Julie Taymor recently lept
from director of a cuddly Disney tale to a story of revenge, rape,
infanticide, cannibalism and dismemberment. Best known as the Tony Award-winning
director of Broadway's "The Lion King," Taymor dove into the deep end for
her feature film directorial debut, choosing a gory and lesser- known Shakespeare
play, "Titus Andronicus," to adapt for the screen (she had already adapted
it for an off-Broadway production in 1995). The result is "Titus,"
starring Jessica Lange and Anthony Hopkins, a highly stylized, time- warped
comic book of a film in the vein of Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" and
Ian McKellen's "Richard III," and yet entirely its own creature. Although
this dark and disturbing play has been dismissed by many as an aberration,
the plot seems surprisingly relevant today.
CitySearch recently sat down with Ms.
Taymor, who was elegantly dressed in all black, to discuss the genius of
Shakespeare, the blending of time periods and the MPAA's influence on films.
Well, I've loved films forever.
I'm not really interested in being in the business. I'm interested in making
movies. There's a distinct difference between those two things. I love
the art form. I love what you can do with it.
The time is a created time.
You can't say, like in "Richard III," that it's the 1940s ... it's a blend
of time. Now, about how you'd have Bassianus in a 1950s Thunderbird and
Saturninus in Mussolini's convertible ... and Titus in a chariot [that]
has more to do with that character. That costume and period feel of the
music was more of an essence of who they are as people ... Costume is about
personality, not about OK, now we're in the '50s, now we're in the '90s,
now we're in the '80s.
We cut a little bit of violence
but not much ... Violence isn't an issue in America, it's sex. And
I cut a little bit out of the orgy scene. The orgy is only 30 seconds out
of a 2-hour 40-minute movie. To give an NC-17 for four seconds was just
ludicrous ... but you have to compromise with the MPAA. They have only
done their job if they've done something to your movie.
The orgy in my movie is so non-graphic,
it's almost humorous. It's meant to be humorous, it's not meant to be erotic
... it's comic relief really. And I'll tell you, it was funnier before
[it was cut] ... I wasn't there trying to do something lurid, but this
is our culture. It's OK to have "The Matrix" and blow everybody up and
laugh at "Pulp Fiction," but whoa if you should do something that's beautiful
like sex. It's so weird. It's so sick.
It leaves a bad taste in everyone's
mouth. I think it's disgusting. What I think is the most disgusting
is that the nipple had to be airbrushed off the metal armor [in the movie
poster featuring Jessica Lange] because posters have to be [rated] R. I
think that's saying something very bad about a female ... The breast is
what nourishes us, and to make the nipple into a negative image is obscene.
He's a genius. The man understood
human nature better than anybody. You look at something like "Titus," his
first play, and it's so rich in comprehension of what makes human beings
do what they do. So I think people can put on layers for later generations
... but he understood human nature. That's why these are great plays. You
can't say that we make them good plays by our understanding of them. It's
all in the text, every single bit of it is in the text ... He was a brilliant
writer of his time, and his time is oddly very close to our time.
Young people have really dug it. The
distributors were surprised, since it's Shakespeare. But hello! Look at
what kind of Shakespeare it is. The inner-city high school students went
berserk when I played it for them ... They said, "Move over Schwarzenegger,
here comes Titus."
—Sasha Emmons
Photos: Courtesy of Fox Searchlight
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