumacher’s inspirations, we can consult a list of his favourite films, as per Combustible Celluloid.
Schumacher clearly admired some of the greatest directors of all time, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola and Andrei Tarkovsky. The Kubrick work he most respected the most is his 1971 picture A Clockwork Orange, the film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ novel of the same name, which explores the moral decline of youth in a near-future dystopian setting – considered to be amongst the filmmaking master’s best works.
As for Coppola, Schumacher was a big fan of one of his less talked about movies – at least in comparison to Apocalypse Now and The Godfather – The Conversation from 1974. The film stars Gene Hackman, John Cazale and Allen Garfield and tells of a surveillance specialist at the moral conundrum he faces when he discovers a potential murder through his recordings.
In terms of the great Russian direction Tarkovsky, it looks like Schumacher’s favourite work of his was the 1979 masterpiece Stalker. The science fiction classic tells of a mysterious figure known as the Stalker who helps an inspiration-seeking writer and a discovery-seeking scientist through a wasteland to find a room that is suspected will grant people their biggest desires.
Elsewhere, we find Schumacher’s love for the great Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci and his 1970 political drama The Conformist, which was based on Alberto Moravia’s 1951 novel of the same name. It tells of several characters’ wishes to live a life resembling normality during Italy’s troubled fascist government period.
A true classic close to Schumacher’s heart is 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia, directed by David Lean. Widely considered one of the most important films in the history of cinema, the historical drama tells of the titular T. E. Lawrence and his experiences in the Ottoman regions of Hejaz and Greater Syria during the First World War. Check out the complete list of Schumacher’s favourites below.
Joel Schumacher’s favourite movies:
- Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
- Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
- The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1990)
- The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1949)
- Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996)
- A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
- The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
- Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
- Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
- The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
