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When it comes to on-the-set notoriety, Kilmer is in a league of his own. He has been accused of sabotaging productions by making up his own dialogue and deliberately burning a cameraman's face with a lighted cigarette while shooting Moreau (Kilmer says it was an accident). Some directors praise the actor's craft and attitude. "Val gives you nuance piled on nuance," says Heat director Michael Mann. "I had a spectacular time working with him." But others hear the word Kilmer and reach for their revolver. "He isn't just a high-strung, difficult actor," says Joel Schumacher, who hired Kilmer for Batman Forever and apparently rued the day from Day 1. "He's a deeply troubled man in need of psychiatric help."
Schumacher says Kilmer "can be one of the most charming, seductive people." But he claims that on the set, the actor often exhibited "tear-the-wings-off-a-fly behavior." One day, after shouting at an assistant director, Kilmer stormed into his trailer. Schumacher followed him inside and said he wouldn't tolerate such antics. "He wasn't used to being spoken to that way," Schumacher says, "so he shoved me against the trailer wall. I shoved him back and he ordered me out of his trailer. I said, 'You're a guest in this trailer. We're paying for it.'" Schumacher claims Kilmer didn't speak to him for two weeks. "It was bliss," says the director. "I didn't have to listen to the outpourings of a damaged megalomaniac."
Kilmer says the initial problem was Schumacher's refusal to let the actor watch his own dailies--the raw footage of his work. "I said, 'I don't know how to improve my performance if I can't see what I'm doing.' But for Joel, my work wasn't about acting. It was a modeling experience; he wanted to ritually sell an image. Once I realized that this movie was going to be a two-hour ad for the toys, that nothing I did mattered, I wasn't a pain in the ass." He says it was his choice to drop out of the series and that Schumacher offered him the lead role in his next film, A Time to Kill, which made a star of Matthew McConaughey. "Joel thought my turning it down was a reflection on him, which it wasn't. No hard feelings--I turn down a couple of movies a week."
Kilmer could be the sweetest guy in the world and his looks would still exude threat. His face is a billboard for California lust, with cool blue-green eyes, sucked-in cheeks and those Halloween wax lips, ever puckered and pouty. The rock-star-satyr features surely helped land him the Morrison role, as well as those cartoon ghosts of the King of Rock 'n' Roll in Top Secret! and True Romance. Yet the look stops just short of drop-dead handsome. Its steely seriousness--all that grit and drive with no hint of easy humor--suggests less Elvis Presley than Elvis Stojko. If Kilmer is to execute the actor's equivalent of a quadruple toe loop, it won't be from movie-star grace but from a triumph of the will.