Julie Taymor Quotes (28 Quotes)


    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.

    After I had received the Watson Fellowship and had been two years in Indonesia on this traveling fellowship, I stayed to start my own theater company.

    You know, I went to Oberlin. At that time, grades were - you elected to have them or not. It was all of that era where grades were out the window. But I did very well in school. I didn't really study the arts; I practiced the arts.

    And I just think that to introduce an unknown Shakespeare is thrilling, too - not to do Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, to do the richer Shakespeare. People will come to this and not know the story.

    One question on everyone's lips is whether a woman will capture best director for a play or musical. This year women are nominated in both categories -- Garry Hynes for the play The Beauty Queen of Leenane, ... The Lion King.


    But I don't think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare's Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.

    There is incredible power in the arts to inspire and influence.

    I have had a lot of experience directing actors so although this is my first feature film, it's certainly not my first time directing with big stars.

    I use cinematic things in a theatrical way on stage, and in film I use theatrical techniques in a cinematic way.

    There's never been a woman that won it, so we don't know, there may never be. But there have not been that many women on Broadway directing, period.

    You program music with an image and then people are desensitized.

    People will justify whatever for a good cause.

    We feel that Grendel is very, very potent as to where we are today, which may not be any different than where we were in the 10th Century.

    Americans in particular are myopic. They're not traveling as much. When you were a college student, the next thing you would do on graduation was to take a year off and travel. That's what I did. I went to Indonesia.

    It's people who are repressed and cannot express their fears that are dangerous.

    I really do believe that if you don't challenge yourself and risk failing, that it's not interesting.

    I have directed good actors and have gone through the process which is more detailed in theater in a way. You have to get people to stay for two or three hours in a performance. They need more talk and rehearsal than in films.

    When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.

    We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.

    I have never had a problem with people not being able to understand the words and the meanings in Titus.


    One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it.

    I am, to be quite honest, sick of hero stories.

    This is not to make it easier, it's just to entice people to come.

    Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.

    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.

    I'm not going to spend two years on a film or four years on an opera if I don't feel like I can put my own self into it. That doesn't mean it has to be about myself.

    I had spent a lot of my life in other cultures. I spent four years in Indonesia. I traveled through Japan. ... I have seen theater practiced in these ways before mask theater, puppet theater.


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