Interview

Martyn Conterio, Scene 360: You directed Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” in theatre production. What attracted you to making it a feature film?

Julie Taymor: Well, it was precisely because I did it in the theatre and was overwhelmed at what a fantastic and powerful play it was. I thought it would be a tremendous one to adapt for cinema. It was a play that was not well-known, and its themes were extremely contemporary… the kind of violence that was going on in America and the rest of the world… the Columbine shootings, the tribal-religious wars in Bosnia and Rwanda. It was just an extraordinary time of violence and it doesn’t seem to have abated at all, which is depressing as hell. The play doesn’t seem even remotely over-the-top when you start to look at it in terms of current events.

Film still from “Titus” (1999). Photo © Fox Searchlight

The setting of “Titus” seems very anachronistic. Why did you choose this approach as opposed to a straight period piece?

I think we’re living in an anachronistic world. We didn’t have to do anything to the sets in Rome. There’s a stratification in Rome. You have old buildings on other buildings, Christian churches on top of Roman forums or Roman temples. People lived in this stratified world where they are a combination of layers. I think that by now our consciousness of history and our future is so dense that it doesn’t feel anachronistic as much as it feels brought to the surface. It didn’t feel as if things were out of place. As an artist you have to find a common denominator that makes the film feel unified and that was through its use of limited colour: every costume was either black, white or grey made with metals or furs. Red was used extremely selectively. When you limit the palette you can control it. The costumes were really about character. The character of Titus is a conservative General and he starts in a dark metallic armour and as you move through the movie he moves from black to grey to white.

Do you have a particular interest in surrealism? If yes, what attracts you to that art movement?

Well I’m not really attracted to that art movement. There are artists I may appreciate, but I don’t follow the art movement. I can find many Mexican painters whose whimsy and their paintings tickle me. I like the way they tell a story through painting, as opposed to a still life—which does seem like still life, as there is a deadness to it. I count a lot on my dream life. I have a very fertile dream life. My dreams can be provocative and rich and many of my ideas can come from that state. The idea of being Cubistic about how you tell a story, that you see it, not just from what we think of as the objective reality… you go into a subjective reality and try and tell it from “inside out” as well as what we think is reality which is from the outside in—only one surface of reality. That is why people like Frida Kahlo “painted her reality” as she said, because what you saw was not what was real, it was a surface. The art of the artist is to show you a new perspective on an event or story that may seem so familiar to you, but if you tell it in a kind of cheesy way and put the camera on and go through the numbers, you’re really not adding anything, or giving any nuance or depth to it. I use surrealism in my images in theatre and film to re-assess an aspect of the storytelling.

Director Julie Taymor and Salma Hayek prepare for a shot. Photo © Miramax Films.

For the dream/nightmare sequence in “Frida” you employed the Quay Brothers to animate it. It is a very interesting sequence, why did you choose the Quay Brothers to shoot this segment?

I’ve always loved their work and felt very aligned with their sensibility…I’ve seen it in many, many films, and I’ve seen it in their theatre work too – their set designs. I simply just called them up and discussed the images from the Day of the Dead (Mexican festival), told them what the sequence was about, gave them pictures of our locations, and our Frida (Salma Hayek) and pretty much let them go free on it. With about three minutes of animation, I think we cut it down to about one minute and then Elliot Goldenthal did the score. I really believed in them as artists and knew if I gave them those images they would spin-off of those images and do their own creative thing.

Salma Hayek (Frida Kalho) is lying on the ground after a bus accident. Photo © Miramax Films

I’d like to discuss one very specific shot in “Frida.” During the scene of the bus accident, Frida is lying in a broken floor with a metal pole through her body and she is covered in gold dust. Was this shot designed from your own imagination, or is it a reference to a painting?

It is from my imagination based on what I read, you know, her broken body… all of those elements: the oranges, the bird, the broken glass, her lying in the hole… this hole…l ike a sexual hole that she stabbed through was very religious in a way, and very much within the Mexican style.

In your co-written book “Playing with Fire,” it states that you had reservations about making an artist bio-pic. What ultimately won you over?

I don’t like the bio-pic for an artist where they just show the artist as drunken and being bastards who destroy their wives lives. You know, go out on benders. For the most part, as I am a visual artist… I don’t think you know “why” people paint or the way they paint. So if they are not about their art, they are about their fucked-up lives and ultimately that takes away from them as people. I didn’t want to do that, I feel like it’s a comment and I’m not sure I can care when they delivered such beautiful art. I’d rather know more about their art than what they went through. We will never know what it was like to be Jackson Pollock when he was painting those lines, or Vincent van Gogh… or any of them. So what made me feel okay about “Frida” was that she painted her story. She painted her biography. The elements of her love story with Diego Rivera and all of the trials that she went through when she came to New York and her own feelings about her accident, they are all there for you to see. She’s not an abstract painter. She’s a self-portraiturist so it wasn’t hard to understand why she painted those paintings.

Evan Rachel Wood and Jim Sturgess in “Across the Universe.” Photo © Columbia Pictures.

For the movie “Across the Universe,” how did the idea originate for a musical based upon the songs of The Beatles?

Probably from one of the original producers, not with me. He invited Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to participate as screenwriters and then they came to me as a director. At that point they had a three-page treatment that was very Beatles-like but the kernel of doing a love story in the 1960s set in Vietnam and Liverpool was in that three-page treatment and I thought that was a good beginning… a good jumping-off point, and when I became involved as director and co-writer of the story I changed it quite a lot and brought in three other young characters: Sadie, Jojo and Prudence… and really tried to up-the-weight of the piece which would have had to have done with the Women’s movement, the Black movement, the Vietnam war and what was going on in New York at that time.

In “Playing with Fire” you talk about the influence of music videos on “Across the Universe,” having shot the film in that style as opposed to traditional musical numbers. What made you choose the music-video format?

The music doesn’t lend itself to traditional song and dance… that’s music hall, old style Broadway. The Beatles were the first video-makers anyway, they did it themselves, and fantastic ones! It seemed that the musical theatre genre had not been exploited to the power of the cinema. If you rely on the theatrical forms of dance you’re really being limited about the power of imagery. So when you have a song like Strawberry Fields Forever and you start to analyse the power of the imagery of the song and its contexts, you want to start using strawberry bombs exploding on your landscapes… you know you don’t do that with dancers. You open it up and not just put it on bodies on a regular film set, like, you know, singing a song about what the content of the song is. You can use the word “music-video” or you can just say “cinema.” Music-video probably gives it a bad connotation. You just think of the early directors from Russia or Japan and those are music videos, they are these long sections of montages that are nothing but musical backgrounds with no dialogue. You’re telling the story through music and image and not through some kind of linear action or progression.

Jim Sturgess in “Across the Universe.” Photo © Columbia Pictures.

What does cinema offer you artistically that the theatre cannot provide?

It offers me the ability to tell a story in a radically different way with different tools. Whether I am shooting in a Liverpool shipyard, or the volcanic rock fields of Hawaii which are totally surreal and anti-human and endless vistas, I can’t re-create that on a stage.

What film projects are you currently working on?

I’m actually starting to shoot… unless all the money falls through, you know, these days are rough, but I’m supposed to start shooting Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” on November 10th with Helen Mirren playing Prospera… and there’s Djimon Hounsou, Ben Whishaw as Ariel. It’s a phenomenal cast actually. I start shooting in Hawaii and then England in the winter.

Credit: All images copyright and courtesy of respective film studios.

Bibliography: [1] ] “Julie Taymor” - Biography: Early life and education. Wikipedia.  Retreived on December 8th, 2008.