Julie Taymor
American director of theater, opera and film.
It’s not difficult to see why Taymor, with her penchant for folk tales and fascination with the cycles of life, would be attracted to the epic tale of an ordinary boy who must cross the thresholds of death and rebirth to claim the mantle of hero.
We have a ways to go in understanding the power of puppetry … Our problem is for too long we have thought of puppets being for children. … The appeal of puppetry to me is it's much more freeing for an artist … Puppetry is a completely controllable means to attack your characters in every possible way. The artist has the possibility to create a much larger landscape with puppetry. The human becomes more human in that sense. Another of the great things about puppetry is the ability to transform.
I love it when people say "What a horrible, lousy idea." I think that's great … I hate the comfort zone … I don't think that anything that's really creative can be done without danger and risk.
I used to say that arts were talked about in the arts and leisure page. Now, why would it be arts and leisure? Why do we think that arts are leisure? Why isn't it arts and science or arts and the most important thing in your life? I think that art has become a big scarlet letter in our culture.
It's a big "A." And it says, you are an elitist, you're effete, or whatever those things...do you know what I mean? It means you don't connect. And I don't believe that. I think we've patronized our audiences long enough.
You can do things that would bring people to another place and still get someone on a very daily mundane moving level but you don't have to separate art from the masses.
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.
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.
I understood really the power of art to transform. I think transformation became the main word in my life.
Transformation because you don't want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see? You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says you didn't know you could see the back of your head. You didn't know that you could amount cubistic see almost all the same aspects at the same time. It allows human beings to step out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different about it.
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.
To me, where theater has it all over film is that it’s in the moment, it’s tactile, you feel it …You’re completely immersed in it — right here and right now.
The first thing I do when I’m creating, either for stage or for cinema, is to find the ideograph of the story. Which is; the one, simple expression that can tell everything. And at the same time be recognizable for the audience. It’s like in old Japanese paintings — if you were to paint a bamboo forest, you should be able to find its essence with only three strokes.
When I was 14 or 13 or 15 I went to Sri Lanka on the Experiment in International Living for a summer. I wanted to travel. And going outside of my own culture and traveling and seeing my own world from a foreign perspective is a big part of my life and who I am. That's what I was talking about earlier, is stepping outside of yourself and examining yourself with a different perspective is very important, and it's important to do as an artist for others.