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A Conversation with Julie Taymor – 2011 LAFF

By Ryan Mason · June 21, 2011

There was no mention of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark other than when director of stage and screen Julie Taymor mentioned she was available for work since she’d just been fired. I’m sure there would’ve been some serious stories for her to tell from that long, troubled Broadway production, but there were plenty more from her other projects that she used to illustrate how she handles telling stories using different mediums.

While the panel was called “The Art of Translation,” by exploring her past films and theater productions, Taymor’s discussion could easily have been called “The Art of Storytelling.” With her friend and collaborator, actor Harry Lennix, moderating the talk, Taymor went through each of her four major projects – Titus, The Lion King, Across the Universe, and The Tempest – to discuss how she made the source material work for that specific medium. Sure, they were all adapted from something else – Shakespearean plays, The Beatles’ songs, Disney’s movie – but, making it work in a new venue is more about simply figuring out how to tell that story with the palette available rather than trying to mimic the previous incarnation. Especially when the theater and the cinema have vastly different tools with which to tell those stories.

In between Lennix asking her questions – which all felt organic to the conversation yet completely on topic – Taymor showed short videos comparing her films with the source material. Honestly, I could’ve seen an entire feature-length documentary about Taymor and the behind-the-scenes of her multiple projects. One of the best moments was seeing her work with a couple singers in the musical Across the Universe intercut with the actual moments in the film along with Taymor’s narration explaining her process. It was surprisingly moving, perhaps more so than if I’d even just seen the movie on its own. Seeing the actors being so moved, so into their own performances in a completely unpretentious way elevated the material to a different level.

It was also interesting to hear how hands-on and involved she is with every aspect of both filmmaking and stage direction, from making the masks in The Lion King to dancing and acting with the performers in Across the Universe.  She’s also fearless. Her first film was Titus, which was an incredibly ambitious production that actually shot in multiple locations including Rome, and involved working with many actors who’d never before done Shakespeare. That led to an audience member to ask, how did Taymor go from theater to directing feature films without any film education? From her response and just from having seen everything prior to that question, the answer was relatively obvious: she’s such a visual storyteller that figuring out which lens to use to achieve her look didn’t take long, plus it helped having a gracious teacher in director of photography Luciano Tovoli.

As much as the different mediums required such different approaches, for Taymor, her main goal with any project is to find the best way to tell that particular story. And while The Lion King has been performed on stages across the world, none of her films have enjoyed the same kind of success. She feels that we all need to stop the current mindset of what success is, that tanking at the box office means a movie is terrible, or if it makes a ton of money that it’s an amazing piece of cinema. She also attributed her success to the fact that she’s stuck with it and that she sought out like-minded people to work with. That if you find something that interests you, you’ll find a way to just get it done. Although, judging from her body of work, having some ridiculously amazing talent sure doesn’t hurt, either.