Julie Taymor

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0:12Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading artistic figures reveal the most important influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the theatre, opera and film director, Julie Taymor. Her stage version of The Lion King is the highest-grossing show in Broadway history, having made nearly$2 billion, and it recently marked his 25th year in London. The Lion King won her two Tony Awards, including for Best Director of a Musical, making her the first woman to do so. She was also co-writer and director on the ill-fated Broadway musical Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark.

0:53Julie Taymor has told Shakespearean stories on the big screen, including Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins, and The Tempest with Helen Mirren. Her film credits also include Frida, a biopic of the painter Frida Kahlo, and the Beatles' jukebox musical Across the Universe.

1:13Julie Taymor, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. Happy to be here. You were born in Massachusetts, the youngest of three children. Tell me about your parents, first of all. What did they do? Well, my father was a doctor, and he was one of the early inventors of in vitro fertilization and was a fantastic professor at Harvard. And my mother was a politician. She was in democratic politics. She was a state representative. She was a delegate and inspired many, many other women. There were programs that she started to get women involved in politics after their children were born or they wanted to go back to school.

1:52But she wrote a book called Running Against the Wind, which was pretty amazing and before her time. I did a film on Gloria Stein in my last feature. The Glorias. Yeah, The Glorias. And Gloria said my mother was one of her big inspirations, which I didn't know. So that was pretty amazing. So she gave you as a child, she allowed you to think, I can, as a woman, I can do whatever I want. Absolutely. And with your father being an academic, being a doctor, so there's science, there's politics. What about art and creativity in the household growing up? Well, my parents loved the arts. Every dinner table conversation was filled with everything.

2:31It was nonstop. We didn't have television and streaming to the extent that people, and definitely no iPhone. So people were lost in conversation with each other, not conversations with a flat little two inch whatever it is. I know I sound like I'm from the dark ages, but I really appreciated the kind of full throttle communication that went on at our dinner table every night about ideas, history, politics, everything. Were you a storyteller as a child? Were you interested in making up narratives? Oh, my God. I had a closet full of dress up clothes and my older sister was very theatrical. And I went to Boston Children's Theatre when I was really little, like 10, every day after school and maybe on Saturdays as well.

3:17So I was involved in in theatre very young. And my sister, we would always put on plays in the backyard or the garage. And I always had to be the princess, which really I resented and hated. And she got to be the witch, which was much more fun. Were you borrowing stories or were you writing your own tales? Well, I wouldn't know what writing would be. You know what I mean? I would make up stories, but we'd also do fairy tales or putting on musicals like Peter Pan and then acting those out with my neighbourhood friends. But in your work as a theatre maker, as a storyteller, on stage primarily and the screen, do you trace it back to those stories that you were doing in the back garden?

3:56Well, I've always made plays and I've always made costumes or I made masks when I was really little. Or by the time I was 14 or 15, I was doing experimental. This is, you know, experimental theatre in the basement of Arlington Street Church in Boston, doing original work. Now, this is what you're referring to. At that time, people were starting to create plays without writers. You know, Grotowski, Peter Brook, a lot of them were creating plays through improvisation from their company members. And you were a teenager at this time. Yeah, I was the youngest member of this company. Yes, I was a teenager.

4:30So the seeds had been sown then? Oh, absolutely. Definitely. I read that you spent a summer travelling to India and Sri Lanka, still in your teens. Yes. What do you remember of that trip? Well, it was the experiment in international living. And I went to Sri Lanka. It was called Ceylon back then. And I travelled there to live with a family for two months, I think. I adore my parents and I had a great home. But for me, I wanted to go as far away as I could from American culture. Why that is back then, I can't explain, but I think it did set me off on this journey as a cross-country artist, cross-national, transnational, I call myself.

5:10What identity? Transnational. I live where I live. I get inspiration where I am. And that started very, very young. So I had an amazing experience in India and Sri Lanka when I was, I don't remember if it was 15 or 16. And then that went on to graduating high school early. I put off a year before I would go to college, and I went to Paris to study at École de Mime Jacques Lecoq, because anybody can understand it if it's just physical and not verbal. It's not to be like Marcel Marceau or that kind, but we use masks. It's really using your whole body to tell the landscape, to tell the story. So you were in Paris.

5:50This was just after you'd been to Sri Lanka and India there. And you were 15, 16 years old. Yes. That's actually very young to be travelling the world alone. I know. My parents were insane, people thought. They gave me so much trust that I had to come up to it, if you know what I mean. I had to rise to the occasion. They treated me like an adult and I treated them equally as adults. I never called them mommy and daddy. I called them by their first names. You must have had to grow up pretty quickly, being 15, 16 years old in Paris, in Sri Lanka, India, alone. You had to have your wits about you as well, didn't you?

6:24Yeah, you do. You do. It's a great way to learn.

6:31On This Cultural Life, Julie Taymor, I asked my guests about their formative creative influences and experiences. And your first choice is seeing the film Rashomon by the Japanese director Kurosawa at the age of 16 in Paris. And Rashomon is often cited by critics as one of the greatest films of all time. What did you make of it when you first saw it? Well, it was in Japanese, with subtitles, obviously.

7:06I had never seen anything like it. I mean, it really was my eye-opener to the power of storytelling. Not just film, but storytelling, because at its base, it is telling the story from three or four different points of view. So you had a rape and a murder, very simple, hardly any characters. And you're hearing the story from someone who might have been a servant. Then you hear the story from the murdered rich man. Then you hear the story from the accused rapist murderer. And then you hear the story from the woman who was the object of desire. And so where is the truth? I mean, this is what we're living every day right now.

7:49We're living a Rashomon because nobody knows what the real truth is. So for me, point of view, this idea of how you have to choose what is your point of view when you tell a story, from which vantage point? Are you an objective observer and a narrator, or are you a subjective storyteller? That was extraordinary. And how he changed style in each of the characters. A shaman is one of the stories. That was very important too. If you want to link that to Rafiki, it was the first time I saw a shaman in a story. Rafiki, who is the storyteller in Lion King? Lion King. She starts it and she interrupts or comes to our assistance during it to forward the story.

8:29But Rashima was not only just an incredibly beautifully told tale, but also the use of camera was mind-boggling. Black and white film. I'd never seen Toshiro Mifuni, who became my passion at age 16, just the most extraordinary actor. And then I love all of Kurosawa's. He's done four or five, I think, adaptations of Shakespeare, Throne of Blood, Macbeth, Ran, which is King Lear. Some of them are modern storytellings, but he takes those themes. And I also felt that's very inspirational to me. You could tell a story that might, as I think Lion King does, transcend where it comes from and speak across culture.

9:09And then you interpret it from your culture. So Kurosawa became my favorite director and has remained my favorite director over all these years. Has he influenced the style of your filmmaking? I think so in the sense that I love some of his grander movies like Kagamusha and Ran, where you have many flags moving along with the horses running and you watch the camera movement. And when it's static, you really think about why is the camera static? His use of camera to tell the story is, bar none, it's one of the greatest. He's one of the greatest. So it has definitely inspired. I mean, there are a number of other great directors who have inspired me as well, but Kurosawa still remains at the top.

9:52Give us the proudest prisoner of the gods, that we may sacrifice his flesh. Victorious Titus, spare my firstborn son. Religiously, they ask for sacrifice. You adapted Titus Andronicus for the big screen. Were there any of the sort of tropes of Kurosawa's filmmaking that you borrowed for that in terms of the visual flair? Anthony Hopkins as Titus himself, and it's set in a very... Well, it's set in Rome, but it's a very obviously stylised version of Rome. It's clearly in a silk. Well, it's crossed historically. You have the Colosseum today, but you also have it then. I try to blend time because that's what Shakespeare does.

10:33I mean, you look at Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and people are going to be in Elizabethan clothes and togas. You know, it's a complete blend because Shakespeare would use ancient tales, myths, stories to talk about his present time. I mean, that's what we do as artists. We have it as an allegory or as a mirror image. So when I went to Rome and I had Dante Ferretti as the brilliant production designer who, you know, did Fellini and Martin Scorsese films, he took me to the Roman Colosseum and Mussolini's Colosseum, the Square Colosseum, which is fascism at its peak. And if you watch Titus, the movie, you'll see that it's a blend of time that you do often in the theatre.

11:16Very rarely do people do that in movies. They think of movies as much more literal. Was that a challenge to present to an audience then in that case? On the big screen when, as you say, you accept the non-naturalism of the stage, but when you try and present it on the big screen, sometimes there is resistance. No, no resistance because it's Shakespeare. They're already speaking in a non-naturalistic language. So you're already in a poetic world. We couldn't shoot in the Roman Colosseum. So we went to Croatia and we shot in Polo, Croatia, because it's the only Colosseum that still exists with a ground.

11:48There was no floor in the Roman Colosseum. Oh, that is an existing historic building that you shot in. I presumed it was a film set. Oh, God, no. A created set. No, no, no. No, we didn't have the money to do that. That was Gladiator. That was not our film. We went to real places. So I've been to Rome a number of times, but when I went with the idea of doing this, what you see is all these ruins in the middle of fiats and fast cars and big buildings. So you're looking at time blended in reality. So in a way, that is reality. You have ancient Rome, then you have the 16th century moving right up through the fascists, right up to the present and the postmodern and the future.

12:30The layers of history. The layers. That's exactly. You feel the layers. That's the word. The layers of time. And I think that because Shakespeare, as we say, is contemporary for all time, you have those layers naturally in the stories that he tells because human beings sadly do not change. Titus was your debut feature, wasn't it? Yes, it was. I mean, that's quite a really deeply brutal story to be telling for the first time that you're making a film. Does that go back to Rashomon as well? Well, maybe, but it also goes to, I'd just done The Lion King, so what should I do next? Titus Andronicus.

13:07What better? You know, I'd been offered the cat in the hat, and I went, okay, here we go. I'm going to get boxed into thinking I should be doing animals and big children's. But I went, no, I want to do what I think is a very great play. It had been extremely maligned for years, Titus Andronicus. I think it is a genius play. I think it is a pearl in an oyster. There's a lot of stuff around it. But if you get to the heart of it, it is the greatest dissertation on violence ever written. It is about the darkest thing to be human. Titus, a great general, comes home to bury his dead sons. And the first thing he does is to slaughter the firstborn son of his enemy, of the enemy queen, as a sacrifice because of religion.

13:54The very first words practically out of the enemy queen's mouth, this was Jessica Lange playing Tamara, when she begs Titus not to kill. He has sons. She has sons. Please do not kill my son. They fought in this war like your sons did. And he says, I have to. This is part of our tradition. This is part of our religion. and she says, Oh, cruel, irreligious piety. Who wrote those genius words? Those are extraordinary. That is the fundamental reason why most wars happen. Oh, cruel, irreligious piety. You know your mother means to feast with me and calls herself revenge and thinks me mad. Hark villains, I shall grind your bones to dust, and with your blood in it I'll make a paste, and of the paste a coffin I will rear, and make two pastries of your shameful heads, and bid that strumpet your unhallowed dam, like to the earth, swallow her own increase.

15:07Here's Titus, a good man, a great general, who by the end kills his daughter and bakes his enemy children into pies. That's not just gruesome storytelling for its own sake. It's a journey. What is it in your background, in your family, in your experiences that will push you to that point? And it's a real, truthful journey. And I saw that in our culture. We opened on Christmas Day 1999 in America with the idea that this would be the last of that kind of violence. You know, I'm talking about silly idealism and all of that from an artist and her compatriots. But of course, it just got worse after 2000.

15:56Your next formative experience is seeing a traditional initiation ceremony in Bali in 1978. I presume you were there on a fellowship. Yes, I had a traveling fellowship to Eastern Europe, Indonesia and Japan. Part of my trip was to go to Indonesia first. I thought I would spend three months in Java and Bali and I spent four years. And one of the reasons is when I was there, there really wasn't film and television. It wasn't ubiquitous like it is now everywhere in the world. So if you went to a village, they would still be doing their theater that was partly ritual and entertainment as they'd always been doing.

16:36And it was very specific to that village. So I went and was blown away by seeing how powerful theatre was, how formative it was in the upbringing of a child, how it spoke to politics, to religion, to education. You'd learn about social things. It was the major entertainment of that society, both in Java and Bali. What was the purpose of the ceremony that you saw? Well, the ceremony that I saw, that specific ceremony, happened after I'd already been in Indonesia for two years. And I was by myself in this giant village square near a temple. And listening in the dark to the sounds of gamelan orchestras from different villages that had come to celebrate this particular village's initiation ceremony was beautiful.

17:28And all of a sudden, I could see coming at the far end of this village square, sparkling little mirrors that had the moonlight bouncing off of them. And as they became closer, these figures in the dark, I realized that they were old men in full warrior Barris costume with their spears, long spears. But their costumes were all covered with little mirrors, the whole thing. So they would be glinting. There was nobody there. They came out, 20 or 30 of these men, and they did this incredible dance. And I had never seen or experienced anything like this. The men were dancing, no musicians, to their own voices, which were what we would say demonic, but things emanating from deep from their bellies as they came and they did this beautiful dance.

18:21dance and as soon as they finished the dance these old men and I say they're old because then they bent over soon as that they were out of what appeared to be a trance they bent over a young man came out with an oil lamp and he took the oil lamp and hung it on a tree branch they didn't see me by the way because I was in the shadows and they were only lit by moonlight and there's no other audience no there was no audience so they were dancing for themselves or for the sake of The ceremony. That's right. And then a young man came out with an oil lamp, hung it on a tree, the square filled with families and people and a curtain.

18:56And all of a sudden they started to do for nine hours an all night Arja. Arja is an opera, like mask dance opera. And, you know, I told you I started very young in the theater and I'd been doing it all my life, along with academics and other things. I wanted to be an anthropologist. I studied anthropology at Columbia, you know, all kinds of things. And I had this kind of light go off in my head, which is these men who did the Barris dance, who came out, they were dancing. The religious dance that they did or the ritualistic dance was for what we call God. But God can mean anything. But it was almost for nature.

19:40It was a giving back and honoring to the spirits. They can describe the way they want to describe, but what I saw as an artist is that there is a point in which an artist has to go beyond the fame and the money and has to go into why are we doing this? Why do we do it for ourselves? Why do we do it for people? Whenever Lion King brings me back, sometimes I tell that story to talk to the actors in the company to say to them, when you're on that stage, no matter how tired you are because you've been doing eight shows a week, you're doing it for an audience that may be their first time at the Lion King.

20:16It may be the six-year-old's first time in the theater. So not only are you inspiring them, but you're also doing it for yourself as an act, a ritual act of performance that you're given. You're blessed with this talent to dance, to sing, to act, to be in a company of players. So when you come for those two hours, you have to fill it with that kind of energy, with that kind of spirit. And that struck you in that moment, watching those old men who were then almost sort of transformed and rejuvenated in the moment of performance. Yes, and that imbuing the tools that you work with, with that kind of feeling that it is beyond the banal, the everyday.

20:56Then I started a theatre company in Indonesia. I had a theatre company, Teatro Loh, L-O-H, which means the source. And using sort of traditional performing techniques or using puppets even? Everything. I had Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese, masked dancers and actors, traditional and contemporary from all over Indonesia. And we all lived together and we created an original piece that was totally inspired by that experience I had and also being a foreigner in somebody else's country. I wanted to tell a tale of that experience of how you can either maintain your center and grow or you can get lost in another person's culture.

21:41Maybe it's one thing to be immersing yourself in other people's cultures at the time and to be expressing and telling these stories through the indigenous culture. But your work in the years since has often looked to those cultures and looking back to your travels. With the debate in more recent years about cultural appropriation, how much thought do you have to give now to conceiving an idea that might borrow from other cultures? Well, I knew it back then. There's a very big difference between inspiration and appropriation. It goes both ways, obviously. I mean, we go to Japan, everybody's wearing suits and ties.

22:17You go to Korea and K-pop is American black culture. I mean, it's been going on forever. That's what travelers telling stories from India to the Middle East to Africa to America. Where do these stories come from? The beauty is that the one thing we're forgetting is that we all have that story. We all have the coming of age story. We all have birth and death and go through the main markers of life. So something like The Lion King proves that there could be a tale that appears to be from Africa, although it could be Hamlet, it could be from Japan. But it is a coming of age tale that you can understand as well in Japan, in Brazil, in Korea, in Mexico, as you do in Great Britain or the United States.

22:59It is not an American tale. We're forgetting our common ground by something very important, which is honoring the identity of voices that have not been heard on their own. So when I was doing the puppetry way back, even before The Lion King, and doing what people like to, oh, she was doing Wayan Kulit, shadow puppetry, or let's talk about The Lion King, or there's Bunraku. No, there is not Bunraku or Wayan Kulit in The Lion King. There is a technique where the actor is manipulating the puppet off of their body, but it is not a traditional Japanese art form because that takes a lot more than just the technicality.

23:40It takes 80 years to become a master Bunraku performer. The movement is so beautiful and you get the feeling of the humanity and the movement of the puppet. Then the singer for the character is off stage. Now, I changed that in my version of this sort of type of puppetry in Lion King, but we'll talk about that when you ask me. Well, I'll ask you now, actually, Julie, because the Lion King opened in 1997.

24:18It seemed to be reaching back from what you're describing to these traditions. Were you drawing on that experience of seeing those shows? Well, I had been in Indonesia already and I'd seen all kinds of puppetry in Czechoslovakia because that was part of my fellowship. So I'd seen a lot of different forms of puppetry from around the world. I had to find the right techniques for each of the characters, the main characters. So the lions have masks on their heads. They're actors who have masks on their heads. You see their face. They stand. They walk like humans. They may have a tail, but it's more like a sash.

24:50And they're facially expressive as well. They're facially expressive. But you get to Timon and Pumbaa, and all of a sudden you have to play with scale because Timon is a little meerkat. Hakuna Matata Ain't no person crazy So if I put a human being into a costume with a mask and little makeup a la cats, they'd be too big. So trying to get this little three foot tall, smaller or at least the same size as a young Simba, I thought of this style, the technique of hachiyoji, which is another Japanese technique that I'd seen in Japan on my fellowship, where an actor or a puppeteer sits on a small box that has wheels, and the feet of the puppet are attached to the feet of the puppeteer, and then he can manipulate the hands or the head or whatever.

25:41And he zooms around the stage on this little box. I thought, ah, what a great idea for Timon, except I don't want the box. So I took a technique that I'd seen, not a tradition. As I say, when it takes 80 years to become a master of a tradition, like punraku or hachiochi or whatever it might be, you're not just studying the technique. It's not just the strings and the rods and how it's manipulated. It's a whole art of exactly how does that character move its hands? How does it speak? It's almost a dance that you're studying. That's why it's a whole cultural thing that takes 80 years. It's not the technique.