Julie Taymor Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In today's world, it's more relevant than ever. It's about how do we look at the world from the outsider's point of view, from the monster's point of view.

I lived in Indonesia for four years and I understand trance and magic and where it comes from.

Children have an easier ability to tap into the surreal than adults do, in a funny kind of way.

One of the reasons why I love to do Shakespeare is that this great artist was able to talk to a wide variety of audiences. He could do the bawdy plays and the humor and the clowns-as you know, because you're a wonderful Stephano-that speaks to the populace, the masses, the groundlings, whatever.

Spider-Man is a genuine American myth with a dark, primal power ... but it's also got this great superhero, and - hey! - he can fly through the theater at 40 miles an hour. It's got villains, it's got skyscrapers, it's colorful, it's Manhattan. I knew it would be a challenge, but I saw the inherent theatricality in it, and I couldn't resist.

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

I've had male executives say that my lead character was unlikable because she slept with a lot of guys.

We tell myths over and over again, lest we forget who we are, lest we not understand that these tales take us through the darkness of our lives, and they put us into a place where you understand what it is to be human.

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.

My God, it transformed me. My life changed.

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

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

People will justify whatever for a good cause.

Limitations force you to find the essence of what you want to say, which is one of the most important things to know for an artist.

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.

Directing is much more psychological-it's a lot like being a general. And you have to be organized. While you're making a film, you have between two and 500 people asking you a billion questions.

I saw bubbling lava, and at the same moment I saw a reflection of a certain kind of inner turmoil. Because at the moment I looked into that crater, I slipped, and a large piece of volcanic rock took a hole out of my leg. The scar is still there 20, 30 years later. But it's one of those things that reminds you of the kind of risk or the kind of moment in order to push yourself.

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.

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.

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.

What I adore is the juxtaposition of high tech and low tech. It's sort of like I love the sacred and the profane. I love to put these extremes in the same hopper.

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

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.

What I don't have in theater is editing.

I think that both musicals and opera have a capacity to get to an inner emotional landscape.

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.

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

I love directing Shakespeare on film. It's fantastic that the actors would do exactly the same thing and be true to their part.

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

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.

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

When you break into song, it's not about dialogue, it's not about how you would speak in a naturalistic sense-it's about expressing your inner torment or your inner joy.

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

I'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.

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.