Sam Taylor-Johnson

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0:13Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading creative figures reveal the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the artist and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson. As part of the so-called Britart generation of the early 1990s, Sam Taylor Wood, as she was then known, made her name with photographic and video pieces. Diagnosed with colon cancer in 1997 and then breast cancer three years later, she addressed her treatment and recovery in artworks that she made at the time. She moved into filmmaking with her first feature, Nowhere Boy, about the life of the young John Lennon in 2009.

0:55Other cinematic projects have included adaptations of the E.L. James novel Fifty Shades of Grey, the James Frame memoir A Million Little Pieces and most recently the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black.

1:11Sam Taylor-Johnson, welcome to This Cultural Life. Good morning. You were born in Croydon in 1967. Tell me about your memories of early home life first of all. I was born in Croydon in Mayday Hospital where Tracey Emin was born as well so we always joke about that. But my early life was in sort of suburban Streatham and until the age of nine, fairly regular childhood. After nine, it all just went a bit upside down, I guess, when my parents split and my dad sort of disappeared. I didn't really see him again properly until I was about 16. Where had he gone? He'd gone off traveling. He'd gone off around the world.

1:49It's kind of strange. There's a sort of secretive side to my dad, so I don't really fully understand. But he went off, basically. And every so often I'd get something odd, like some sort of American memorabilia, or I remember getting a skirt that had shorts underneath and it felt so American and sort of like skater girl thing. So you had a sort of clue as to where he was in the world. Sort of clue to where he was in the world. And also a kind of fantasy about who he was a little bit too. What had he been? He hadn't just given up family. He'd given up a job as well, I presume. Yeah, I think so.

2:23Like I said, he's quite secretive, so I don't actually really know what path took him or where. And so, yeah, off he went. You never asked him? Yeah, of course. But he just sort of never really said very much. I sort of play a game with him where I sit with him in a room and I see if I can keep going and not saying anything and sit with the silence. Because unless I say anything, he won't say anything. So he's a very, very quiet person. And you moved with your family, without your dad, to Sussex. Yeah, with my stepfather and my mum. With your stepfather. Yeah, we moved to Crowborough, East Sussex, and I lived there until I was 16 when I left home and went to Hastings Art College.

3:05But your mother left as well, didn't she? Yeah, I mean, I find it difficult to go relive it. I used to talk about it quite regularly, but now I'm in a sort of much more of a place with my mum of kind of forgiveness and trying to repair. But yeah, she did go and left us kids with my stepdad, who was not in such a good mental state. She'd met her now husband, who she's been with since then. But yeah, kind of very traumatic times. But I don't know, you get to a certain point in life where you're just like, oh, you gotta let it go. But it brings to mind your first feature film, Nowhere Boy, about John Lennon and the fraught relationship he had with his mother, who he lost.

3:49Yes. Did you relate to that story? Was that part of the appeal of the Lennon story? It's so interesting. I mean, I always say my work's a few steps ahead of me. Sometimes I choose projects or create things, and I don't really know quite why I'm making them, but it seems like an important thing to be doing. I think with Nowhere Boy, Joe Wright, the director, had sent it to me. I read it, I connected with it on such a fundamentally deep level. And when the final song of the movie was written in the script as Mother playing out. Mother, you had me, but I never had you. I just, my face was absolutely wet.

4:31I was on a train coming back from Cornwall to London on my own. and I just had this feeling I had to make this film. Now I'd never made a short film, but I'd never made a feature film. And I had this feeling that I can't really describe other than a kind of deep penetrating gut instincts that I had to make this film. And I went to meet with the producers of the script and I said I have to make this film. I've never made a film, but I'd made a short film which got me through the door. And they said, well, we're actually going into production. we have another director anyway I said in the meeting if anything happens to the director or they don't want to do it or anything I am here waiting and then I just tracked it and them everywhere when there were sort of industry parties I knew they'd be there I'd be like at the bar hey how how's it going with no or why do you have a director yet I heard that director's left and and then I remember meeting one of the producers and they said well we're actually going out to Stephen Freer, Stephen Daldry, Stephen, Stephen, Stephen, David, David, whatever.

5:37And I just said, I think a woman needs to do this and I have to do this. And, you know, to their credit, they listened. And then that was it. I was doing it. But it was the song, the John Lennon song, Mother, which resonated originally. Yeah. And it's interesting. You say you got your foot in the door with another short film and that was Love You More, which is also a song and that's a Buzzcock song. Yeah. So it very often starts. Starts with a song. With a song. Starts with a song, you're right. I'd never really thought about it. Back to black, of course. Back to black. But the writing of Nowhere Boy was so profound and, yeah, that feeling that this has to be me making this film was just sort of so powerful.

6:15How creative were you as a child growing up? I was creative in my head. I wasn't a maker of things necessarily because I have my youngest daughter, Romy, just makes things out of nothing constantly so I know what that looks like. But I had fantasies constantly, fantasies and dreams and possibilities and ideas and also a growing frustration with my head being so full of noise constantly. But as I slowly sort of found places to channel it, it sort of relieved some of the steam and pressure. Were you encouraged by your mum or by anybody else? No, not at all. If anything, the other way. I had an amazing art teacher at school who my art room sort of became a bit of a sanctuary in terms of, you know, being able to just be myself a little bit and relax with Miss Griffin and talk about things that were going on at home whilst drawing a little bit.

7:11It was more that my head was just filled with a kind of... It was like a warehouse of ideas and thoughts that I just didn't know quite where to put them.

7:25On This Cultural Life, Sam Taylor-Johnson, my guests choose the most significant creative influences in their life and your first choice is the series of paintings made by the American artist Mark Rothko in 1958 they're known as the Seagram murals which were given by the artist to the Tate in 1970 when did you first see them? I was about nine years old and my mum had taken me and my sister on a trip to the Tate gallery I'm now Tate Britain and it had the Rothko room and I remember it's it's funny because I don't remember much of my young life but I remember seeing people sitting and thinking I'll sit with them and see if I can feel or sense what they're feeling and then sitting there and feeling this peace kind of come over me as I was staring into one of the paintings I can't tell you which one But it wasn't just a sense of tranquility.

8:19It was a sense of, I don't know, in my mind, an explosion of thought that came with that. So as I could look at this, there were thoughts that were coming rapidly that I could kind of process in a different way whilst looking at this painting. So I suppose in a way it was my first experience where I connected with art that became inspiring in my mind. Did you know anything? I guess at that age you wouldn't have known the backstory of the paintings. Nothing. And for me, I didn't know or study anything further than that moment and just a reflection. Because the significance is they were made for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, very swanky restaurant.

8:54Yes, for the Seagram building, yeah. In the Seagram building. And he went to see the restaurant, apparently, and then took the paintings away at the last minute because he said, I don't want them wasted on these rich people. No, he didn't like the idea that people would go and sit and eat lobster and talk around these paintings. He felt like that was not the place for them. And so, blessed that they were gifted here to the Tate where they sit. And they arrived on the day he died, the day he killed himself. Yes, that's right. So there is that emotional resonance to them as well. It's reported that you're making a film about Rothko, or the Rothko's legacy.

9:25Yeah, I tried to not sound too much of an expert at that moment, but I have become one a little bit. There was an amazing story that when Rothko died, all the paintings were stolen by his accountant and gallery. and... The ones that were left in his studio? Everything, no, the ones from home as well. So his daughter, Kate, at the age of 16, went to the family home and there were no paintings, no drawings, no nothing on the walls. Everything was taken out of the studio. Everything had been basically stolen and there was a great moment in the script, in the film that I was making, where she, as a 16-year-old, goes to court and takes this heavyweight gallerist and accountant to court and it took it was a four-year court case where she went to this you know young attorney that she could afford or a free attorney and he said what do you want how much and she said I want 800 and he said 800 ,000 pounds she said no they stole 800 paintings I think give or take and she went to court to try and get them all back there are still something like 100 missing but she won her case but it was through the perspective of the daughter and her father as Mark Rothko that I wanted to make the movie.

10:39It wasn't a biopic about Mark Rothko. And what's the state of the film? It's in pre-production? I spent six years working on it and it just was really difficult financing a film about an artist. It's quite a difficult subject matter for people to put money behind it seemed. So we got very close. I had De Niro at one point, I had interested, I had all these amazing actors interested in playing but I still couldn't quite get it over the line for whatever reason. Do you have the option on it though? I mean, is it still a possibility? It is, but I tell you what's difficult is I've just, you know, spent two and a half years in Amy Winehouse's life and it was such an emotional connection that I had with her and her life and the music and everything that I feel like the movie I want to make next needs to be almost like a palate cleanser in the sense that not about somebody who lived because it's such a huge responsibility that you take on.

11:38Yeah, you say somebody who lived and also who had a tragic end. And also who had a tragic end. And I just felt like I needed to do something where I had a kind of different narrative and freedom in a sense, you know, a thriller, action, something. And getting back to your younger life, you won a place at Goldsmiths College to study art in the late 80s. And that was alongside a cohort of students who collectively went on to redefine British art in the late 80s, early 90s, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Gillian Waring, all of those people. What was the creative atmosphere like at the time? Did you feel something in the air?

12:14I think because, to go back, because I had quite a traumatic childhood, I messed up all my exams. I barely got any GCSEs. So I had to kind of find my way through the back door every single time to every path I've decided to take. So I didn't try to, but I couldn't get into any of the sort of fancy ecologist Chelsea Goldsmith St Martins because I just didn't have the backup of what I needed for that so I went to northeast London Polytechnic in Plasto East London I lived in Forest Gate and then Phila de Barlow the artist came to see me at art school and she said you're in you're in the wrong place you should not be in this art school this is not your world you need to be at Goldsmiths which is about ideas and thoughts and process.

12:58This is about very physical making. And she saw that and helped me to go and have an interview, even though I was halfway through my degree. And I went to Goldsmiths and I walked in and I thought, this is like a Swiss finishing school compared to where I've been at, because people talked about ideas and were so eloquent and were already artists. They already had studios. It was just like a mind-blowing idea that they'd already had exhibitions. Damien had put Frieze on by this point. Frieze had already happened. Damien was already a star, as was Gary and Tracy and everyone. They were all there and coming up.

13:33And I sort of was in the slipstream holding onto the tail of everything as they sort of progressed forward. And Gary Heum and I were really good friends. And he said, you know, there's a curator in town. I'd love to show them your work as well, because there's an exhibition at the Listen Gallery. And that really was the beginning for me. And then the other sort of beginning, beginning, was Sarah Lucas and Tracy Ammon had a little shop. just off a brick lane. And I remember just going in there and, you know, they were just making anything out of anything. And it was just productive art being made with ideas and emotions and thoughts and fun.

14:07And it just sort of freed me up to the feeling of possibility of doing anything. What sort of work were you making at the time then? I was sort of figuring out who I was, but when I left ArtScore, my cousin had given me a camera that's slightly fallen off the back of a lorry, I think, because that sort of guy who was, gave me a camera. and I just started using it and it was always with me and I found my voice through taking pictures. I suddenly felt like I had a tool that made sense to me and I was working at Camden Palace, which is now Coco. I was working there and Basil, Ray and Steve were the bouncers on the door.

14:44Basil, Ray and Steve. Yeah, they were the bouncers. They were heavy, heavy guys, but they were my friends actually. They were the guys that sort of protected me because I was the girl on the door, But then I became the manager and I was running. It was a mad scenario of kind of like London nightlife. You know, it was kind of brutal. It was another world. I mean, it really almost broke me because I was trying to be an artist in a day and run a nightclub at night, which I had no idea how to do, of course. And then I started to sort of connect my life in a sense. I took these three Basil, Ray and Steve guys to the Tate Gallery and I took these photographs of them standing in front of a Klein painting, like looking menacing, like your name's not down, you're not coming in.

15:28Or I'm trying to remember all the ones I did. Rothko? Did you use the Rothko? Yeah, Rothko. And anyway, there are all these paintings that I loved and I just had them stand there looking intense. And they were called Basil, Ray, Steve, Rothko, Basil, Ray, Steve and Klein. and suddenly I made the connection of my life and art and it was like a sort of revelatory moment that that was my path forward. I sort of just went on that sort of rolling trajectory. So that felt like your starting point. You felt even though you'd been to college and you'd learned the sort of theory of it, this was you actually becoming an artist.

16:05Well, yeah, absolutely. Art college for me was a sort of an incubation period, I suppose. Yeah, and then Gary saying, come be part of this. All of us going then on that journey. And I remember saying to the bar I used to work in, I can come in Friday, but not Tuesday. I've got an exhibition in Copenhagen and I'm going to go. And at that point, the manager then said, just leave, it's time for you to exit.

16:34Your next choice for this cultural life, Sam, is the films of Andy Warhol, including Chelsea Girls and Empire, both made in the mid-1960s. Yeah. So when did you see them? I had this art school teacher called Michael O 'Pray and one day he decided to show us who Warhol was as a filmmaker. I knew him as, you know, the creator of the double Elvis and all the screen prints, but I didn't know him as a filmmaker. And I don't know if I would have known him as a filmmaker so well if this guy hadn't have just sat us all down through a day and taken us through Andy Warhol's screen test films. or Empire as an idea of a film.

17:14And just to explain what the Empire idea is. So Andy Wilholtz set up a camera in a building opposite the Empire State Building in New York and on film, which I guess is 10-minute canisters, he would film the Empire State Building from, I think, early evening through to early morning and just sort of watching the lights change on the Empire State Building. And the film is, I think, eight hours long maybe, as an idea. It was just one of those things where it sort of connected to me in the same way that Rothko connected to me in the sense that the stillness of that led me to be able to release thoughts or feel creatively connected to something.

17:55And then from that, the National Film Theatre, the NFT had a Warhol film retrospective and they showed Chelsea Girls, which I went and sat and watched all four hours of. they showed the screen tests which were so influential on me on my artwork and similarly I think about them I even thought about them for the beginning opening moment of Back to Black In what way? Because the screen tests are people sitting in front of his camera and just presenting themselves. The camera is locked off which means it doesn't move it just films somebody for the length of the reel of film, 10 minutes and he tells them not to blink and so their eyes start to stream or they do blink but they're staring dead into the camera.

18:39And it's like a portrait of somebody because at the beginning you see just like a photograph, you see what they look like. But as you stare at them over that course of 10 minutes, you see vulnerabilities and you see thoughts and you see all these different emotions going through. And I guess with the opening of Back to Black, I thought about what's our portrait at the beginning of the movie? What do I want to say about Amy? And the opening shot is her running through the streets and the camera's just with her for a short amount of time. But in that amount of time, you feel emotion and you feel optimism and you feel joy.

19:16And that moment repeats later and you understand what she's running to. She's not running from, she's running to. And also within the film, there's a sort of very long take of Amy and Blake falling in love. It's like a sort of three, four minute, one take push in. Now I wouldn't have known or had the confidence or the feeling to make that if I hadn't have been sort of educated in Warhol's films, I guess. I mean, you are now known primarily as a filmmaker, having made Nowhere Boy and Fifty Shades of Grey and now the Amy film. There's one more in the middle. Yes, there is as well, isn't there? A Million Little Pieces.

19:51A Million Little Pieces, which is the James Frey adaptation. One of your earliest art pieces was a multi-screen film called Killing Time, which, if I remember, there are four people miming to the Richard Strauss opera Elektra. Yes. But they look very ordinary and very bored. Was that a reference to Warhol as well and the split screen aesthetic? Yeah, I mean, that came out of... So after I left Camden Palace slash Coco, a friend of mine who worked there said, they're looking for a dresser in the men's wardrobe at the Royal Opera House. Come and work with me because it's really fun. and so I went to work at the Royal Opera House in the men's wardrobe department as a dresser for a year and when they hired me they said we're only hiring you as a woman until we can find a man for this role because it's not right that a woman's dressing and seeing men in their underpants but I was totally so overwhelmingly it was like being in love I couldn't believe that I was in this environment where I was working doing interesting things with fun people whilst listening to this music that was channeled out of every speaker all day every day relentlessly from and I was there eight in the morning you have to be there as a company as a house to sit and have breakfast with everyone right through till 11 o 'clock at night and that fed into Killing Time and I guess because the people that I worked with you know sitting drinking tea and listening to this music and absorbing it so that's how that piece sort of plays out is it's people like me, my friends but they're lip syncing to and God bless my friends who I asked at the time they had to learn the entire libretto so that I could film them for their moments but just sort of sitting at home hanging out, smoking cigarettes and singing it like they're singing it but then going back to what they're doing which is fairly mundane

22:02It also brings to mind that one of Warhol's short films in the mid-60s was called Sleep, and he just had a locked-off camera on his boyfriend. I know where this is going. Well, you made a piece, a 107-minute film, I think it was, of David Beckham, which is now in the National Portrait Gallery. I saw it the other day, in fact. I mean, that must have been an homage to Warhol, wasn't it? Absolutely. I mean, when I went for the meeting at the National Portrait Gallery, they said, we'd love you to take a photograph of David Beckham for it to be part of our collection. I remember sitting there thinking, why would I do it?

22:34Not because for any reason other than he's the most photographed person in the world. What am I going to do that's going to be any different? And as I was saying that, I said, you know, maybe it's doing something different. Maybe it's doing something which we don't normally see. Maybe it's an intimate moment, like he's asleep. but then how are people going to be aware that he's a sleeping person? Maybe it needs to be a film, a film of him sleeping. So I kind of did it in real time with them and they love the idea and thankfully so did David Beckham. And he was actually sleeping? I wouldn't start the camera until I felt like he was absolutely sleeping or drifting into sleep.

23:10So I said to him, I've got this camera and I'm going to just wait and you can pretend to sleep but I'm going to wait until you're actually asleep. so you may as well just get on with it. Images of strong men in states of extreme vulnerability have become a sort of recurring motif of so much of your work, I think. You had another series of photographs of men, a lot of them very well-known, strong men, crying or appearing to cry. And, of course, the John Lennon that we meet in Nowhere Boy is really struggling emotionally with loss. Why this apparent interest, do you think, in male vulnerability?

23:48I don't know. I mean, I can speak specifically to the crying men a little more because that started with 28 actors crying. I did it as an exhibition and so photographs. But initially it started as a portfolio for GQ magazine. And I said, I'll do it if you can give me free reign to do whatever I want. And I didn't tell them what I was going to do. And so they lined up Benicio Del Toro, Jude Law, Paul Newman, Lawrence Fishburne and a young up and coming unknown actor, Ryan Gosling. That was my initial beginning. Suffice to say, amazing cast list. They were coming to me with a sense of I was going to take a beautiful portrait to look great in a magazine.

24:30So when they walked in and I said, I'd like you to cry, I was met with resistance from every single one of them. But once I kind of explained a little bit the idea behind it, you know, that this is actually about vulnerability and showing a different side rather than me saying, smile, I'd like you to cry to try and flip it a little bit. Sometimes it would work and other times I had to use other tactics. They're all actors. I mean, many of them can cry on command. Well, the thing that I had underestimated was I was actually asking them to cry as themselves and not as a character within a story or a narrative.

25:06So Forrest Whitaker, I couldn't even get the film in the back of the camera and he was crying. And he was just giving me the most incredible performance that I was desperately trying to keep up to. And then, you know, a couple of other actors like just put some peppermint oil in my eyes and you'll get exactly the same photograph. And actually that every single person within the portfolio accepted the challenge and offer and did it. And it became a three-year project that towards the end became really difficult because I would walk in and I'd see, you know, Sean Penn, you know, a hero of mine, and I'd just have to ask them to do something.

25:42It made them incredibly uncomfortable and me uncomfortable. And I also kind of had that revelation that they were sort of ultimately crying tears I couldn't cry. It was a moment where I realised, again, the sense that my work was sort of three steps ahead of me, that it was ultimately sort of dealing with a grief and emotion that I was incapable of processing for myself. And you're referring there to a time when you were undergoing treatment for you first had colon cancer and then breast cancer separately, and both primary sources as well, weren't you? Yeah, I had colon cancer when I was 29, and I had breast cancer when I was 33.

26:21and I'd started to make these during that second period. And yeah, it was just, I guess, I was always so stoic through it. I had a young child, I had Angelica at 29 and very quickly after that I'd been diagnosed with colon cancer and I felt like I just had to be like, okay, that's done as soon as I was sort of through it. That's done, right, let's get back on track. And then, you know, being hit the second time with breast cancer was just, it slowed me down more and I had to go through intense chemotherapy and all of that. I just didn't process either of them, I think, in a particularly thoughtful way.

27:02I don't really know how to describe it apart from I just got other people to cry for me. Proxy tears. Proxy tears, yes. But did it help, do you think? I don't think it helped me, but the realisation helped me. A realisation of an unprocessed grief had kind of dawned upon me, and that's what helped me. I think after that, I sort of radically shifted and changed my life and flipped everything on its head. In what way? I mean, I kind of exited my marriage and I put myself on a very different path that I felt was better for me. You were just going to do things on your terms? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to, you know, I don't want to talk in a disrespectful way because it's unfair.