Actor Nicolas Cage and director Joel Schumacher of 'Trespass' pose during the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival at Guess Portrait Studio on September 14, 2011 in Toronto, Canada.

TORONTO - He quotes Joan Didion, talks easily about the meaning of life and believes he may have spawned the very first contemporary Tea Partyer. Indeed, a lunch with Joel Schumacher can lead to one surprise after another.

The veteran director of such films as Falling Down, Batman & Robin and The Client likes to push buttons. He wants people to question the status quo, because as a former alcoholic who's more than 20 years sober, he says he's not willing to turn a blind eye to the social maladies that plague us.

He's issued proof in his latest movie, Trespass, a psychological thriller starring Nicole Kidman and Nicolas Cage that premiered here at the Toronto International Film Festival before a theatrical engagement later this fall.

On the surface, Trespass looks like a straightforward movie about a nice, affluent couple who find their world torn apart in the wake of a terrifying home invasion. But beneath Schumacher's slick Hollywood veneer, lies a message of increasing urgency.

"These are people who have overreached the American Dream," he says. "Instead of working to achieve a little bit more, they want it all. I can't speak for Canada, but in the United States there are too many rich and too many poor and the middle is shrinking," says the youthful 72-year-old over a spinach and chicken salad.

"That's when things get dangerous, because the more have-nots you have, the more they want (what) the haves have," he says. "And some of the haves don't have as much as they think they have."

Schumacher says we're all chasing after meaning, and for some, that just means an endless quest for status - themes he addresses in Trespass as Kidman and Cage find themselves under siege in their own home.

"It's a primal fear isn't it . . . the home invasion," he says. "And I think that along with that fear is the fear of the unknown, and that is: We don't know what we're gonna do. We don't know who we're gonna be. If the ship goes down, are we the one who's gonna help people get off, or are we the person who's gonna push people out of the way?"

Schumacher pauses for effect.

"We hope we're the good person. But you never really know for sure until you are faced with that situation."

Schumacher says he enjoyed watching two confident and highly accomplished actors such as Cage and Kidman approach the subject matter with all the dimensions he was looking for, because like so many of Schumacher's films, Trespass also operates as a modern fable that questions our moral compass in an increasingly unrecognizable landscape.

"Nic's character is archetypical, saying I must do better to show my wife and child that I am better, that I can seem perfect at all times."

These are ancient macho codes that date back to the cavemen days when one partner had to go out and slay the mammoth, he says. Men are still caged by gender and alpha expectation.

"I have been in AA for 20 years, and one of the meetings I like to go to - I like the mixed ones the best - but sometimes I like to go to the men's meetings. It's so hard for them to get out just a little feeling, just a little fear, to tell their friends or their family, or their peers about their pain. . . . So they carry this weight," he says.

"You really see how many people live unexamined lives.

Schumacher's entire oeuvre has been dedicated to poking holes in the red, white and blue fabric of the American ideal. But I often wonder if people even understand what he's trying to do because he works within the strict and somewhat seductive cloak of genre.

"They don't," he says, matter-of-factly. "Sometimes, I don't even think they have seen the movie."

Schumacher says Falling Down was one movie that people either understood, or didn't. The 1993 film featured Michael Douglas as a man who has simply had enough and decides to tear through the urban landscape carrying a loaded gun.

"I think Michael Douglas was the original Tea Party-er," says Schumacher with a truly mischievous grin. He was, after all, a self-admitted wild child who got into endless trouble.

"He's the man who wonders who are all these (foreigners) in my country? And where is my gun?"

Schumacher says a lot of people identified with him, and even saw him as heroic for becoming assertive in a society that demands sheep, but his intent was much darker.

"I guess you could call him a hero, but he's waving his gun at his wife and child by the end of the movie. I mean, is that heroic?" he asks, with a shrug.

"I think when a person leaves his car, he's abandoned his identity. So if you pull out a gun at McDonald's, are you going to use it? Where does it go from there? It's like what Joan Didion wrote about swimming out so far that you can't return, and you are out there where there is nothing."

Schumacher seems to have moved through the flames of his personal Hell, and he still feels incredibly lucky. "It will be 40 years (in the business) this Christmas and I still feel that I have the greatest job in the world. I always wanted to be a director and the odds of that happening . . . when I started as a costume designer . . . So grateful," he says.

"My problems arrive when I forget how lucky I am," he says. "Not just about being in the business, but about having anonymity. I can wake up and go to Starbucks with messy hair and no one will take a picture. You can't wake up and NOT be Tom Cruise."

Schumacher says he's in awe of the movie stars who don't lose their humanity to the machine, and he's also had great luck with unknowns, such as casting Colin Farrell in Phone Booth before anyone really knew who he was.

Coincidentally, just as we hit this note, he gets a call on his cellphone which he says he's gotta take. It's his lawyer, and there's some chatter about getting "Halle . . ."

Can I ask what that was about?

"I'm trying to make a movie with Halle Berry about a 911 operator who gets involved with something that's happening . . . we'll see how it works out," he says.

"I love movies, and I like the ones that are just a little more challenging. I always have. I grew up behind a movie theatre, and when my friends were watching the Three Stooges, I was watching A Streetcar Named Desire and Hamlet," says the man who fell in love watching movies with great expectations.

These days, he says he expects little.

"You'll notice I have no entourage. I love the work, and the people I choose to work with share that work ethic. It's about showing up ready and prepared and open," he says.

"My father died when I was four and I grew up watching my mother work herself to death, six days and three nights a week. Movies were my escape . . . as they are the escape for so many. But that doesn't mean they can't have meaning."

Trespass is slated to open at the end of September in select markets across North America.