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

Through all of the art forms that you have brought us, you have been working with the same composer through much of it. Can you tell us how you came together and how you knew that was the right partnership?

Julie Taymor: But you don't know it's the right partnership because it just grows. I think we met in 1980, so 26 years ago we met.

A film producer who had worked with Elliot said -- and who was a friend of mine -- said, "You're equally grotesque, so you might be attracted to each other's art." Then we created a musical together called Liberty's Taken -- that Norman Lear produced, actually -- of the underside, the bawdy underside of the American Revolution. And we started to work together in theater. He would do incidental music, and I would direct, or design and direct. And we found that our tastes and our inclinations and the stories we wanted to tell were aligned.
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Juan Darien would be the piece that really did it for us. He brought that piece to me. It's a Uruguayan short story by Horacio Quiroga. It's also a requiem mass. Elliot's idea was to put the requiem mass together with the seemingly naïve child's tale of cruelty. It's a child's tale just in that it's about a little jaguar in a circus, but what it shows is really man's inhumanity to the "other."

We have often been attracted to the story of the other, the outcast. And he and I just loved working together, so it just kept happening, and our relationship is completely bound up with our work. We enjoy each other's art. He's done Frida and Titus, and of course he won an Academy Award for Frida, which was very nice. I was happy it was on my film, you know.

Even with the Beatles, he and T-Bone Burnett are producing, but Elliot has done a good deal of the arrangements, and it's incredible to hear his new take on Beatles songs. It's amazing as a composer.

Do you edit each other's works?

Julie Taymor: That's an interesting question. We so much love what the other does, and respect it, that if he does something that I don't quite get, I won't question it -- especially in the opera. The opera is his. The composer is at the top. He's top dog. So for me, last night, I didn't take a bow, because I wanted to see Elliot go on stage. It was the most extraordinarily wonderful thing to have all those people standing for him. There's a lot of private stuff that goes into that, but it is his work in opera. It's Mozart's Magic Flute. It's not Schikaneder's Magic Flute. Now, I've done the Magic Flute, and I've got a nice one that keeps coming back, but in years it will die and Mozart won't.

So Goldenthal's Grendel is there, and in that, I didn't even listen to a lot of it until it was done, because in film -- when he's doing music for my films -- I am the director and I can say, "I don't like that. It doesn't work." And he has to sublimate, even if he feels it does. But now, after these many years, if he really believes, I can probably see it. You see? There's a different communication. We're much faster. It's very easy to see where the other is going and support it. So it's an amazing artistic collaboration in theater. He's done ballets on his own, and other works, but we're doing theater and film and now opera, and we're doing musicals as well together.

After Across the Universe is edited, do you have another project already in mind?

Julie Taymor: Yes, we have. I have a couple. We're doing a movie musical of Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads, which we did as theater and as a musical, and now we're throwing out all the original and writing together. We enjoy writing songs together too. I did one for Frida. I do the lyrics, he does the music. So we're writing this musical together.

Then -- if it happens, it happens -- but I've been slated to direct a Broadway musical Spiderman with Bono and the Edge writing the music. It just hasn't quite been signed off on; it's been in development for a while. But I would like to do that. I look forward to that. I've got a weird take on it.

Thank you very much for a great conversation.

You're very welcome. Thank you.

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