Julie Taymor Interview (page: 2 / 8) Theater, Opera and Film Director	Print Interview

Were you a serious student at school?

Julie Taymor: Yeah, yeah.

I did well in school. You know, I went to Oberlin. At that time, grades were -- you elected to have them or not. It was all of that era where grades were out the window. But I did very well in school. I didn't really study the arts; I practiced the arts. I really never studied drama and playwriting or any of that. I just was a practitioner always.
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What about books? Were there books that you particularly remember as a kid, growing up?

Julie Taymor: Well, as a child I remember Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. Those are the books that I can remember. As a young adult -- I think 14 or 15 -- Gabriel García Márquez. I think that I must have read One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was 14 or 15, and that was my favorite book at the time, and then more of his books. As I get older, I have other favorites.

Could you name a few?

Julie Taymor: Salman Rushdie's books. I think the last one he wrote, Shalimar the Clown, was incredible. Oh my God! It's hard when you get put on the spot for your favorite. It's always what you just read. White Teeth! I read a lot of books that are, for lack of a better word, cross-cultural. I find movies and books that take me -- transport me to another culture are the things that I'm most interested in, and always have been. So reading about someone from an Indian culture growing up in England -- some other books by Indian authors have come out recently that I've really enjoyed.

You mentioned visiting Sri Lanka when you were 14 or 15. What program was that?

Julie Taymor: It was the Experiment in International Living, where you live with a family for the summer.

That's really young to be traveling away from home.

Julie Taymor: Yeah, but they let me do it. They were very busy with my older brother and sister, who went right through politics, the drugs, the dropouts, the marches, the entire '60s, and I watched that as a voyeur. I was 12 or so, watching my sister, who was in SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. Then her husband was on the way to being a Weatherman. I saw the whole thing. My brother went to Haight-Ashbury and was a musician and dropped out of college three or four times. And the LSD! I actually had tremendous sympathy for my parents, compassion, because they didn't know what the hell was going on.

This new movie that will come out next year, Across the Universe, is the first piece of work that I've done that has anything remotely to do with the way that I grew up in America. Everything else I've done, whether it's Grendel -- Beowulf, the monster -- or Frida Kahlo or Titus -- Shakespeare -- or Indonesia, have been places where I feel I lived. Where I live is not necessarily in New York City. That's where my apartment is, but I live in Mexico, or I live in Indonesia. I live in Japan. I feel as comfortable in those other cultures, because, in a way, I'm always uncomfortable. I can't explain that, exactly, but I put myself into situations where I'm forced to do something, to create, to respond, to see differently.

It was fascinating to be offered a Beatles musical -- this is using 30 Beatles songs -- having nothing to do with the Beatles. It's a completely original musical set during the '60s that takes place in New York and Vietnam and Detroit and Washington and Liverpool, but is not about the Beatles, and really is telling the story of that time.

How did you get the Beatles songs?

Julie Taymor: Revolution Films. They had the rights. I picked the songs. That's where I was this morning, before I came here, I was in the cutting room, working on that movie.

So you're preparing an opera for its world premiere and cutting a movie on the same day?

Julie Taymor: Yes. I've been back and forth. I had to look at visual effects this morning.

Sounds like a busy weekend.

Julie Taymor: Very. These are the two biggest projects I've ever done, and they overlap each other, this film and this opera. Bigger than The Lion King actually, in a certain way.

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