Julie Taymor Interview (page: 7 / 8) Theater, Opera and Film Director	Print Interview

A recurring idea in your work is this idea of ritual, that theater in itself is a ritual. We all sit in a room and have a communal experience. There was a ritual aspect to your production of Oedipus Rex and Titus as well. You draw this parallel between art and religion, and it seems to be very close in a lot of your work.

Julie Taymor: I'm not religious, but I believe in the ecstasy that art and religion can create in human beings, the ecstatic or the awe -- as I like to call it, you know, "a-w-e" -- that it makes people feel in a way that isn't their banal, everyday feel. That they go, "My God, it transformed me. My life changed." Frida Kahlo, the story of Frida Kahlo, I'm in Australia and I meet a woman and she says, "I have cancer, and watching that film has completely transformed my life because now I know that every single moment I can actually fill with color, and I don't have to go into the dark and the morose."
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When people talk about all of the bad things happening in the world, you just go, "Okay, and how do we live our lives? How do we live through those dark times? How do we bridge those horrors and those ailments and those deaths and those accidents?" And...

Theater evolves through religion to be the mediator between the darkness and existence, to help you get over the hump of a bad season and no rice paddies and a sickness, a demon that's come into your family and has spread malaria. And you go, as the artist -- the shaman -- would make these spirit journeys, and he would take you into a place. Now, it's a psychological play, but as we said, the concrete world isn't necessarily the most powerful world. The world of the mind -- whether you're watching Matrix or whatever -- the world that's inside here has the power to do a lot of good and a lot of damage.
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So that is the religious part of it. That's the part where...

When people are there, and they're committed -- whether they're a performer who says, "I'm going to take the next 10 hours to put on my costume, it will take me that long, and as I do, I will eat this food and I will cleanse my body," whether -- you know, if you're a dancer, a Kathakali dancer from India putting on that 40 pounds of fabric -- it transforms who you are so that you can stay up all night and dance for 20 hours. As a regular Joe, you can't do that.
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So we've seen that. There is something human beings can do. "The adrenaline rush," we call it. Fear, tremendous love. When people kill themselves, commit suicide over love, that kind of passion will move mountains. And I know, as an artist -- and I still feel weird about that "A" word, "the artist" -- but I know that that's the greatest pleasure I get. Satisfaction more than pleasure.

I love to make people laugh and cry, and that's very good. But in another way, when these moments have happened, and people have written me or have told me, "You don't know what that did to my life," I feel incredibly blessed. I was just given this gift somehow from my mommy and my daddy, and whatever else, to actually do that for people. And it's -- I have to say what I have to say, but not in a void. I'm not one of these people that go, "Oh well, I'm just going to do my art and I don't give a shit what anybody thinks." I don't feel that way. I really, really love to have people honestly be moved and inspired. And whether it's just here or just here -- it's always better if it's the both. That's why Shakespeare is so great, because he gets you from the gut to the heart to the head, and that's what I aspire to do, more than anything.
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In your film Frida, pain was healed through color and art. Unbelievable pain, more pain than most of us can imagine. That was one of the most colorful films ever made.

Julie Taymor: Yeah. In our culture, we think that happy and color is trivial, that black and darkness is deeper. But Nietzsche said -- which is a line that I firmly believe -- "Joy is deeper than sorrow, for all joy seeks eternity." And if you see Grendel, you'll see, as he's on the edge of the abyss, ready to leap to his death, he sings, "Is it joy I feel? Is it joy I feel?" And it's so, so moving. You can have a lot of different explanations for the ending of that opera, but there is something so palpable that you will feel when he sings those lines.

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