Top 72 Quotes & Sayings by Julie Taymor
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American director Julie Taymor.
Last updated on November 3, 2024.
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.
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.
People will justify whatever for a good cause.
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.
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.
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.
Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.
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'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.
It's people who are repressed and cannot express their fears that are dangerous.
I use cinematic things in a theatrical way on stage, and in film I use theatrical techniques in a cinematic way.
You program music with an image and then people are desensitized.
There is incredible power in the arts to inspire and influence.
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 am, to be quite honest, sick of hero stories.
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.
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.
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 don't have in theater is editing.
Some of my ideas for film or theater come to me in dreams. I'm also very creative when I'm talking to others. I believe in collaboration.
People have become so literal because they're used to reality-based television.
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.
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.
Learning is about much more than science and math. Doing theater, music, and art in school really helps children's minds grow because they're using different parts of their brains. Parents who care should insist on that.
My aesthetic is not a Disney aesthetic at all, but when I met with the wonderful producers at Disney, they weren't looking for me to do their aesthetic. I'd already spent 20 years in the theater, so if they were going to hire me, they'd be hiring me for what I have to offer.
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.
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.
You don't have to patronize your audience, and you can mix art and commerce in a profound way. You can simultaneously play to the sophisticated, 60-year-old theatergoers and to 4-year-olds.
I don't want to sound like a heroic woman or to seem full of myself, but I do have a core of trust that I'll figure things out and find my way. And if whatever I try is not a good experience, even that is a good experience. If something turns out lousy, it's interesting.
My God, it transformed me. My life changed.
Americans are attracted to the dark side. But which movies should be allowed to be violent and show that dark side, and which should not? I don't believe in censorship, but I do think there are horrible movies that are bad for you.
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 think we all see the world from our own little unique bubble.
When I was growing up, there were a lot more arts in the public schools. Politically, America has screwed up on that.
An artist is an entertainer, number one - a storyteller who takes people someplace, who gives them what they didn't know they wanted.
You just have to throw fear out the window. If there's anything that's going to hold you back, it's fear.
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.
When I'm sculpting, I work with wood and clay, and though some say that an image is already in the material and the sculptor just has to discover it, I also believe you have an image in your head that you're trying to get to. So you're in a dialogue with the piece, a back-and-forth.
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.
What I don't know for sure is what's next for me - and I don't mind that. I know for sure that whatever happens will be interesting and will challenge and excite me.
The idea that all violence in movies is okay simply because it happens is bull. Directors and writers have a responsibility.
I'm a firm believer in the idea that theater excels over film and TV in its ability to let people play with poetry.
I know I'm missing something, but those who have children are missing what I get to do. And frankly, I'm probably missing more of what I don't want than what I do. Some may call me selfish or narcissistic, but I don't want to spend my time going to PTA meetings. The only way I could have children and do the work I do is to have a househusband - and I'm not attracted to a househusband. I'd rather affect children with the work I do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You have to stop yourself from even thinking about failing.
A performance can have amazing visuals and special effects, but it has to tell a good story, even if that story isn't original.
We're really having a problem right now in our culture. I haven't seen one movie lately in which the story and visuals have been equally good.
Everything amounts to nothing if you don't love someone or something.
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."
Some people become dullards, but as children we are all creative. It's in the programming, the socialization, that we lose our sense of play.
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.
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.
I believe that if you really have a strong idea, you can say, "What do you think? Let's see how my idea plays off yours."
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.
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