Julie Taymor Interview (page: 3 / 8) Theater, Opera and Film Director	Print Interview

Going back to the beginning of your career, what do you think you learned in Japan and Indonesia that changed your way of looking at things?

Julie Taymor: Very different in Japan than in Indonesia, because Japan is already a modern culture, even though they have traditions, which are incredible and are not just preserved, but living. Different experiences impressed me. One thing is, I would go back and forth between the traditional arts, like the Kabuki or the Noh, and explore the contemporary theater, like Suzuki or Terayama, the Butoh theater, and all of the unbelievable puppet theater that they have for adults. You know, we still hear the word "puppet" and we get this nauseating image of some kind of Muppet or something. Puppets really are the origin of theater. Even the shadow on the wall of Plato's cave was a puppet. The very first actor was some kind of hand creating some kind of animal.

I met a Noh mask carver in Kyoto, and I was very impressed, when I went into his workshop, how he laid out his tools, how he laid out the wood and the carving tools, and the neatness, so that the act -- the sheer act of carving -- was an act of devotion. And you didn't go into just a messy studio and just slap-dash something together. The making of the mask, or the making of the puppet in Indonesia, the carving of the leather shadow puppet, is such a high art form that -- a wooden mask, you have to hold the head to north, and the south would be the bottom. How you put the masks in a box, how you treat them -- they are not merchandise. They are not just inanimate objects.
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If the grain of the wood in the tree goes from north to south, then you carve that mask that way. People make up these rules. They're not God-given, because there's no such thing, but somehow these rules come from nature. When I was talking about awe earlier, they are things that bring the level of our humanity to another place. We can either be monsters or angels. We are able to be demons and angels, as that book says. We are able to be incredibly creative or to be incredibly destructive. We have that decision to make, to create something. It could be grotesque and ugly, but it is monstrously beautiful, so it inspires people.

I received from my experience in Japan an incredible sense of respect for the art of creating, not just the creative product. We're all about the product. To me, the process was also an incredibly important aspect of the total form. And in Indonesia even more so. So then I spent more time in Indonesia and watched these incredible ceremonies that would go on for nine hours that were completely -- the separation between your function as a Hindu and your function as a puppeteer creating a puppet show in this Hindu (culture) -- there is no separation.
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We have relegated our arts to an entertainment factor, yet on the other hand, we recognize the power of sports and entertainment to completely take over the psyche of individuals, the worship of celebrity. So you can't dismiss it. I think that there is a point where you can't dismiss it. What you have to do is plug into it and understand that that's something very powerful.

There is incredible power in the arts to inspire and influence. Let's even just take homosexuality in our culture. Brokeback Mountain is, to me, way behind. If we didn't have movies like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, where we see a love affair between two men. That was way beyond Brokeback Mountain for me. When we saw the family accepting their son's choice -- not even his choice, but who he was -- that completely started to change the culture. So in entertainment, you have the power to totally transform.

Now, again, if you're talking about religion, we see that we're into this massive religious warfare. That is so totally connected to the spirit, and the spirit is completely manipulated by the arts in a good and bad way. You can rile people up with incredible poetry, with words. And what are words?

I heard Ralph Nader speaking about the sharp tooth and the smooth, silvery tongue. Grendel is full of this. What Grendel is about speaks to these issues. It is the power of music and the power of words, whether they're from the Koran or the Bible, to sway you. People will go to war based on art. "Men gone mad on art." That's a line from Grendel.

If you can show through a story what will happen, what is going on, you will by far inspire and influence people more than anything else. They're not going to be listening to reality. They won't. Because there's nothing worse than reality. What they want to hear is stories, and then if the stories touch them -- and that means sets the blood and sets their sentiments and their emotions going -- they will do something. But it has to be done that way. That's what will move them.

That's why when you go to church and you see people going into a trance, you say, "How does that happen? How did it physiologically happen?" How do people walk on coals if it's not through belief? Belief is through talk and through image and through music and through the church or the temple or the space that you've created to create that sense of transformation.

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