She Won’t Give You What You Expect

Director-designer Julie Taymor’s visionary work has been turning heads in the theater world for nearly two decades. Yet for all her renown among aficionados of the avant-garde, it’s only in the last few years that she’s come to the attention of mainstream audiences.

This newfound recognition comes thanks to Taymor’s Tony-winning turn as director and co-designer of Disney’s “The Lion King” and, more recently, her 1999 feature film debut, “Titus,” starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. “The Lion King,” which opened on Broadway in 1997 and now has productions in New York, Japan, London and Toronto, will arrive in Los Angeles in October.

Multidisciplinary, genre-bending and unfailingly imaginative, Taymor’s highly visual productions have long evinced a passion for the enduring power of myth and ritual. Using masks, dance, puppetry, music and other nonverbal theatrical forms, Taymor explores archetypes of good and evil in often dark tales laced with bawdy humor. At once classical and tribal, ancient and contemporary, her works draw inspiration from Eastern and Western societies alike, creating a truly cross-cultural idiom.

Late last year, Taymor’s 25-year career in theater, opera and film was given a major retrospective at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The exhibit will tour in 2000-01, although there are no dates set for Los Angeles or New York. Her recent works include Carlo Gozzi’s “The Green Bird,” which closed in April after a short run on Broadway, and the music-theater piece “Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass,” which she co-wrote with her longtime partner and collaborator, composer Elliot Goldenthal. Taymor’s work was last seen in L.A. when she staged “The Flying Dutchman” for Los Angeles Opera in 1995.

Based in Manhattan but recently in L.A. for final casting on “The Lion King” and other business, the 48-year-old Taymor spoke with The Times about her passion for theater, her work in film and opera, and her upcoming projects.

Question: “The Green Bird” was a success when it was first staged in New York in 1996 and then at the La Jolla Playhouse later that same year--and that was before you had “The Lion King” going for you. Yet it closed after only two months on Broadway. What happened?

Answer: The production we did in New York this time far surpassed the one at La Jolla or the one in New York before. We had tremendous reviews, but it was very hard for people to know what it was. Is it for children? Is it for adults? It was hard to know how to get to the audience completely, and we were in a Broadway house. It was very large and expensive to run for a straight play. We needed another 100 paying people a night just to cover the costs.

Straight theater on Broadway means straight theater--serious, straight, psychological, sociological theater. And when you do something like “The Green Bird,” it’s part musical, part dance, part hilarious masked performance, and part comic writing, and a lot of it created with the actors. You have to open yourself up to that, and on Broadway I think they’re still not ready to do that. It’s a very distressing situation. When we closed, it was four days before the Tonys. We didn’t get enough Tony nominations. Why? We don’t know.

I want to do a movie now. I feel like, why should I work for such little money unless it can have a life? I still will do [theater] because I love it, but you want your own community to say, “Wow, this is unique and let’s support it.” And that didn’t happen.

Q: One would’ve thought that the success of “The Lion King” would have brought people out to see another show by the same director.

A: Maybe “The Lion King” backfired on me. Maybe they thought, “She got hers.” It was a draw, and it was a negative, because then people come expecting “The Lion King.”

What I believe about an audience is they have expectations that you have to fill, and then you have to give them something they didn’t know they wanted, and that’s what I do. So they come to “The Lion King” thinking, “OK, I’m going to get that story, Simba and Elton John.” But then they’re also going to get the African music and this form of theater that they’ve never seen before, that they didn’t even believe could work.

You need to take the risks. Otherwise, you don’t move along there. Rightly so, Michael Eisner and Disney went for the risk. They did go to the extreme with that show and let me do my business.

Q: Given that the experience of “The Lion King,” unlike “The Green Bird,” turned out so well, it couldn’t have soured you on working in the theater. And yet you went from “The Lion King” to making a movie.

A: The reason I went from “The Lion King” to “Titus” was to go as far away from “The Lion King” in as many ways as possible. I like the message of “The Lion King,” so I’m not putting that down, but [there isn’t] the depth of what Shakespeare’s written and how he writes and the language. I’ve directed a number of Shakespeares, and I wanted to work with the best actors in the world--and I was able to.

Q: You directed Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” as a stage play off-Broadway in 1994. What made you want to return to it to adapt it to the screen?

A: The theme of violence and race is absolutely the No. 1 thing you have to talk about in this culture. I don’t think there’s a better dissertation on violence than “Titus.” Now after saying that, that’s a hard sell, because people don’t even like the way that sounds. So you’ve got to say, “Yes, but it’s entertaining.” It’s about violence versus violence as entertainment, and how we use violence as entertainment.

There’s a very complex, ironic relationship of violence and entertainment. All these beautiful paintings of mass slaughter, crucifixion, rape--[Hieronymus] Bosch--are the most sublime and supreme art in the world. And we as human beings have to keep constantly seeing what is in the darkest parts of our soul and what we do with that.

Q: “Titus” wasn’t your first effort on screen. You filmed your staging of the Stravinsky opera “Oedipus Rex,” as well as “Fool’s Fire,” your adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hopfrog,” for “American Playhouse.” But “Titus” was your first feature, and a large, logistically difficult and artistically ambitious one at that. Was it what you anticipated, making the transition from mostly stage work to this new arena?

A: I found that it’s a grueling experience, but the satisfaction of dailies is tremendous, and that’s a difference with theater. Theater is a constant developing process, and you can be very unsure of things until previews, until there’s an audience.

Q: Artistically, how much do the mediums have in common?

A: Many people think that theater directors aren’t cinematic. They think that they’re grounded in language and plays, because most plays are in three sets and a lot of dialogue. But what I do--and it’s obvious in “The Lion King”--is create a highly theatrical show that’s totally cinematic. My techniques include long shots and close-ups, but it’s pure theater.

I think that in each medium, including opera, you have to search for what that medium excels in, and that’s what you do. Movies excel in fantasies and realism. So in film, I do what you can only do in film. If you look at my favorite filmmakers, the early ones, [Georges] Melies, Fritz Lang, they created worlds, and they were much more cinematically theatrical than filmmakers dare to be now. Things became almost cinema verite, just like realism and naturalism in the theater became an obsession in the ‘40s and it hasn’t left.

Q: You’ve never shown much interest in everyday realism. And yet some might argue that film is an inherently more realistic medium than, say, theater. So what is it about film that attracts you?

A: I like the collision of reality and unreality. Then I think you can take your audiences someplace that they haven’t been before, and you can explore their nightmares and their inner worlds and their inner arias. I use the word “aria,” because an aria is a long form of a thought that might be a haiku thought, and it’s expanded.

In “Titus,” with the nightmare sequences, after I shot the movie, I thought, maybe I don’t need those. But I decided to put them in because they had come from the theater concept.

It’s a kind of skewed mirror on reality. I believe that’s what your role is as a filmmaker, as an artist, as a director. It’s not to throw back a direct mirror, but to throw back a reflection that gives insight and takes people to another level of understanding. It’s like Cubism. You get to see a situation or emotion from a different side, or you get to see it from all sides.

So when I get the absolutely everyday film scripts, no, I’m not that interested in doing that. There are plenty of other directors who do that very well. It’s not that I always want to do magical realism either. I’d love to do [Gabriel Garcia] Marquez; I’d love to do those books. But I’m also interested in things that can be very down to earth and present-day. It doesn’t all have to be myth-oriented.

Q: You have several potential film projects in the works. Care to talk about any of them, or the other projects you’re working on?

A: I’ve got one film in development, one being offered and one trying to get backed. The project I have at Fox in development is “The Flying Dutchman,” which is the opera I directed here, and it’s an updating. It’s an extraordinary myth, and I’m taking that character and bringing him into the present.

Elliot Goldenthal and I have been working for some time on developing an opera of Grendel, which is the Beowulf legend from the monster’s point of view. It’s a wonderful tale where you are forced to identify with the monster, and he is sort of us, the outcasts of us in the 20th century. I want to use ice dancing and wild monster dances on ice. We’ll exploit puppetry and live actors and dance in a way that hasn’t been done in opera and film. I want to use three-dimensional film.

Elliot and I want to do a musical together. We’re contemplating doing a large one with Disney. And I’m actually at the moment letting people know that I’d like to do some new plays.