Val Kilmer names the director he believed went “nutty”
Acquiring a reputation for being difficult can often prove to be a hindrance to an actor’s career, but despite being repeatedly labelled as a nightmare to work with, Val Kilmer continued racking up major roles at the peak of his career without any notable issues.
The tales of woe to have followed the star for decades have become the stuff of legend, whether it was his uncooperative antics during the already-tortured production of The Island of Dr. Moreau or his physical and verbal sparring with Tom Sizemore on sci-fi failure Red Planet.
Offering him the title role in Batman Forever was always going to pose its own unique set of problems, then, and Kilmer lived up to that billing by constantly butting heads with director Joel Schumacher. During an interview with SPLICEDWire, Kilmer addressed his decision not to return for the fourth entry in the franchise, which he’d predicted to be a disaster ahead of time: “At the time it was, ‘What? Has he gone nutty? Why isn’t he doing it?’ Once it was seen, I was redeemed.”
The leading man’s issues with Schumacher the first time around were well-known and highly publicised, with Kilmer reflecting on the filmmaker’s reaction to the news he wasn’t going to return as the Dark Knight due to the rushed production schedule: “They weren’t very gracious,” he said. “Joel got all nutty. He somehow thought what I was doing had to do with how he was perceived as a director. He started saying bad things about me, which is just stupid.”
Schumacher had already said plenty of bad things about Kilmer, in fairness, which all stemmed from their tumultuous time on set. Confirming to Entertainment Weekly that they “had a physical pushing match” during the shoot, the director eventually had enough: “He was being irrational and ballistic with the first AD, the cameraman, the costume people. He was badly behaved, he was rude and inappropriate,” he said.
Adding: “I was forced to tell him that this would not be tolerated for one more second. Then we had two weeks where he did not speak to me, but it was bliss.”
While Kilmer maintains that he chose not to return for what would ultimately end up as George Clooney’s ill-fated Batman & Robin, that wasn’t quite the way Schumacher saw it: “He sort of quit, we sort of fired him. It probably depends on who’s telling the story.” Unsurprisingly, then, both filmmaker and star have entirely different opinions on where the truth lies.
Schumacher had even “heard horror stories about Val” that saw him “warned not to hire him,” but he was swung by the fact he’d “heard that about many talented people, hired them anyway, and had no problems whatsoever”. Considering they ended up feuding on set, and he was branded “nutty” after the fact, their pairing might well have been doomed from the start.
