Julie Taymor
Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Movies
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.Collection: Relationship
There is incredible power in the arts to inspire and influence.
I really do believe that if you don't challenge yourself and risk failing, that it's not interesting.
What I don't have in theater is editing.
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.
It's people who are repressed and cannot express their fears that are dangerous.
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.
People will justify whatever for a good cause.
I use cinematic things in a theatrical way on stage, and in film I use theatrical techniques in a cinematic way.
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.
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 have never had a problem with people not being able to understand the words and the meanings in Titus.
You program music with an image and then people are desensitized.
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.
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.
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.
I am, to be quite honest, sick of hero stories.
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.
Creativity is a gift, but if you don't know how to use it you might not even know it's there. There's a lot of creativity in the air, but it's meaningless if you're not open to receiving it.Collection: Creativity
An artist is an entertainer, number one - a storyteller who takes people someplace, who gives them what they didn't know they wanted.Collection: Artist
You just have to throw fear out the window. If there's anything that's going to hold you back, it's fear.Collection: Window
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.Collection: Writing
I think we all see the world from our own little unique bubble.Collection: Unique
When I'm working as a director, I might have an idea of my own but I'm also trying to get great ideas out of my actors. 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 2 and 500 people asking you a billion questions.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Song
It's how you tell the story that makes it new. That's what artists do. They let us look at the world from a different perspective. They let us look at birds in a way that makes us never see birds again in the same way. That's why I don't think computers are healthy for kids. They're too literal. You pop a button and a bluebird comes out. You pop another button and you can take the color blue and shove it into the outline of the bluebird.Collection: Kids
A performance can have amazing visuals and special effects, but it has to tell a good story, even if that story isn't original.Collection: Special
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.Collection: Darkness
In a way, artists are shamans, facilitators who take what's there, channel it through themselves, then put it out there for people to appreciate.Collection: Artist
When we were kids, you picked up a little paper and put it on a stick; and when you waved it back and forth, you understood the power of air underneath the wings. In that way, a child begins to understand abstraction, poetry, metaphor, symbolism. You play with the materials you have and use your imagination to make them into something else. That what's so sad about having everything on a little screen - it's not physical and dimensional, and that seems backward.Collection: Children
That's my policy - to be positive, to just hope that something will happen. If you start with all your fears, your receptivity is for the negative.Collection: Being Positive
I want to experience a performance on all levels - I want goose bumps and I want to leave the movie or play arguing about something that's unresolved.Collection: Play
I call myself a playmaker sometimes - but that's just a word. I don't feel like I have to have a title or a job description.Collection: Jobs
Going to the Far East was my first eye-opener to a world vastly different from my own. Then when I was 16 I lived in Paris for a year and studied mime. At 21 I went to Indonesia. I had planned to go for three months, but I stayed four years. I just got lost in the culture.Collection: Eye
In America, the word art has become like the word adultery. It's this big scarlet letter. When you say you're an artist, people are like, "Ugh."Collection: Art
The idea that all violence in movies is okay simply because it happens is bull. Directors and writers have a responsibility.Collection: Responsibility
Because my parents had given me tremendous respect, trust, and freedom as a child, I knew how to take responsibility for myself. If you're constantly being told "No, don't do that" or "We don't trust you," you can't develop that responsibility.Collection: Children
I am creative in my living space - the designer in me helps that out.Collection: Space
Growing up I had amazing parents who really let me be creative and free. I was the youngest of three by six years, the child who was the outsider and observer. When I went off to Boston to act, I was very young - 10. And my parents didn't fear that. They had the respect to let me make my choices.Collection: Children
Children have an easier ability to tap into the surreal than adults do, in a funny kind of way.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Reflection
I think that both musicals and opera have a capacity to get to an inner emotional landscape.Collection: Emotional
I love directing Shakespeare on film. It's fantastic that the actors would do exactly the same thing and be true to their part.Collection: Actors
I lived in Indonesia for four years and I understand trance and magic and where it comes from.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Dark
I've had male executives say that my lead character was unlikable because she slept with a lot of guys.Collection: Character