Thinking outside the box

On the first day of filming in Los Angeles on his new urban thriller “Phone Booth,” director Joel Schumacher got a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach. Why had he ever agreed to make a movie in which virtually all of the action centers around a public telephone booth?

Glancing at his assistant as they drove to the set that morning, Schumacher remarked: “Aside from putting a needle in my arm for several years in the ‘60s, this is the most insane thing I’ve ever done.”

Let Francis Ford Coppola spend 16 months filming “Apocalypse Now”; let Kevin Costner & Co. run up $100 million shooting all those seagoing skirmishes in “Waterworld”; send Orson Welles to Brazil and keep your fingers crossed. Schumacher will argue that a real test for a director is whether he can keep audiences in their seats when the star of the movie spends most of his time in a telephone booth.

Call it the un-David Lean approach to moviemaking. Instead of Lean’s sweeping vistas, Schumacher used a patch of sidewalk. Where Lean had Peter O’Toole riding camels across a broad expanse of desert, Schumacher had Colin Farrell gripping a receiver.

In “Phone Booth,” which opened Friday nationwide, Irish heartthrob Farrell plays a sleazy, self-absorbed jerk of a publicist named Stu Shepard, whose life is threatened when he answers a ringing telephone while walking down a New York City sidewalk. The stranger on the other end has him in the crosshairs of a gun and warns him that he’ll be shot if he hangs up.

How Schumacher managed to keep the action flowing and build the tension is a testament not only to the Larry Cohen script but to the inventiveness and resourcefulness of cinematographer Matthew Libatique and production designer Andrew Laws.

“When I made ‘Flatliners’ [in 1990], we had a scene where a group of medical students is trying death experiments in a lab,” Schumacher recalled. “An actor or actress had to lie down on a table with four other actors standing around looking down on them. So it’s very uncinematic. But [cinematographer] Jan de Bont did a brilliant job of shooting it. It almost had to be shot like an action film. It was the same with ‘Phone Booth.’ We were trying to build the energy constantly. We weren’t sure if the audience would sit still for it.”

Release delayed

Filmed in only 10 days in December 2000, “Phone Booth” initially had been slotted for release by 20th Century Fox the following autumn. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the studio decided to delay the release until November 2002 and, in preparation for its rollout, Fox took the print to the Toronto Film Festival, where “Phone Booth” drew mostly solid reviews.

But only weeks before the movie was set to debut, a real-life sniper drama unfolded near the nation’s capital when a gunman dubbed the “Beltway sniper” unleashed a reign of terror that resulted in 13 shootings -- 10 of them fatal. Two men were subsequently arrested in the case and face trial on capital murder charges.

“Then a very strange thing happened,” Schumacher recalled. “The media got onto ‘Phone Booth’ and showed clips all through that tragedy in a very complimentary way.” At the same time, the long delays in releasing the movie gave the public time to know Farrell in other films -- “Daredevil,” “The Recruit” and “Minority Report.”

The setting for “Phone Booth” might have been the Big Apple, but Schumacher and his crew only spent one day filming there.

“We got onto Times Square, and it was really freezing cold,” Schumacher recalled. “I didn’t want to play the movie in a really cold environment.”

The filmmakers decided to shoot most of the movie on 6th Street in downtown Los Angeles, relying on Libatique and Laws to create the illusion of New York. But these plans evaporated when merchants in the Jewelry Mart district complained that the shoot would disrupt the area during the all-important Christmas season. “The jewelers were afraid it was going to interfere with their business,” Schumacher recalled. “About 150 of them were going to lie down in the street. So in the middle of the night we moved from 6th Street to 5th Street.”

Meanwhile, because it was late in the year, darkness descended at 4 p.m., so the cast and crew were asked to shoot “French hours.”

“The whole crew had to vote on it,” Schumacher explained. “You work straight through and pass food around the whole day. You don’t break for lunch.” They shot 10 pages of script a day.

The dance of the cameras

To film the action, Libatique choreographed a “camera ballet,” using up to four 35-mm cameras at a time. One would be focused on Farrell; others might be on co-star Forest Whitaker and on actresses Katie Holmes and Radha Mitchell.

With so many cameras operating simultaneously, the actors were told to wear small earpieces so they could hear one another and know their cues. “Everyone was kind of on camera all the time,” the director said. “When Colin was in the phone booth, the rest of the cast can’t really hear him, so they don’t know when their cue is coming.”

Schumacher also had an assistant director don a police uniform and stroll back and forth among the actors in case they got too involved in ad-libs.

“He told them, ‘Your line is coming up next,’ ” Schumacher said. “That way everything is kept fresh and alive.”

To ratchet up the tension, Libatique employed varying camera angles, sometimes four different angles on Farrell alone.

“We wanted to build the impression you really didn’t know where the sniper was,” he said. “But we wanted the audience to see Colin from many different angles. We had cameras on everything.

“We would take one room in a hotel, then take a position in a fire escape. Maybe it was off a ladder. We would just get different locations..”

Schumacher said that with so many cameras going, the trick for the crew was staying out of the scene. “We were usually tucked in doorways with a little portable monitor so I can try and see what everybody is doing.”

Meanwhile, production designer Law’s challenge was to create midtown New York in L.A.

“We created a kind of collage of identifiable visual clues,” he said.

“You might not be able to say exactly where that thing is in the Times Square area, but they recognize it. We can play with those visual clues and create this symbol of a street. One of the things we worked hard on was the billboards. We went out very early on and got real advertising. We didn’t want to create fictitious advertising because when you are on that street and spinning around, it’s almost like a theater street.”

Law noted that it took him a long time just to find a telephone booth, but he finally did locate one in the L.A. area and two others in Alaska.

“It’s very similar to some of the old Bell Atlantic phone booths, but I needed it slightly more open to see the actor because you see him so long,” Law said. “There aren’t too many phone booths of a certain type. A lot of them are too small and difficult to get around in.”