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Julie Taymor Quotes (1952-)
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About Julie Taymor
Julie Taymor (born 15 December 1952) is an American director of theater, opera and film. She is widely known for directing the stage musical The Lion King, for which she became the first woman to win the Tony Award for directing a musical. She is currently working on the upcoming Broadway-musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
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βTo me, where theater has it all over film is that itβs in the moment, itβs tactile, you feel it β¦Youβre completely immersed in it β right here and right now.β
βI love it when people say "What a horrible, lousy idea." I think that's great β¦ I hate the comfort zone β¦ I don't think that anything that's really creative can be done without danger and risk.β
βI 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.β
βI'm trying to make the theatrical experience an environmental experience. We want to have the theatre of it right in the laps of the audience β¦ You don't know until the last half second that he's going to be that close.β
βI've never been a puppeteer, I conceive and I write and I design and I direct. And not just puppets. I direct actors, I direct dancers, I direct singers, I direct films. I also direct puppeteers. I'm really a theatre maker, but there's not a word for that.β
βI'm not religious, but I believe in the ecstasy that art and religion can create in human beings, the ecstatic or the awe β as I like to call it, you know, "a-w-e" β 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."β
βWe 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.β
βI can't design a mask and say to someone else, "Just do it." It's partly because I'm a better sculptor than I am a drawer. Considering the amount of time it would take me to draw exactly what I want, I might as well sculpt it. I paint most of it too. It's incredibly time consuming so I end up turning down a lot of jobs I want to do.β
βI would never do something with just puppets. . . But I like the things puppets allow you to do. I had this puppet Dinah Donewell, and she had this hand puppet named Mr. Pleaser. He was her lap dog who was constantly under her skirt. Now if you did that with actors, people would be offended. But in this case, so what? It was a puppet with a puppet.β
βTheater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry. β¦ A lot of what I do in theater is cinematic, and a lot of what I do in film is theatrical, but there are different rules to it. β¦ each art form makes me more interested in the other art form because I try and bring in those techniques and those ideas and put them into a different way of using them.β
βWhere I live is not necessarily in New York City. That's where my apartment is, but I live in Mexico, or I live in Indonesia. I live in Japan. I feel as comfortable in those other cultures, because, in a way, I'm always uncomfortable. I can't explain that, exactly, but I put myself into situations where I'm forced to do something, to create, to respond, to see differently.β
βWhen 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.β
βI'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 β 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.β
βThe first thing I do when Iβm 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. Itβs like in old Japanese paintings β if you were to paint a bamboo forest, you should be able to find its essence with only three strokes.β
βSpider-Man is a genuine American myth with a dark, primal power β¦ but itβs also got this great superhero, and β hey! β he can fly through the theater at 40 miles an hour. Itβs got villains, itβs got skyscrapers, itβs colorful, itβs Manhattan. I knew it would be a challenge, but I saw the inherent theatricality in it, and I couldnβt resist.β
βWe have a ways to go in understanding the power of puppetry β¦ Our problem is for too long we have thought of puppets being for children. β¦ The appeal of puppetry to me is it's much more freeing for an artist β¦ 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.β
βI 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.β
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.β
βIn our culture, we think that happy and color is trivial, that black and darkness is deeper. But Nietzsche said β which is a line that I firmly believe β "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.β
Julie Taymor Quotes by Topic
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Julie Taymor on The Tempest (2010 film)
βI didn't really have a male actor that excited me in mind, and yet there had been a couple of phenomenal females β Helen Mirren being one of them β who [made me think]: "My God, does this play change? What happens if you make that role into a female role?" β¦ We did a reading to see if it was just a gimmick, and it worked so beautifully. The potential was there to enhance the play for people who know it β and for others it will just seem natural.β
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Julie Taymor on Puppetry
βWe have a ways to go in understanding the power of puppetry β¦ Our problem is for too long we have thought of puppets being for children. β¦ The appeal of puppetry to me is it's much more freeing for an artist β¦ 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.β
What Julie Taymor Said About Others
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Julie Taymor on William Shakespeare
βWhy Shakespeare lends itself so well to film is because he wrote movies.β
Julie Taymor on Miscarriage
βWe always write stories of tragedies because that's how we reach our human depth. How we get to the other side of it? We look at the cruelty, the darkness and horrific events that happened in our life, whether it be a miscarriage or a husband who is not faithful. Then you find this ability to transcend. And that is called the passion, like the passion of Christ. You could call this the passion of Frida Kahlo, in a way. When I talk about passion, and I'm not a religious person, but I absolutely am drawn and attracted to the power of religious art because it gets at that most extreme emotion of the human experience.β
Quotes About Julie Taymor
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Bono on Julie Taymor
βJulie Taymor's definitely a magician. And I think that's what you call a person who, even though they put the rabbit in the hat, is really surprised when it comes out: that's her.β
Adam Green on Julie Taymor
βItβs 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.β
N. R. Kleinfield on Julie Taymor
βEven though she is enduringly fond of her creations, Ms. Taymor never operates any of the puppets herself. "I can't do everything," she said. β¦ Becoming renowned for puppets is not easy β finding a new galaxy or making the draw at Wimbledon is easier. β¦ People sometimes sum her up simply as a puppeteer, which aggravates her to no end. She prefers to be thought of as a writer and director who happens to use puppets. American culture, she believes, does not pay due homage to the idea of the puppet. β¦ She believes it might be better to allude to her puppets as "kinetic sculpture."β
About Julie Taymor
Julie Taymor (born 15 December 1952) is an American director of theater, opera and film. She is widely known for directing the stage musical The Lion King, for which she became the first woman to win the Tony Award for directing a musical. She is currently working on the upcoming Broadway-musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.