Julie Taymor is a Phi Beta Kappa MacArthur Genius director of theater, film, and opera, whose psychedelic oeuvre spans from Broadway’s majestic The Lion King to Across the Universe’s elegiac romp through the ’60s. Taymor sat down with former Disney CEO and Institute trustee Michael Eisner at the 2012 Ideas Festival to talk about everything from Indonesian puppet theatre to her distaste for pacifying children with technology.

ON BECOMING DIRECTOR OF THE LION KING

Michael Eisner: The number two guy in animation called me up and said, ‘How about Julie Taymor?’ And I said, being very well-educated in the theatre, ‘Who is Julie Taymor?’ And they said, ‘She’s worked in Indonesia, very avant-garde, she’s done all these unbelievable things.’ So we decided we’d have Julie present some ideas of what she would do with Lion King, odds being one in ten that we would actually do anything, because everyone thought it would be impossible and crazy to try to do a theatre version of the movie. Julie came down to a little room at the Disney Institute and presented in half an hour basically what became Lion King. And she had—I don’t know what it was called, the thing with the wheels—

Julie Taymor: Gazelle wheel.
 
ME: The gazelle wheel, which she rolled in, and we just said, ‘Fine, go, do it.’ Julie, what was your side of it?
 
JT: I think I was doing Oedipus Rex at the Stravinsky Opera at the time, and I was on my way to do The Flying Dutchman in LA at the LA Opera. I said, ‘You know, I don’t know if I’ve seen that movie. So I asked [Disney] to send me the tape. And I looked at it, and it’s an amazing animated film, but Disney’s visual aesthetic and my aesthetic are not the same.

But I took one look at it, and I thought, ‘Wow, how to put a stampede on a stage? That’s exciting.’ Puppet theater, as you all know from your childhood, is when the puppeteers hide behind a black curtain or in a Punch and Judy stage, and these little things go up and down. And you suspend your disbelief, you believe that these things are alive and that they’re moving, but the puppeteer is hidden, meaning the magic is concealed. The idea with The Lion King was to expose the magic, to expose the strings, the rods, the mechanics, and that the telling of the story would be as moving, as spiritually moving, as emotionally moving, as the story itself.

ME: I hear all of this, and then I hear that Julie wants to make a few changes in the story. And so began the negotiations. We agreed on one change we thought was good—making Rafiki, the monkey, a woman.

JT: One of the problems I had with the story was that the women’s parts were lousy. They were just terrible, as usual. I say that because in most fairy tales you have to have the wicked stepmother or have to have no mother at all, otherwise the child has no journey to make. If you’ve got a very happy mother-and-father situation, there’s no story to be told. In the same way, Simba’s mother is a lousy character. She is nonexistent. So what I suggested was to have Rafiki, who was kind of a storyteller, shaman, be the center of the piece in a spiritual way.

ON SPENDING HER FORMATIVE YEARS
TRAVELING

ME: At 15, you went to Paris for a year, and then to Indonesia for four years. As a parent, I cannot imagine letting my daughter do any of that. How did your parents let you do it, and why did you do it? And is it the basis of everything creatively that you have brought to The Lion King, your operas, and your movies?
 
JT: I don’t know how many of you have seen Across the Universe, but that’s my family in it, a little bit.I’m the little girl opening the door and watchingmy parents go through the hell of the ’60s. Andwhat happened with me is that they let me do whatI wanted to do. They had so much to contend withwith my brother and sister.
My sister is a radical, very political.

My brother was a musician drop-out, and my parents were dealing with something that many parents had to deal with, but they didn’t know what had hit them, because they were the first. And I became a go-between and was treated very much as an adult from [when I was] a very little girl. I was given tremendous freedom, and therefore I’d make up my own decisions about what I wanted to do. And it wasn’t spoiling me, it wasn’t materialistic, it was always ‘I’d like to go into Boston on the T.’ And starting at age eight, I went into Boston every day from the suburbs to do theatre, and they let me go.

ME: That’s not 8,000 miles away at age 15.

JT: By the time I was 13, 14, I said I wanted to go on the Experiment in International Living, and they were fine with it. I would go to Eastern Europe, Indonesia, and Japan, on a fellowship for visual theater and experimental puppet theater— whatever that is. I went for three months and ended up staying four years in Indonesia.

I found Indonesia so compelling because television and films hadn’t really made their way. There might have been one television in a village or occasionally, but people were still performing their local theatrical rituals even in the cities. Theatre was a profound art form. In those cultures, art is synonymous with how you live your life. I was astounded and moved by the power of theatre not just to tell the stories that are the stories of mythologies that religions cover, but also to be a socializing event. Because the theatre was where during the nine-hour shadow play, you could move around and flirt with your boyfriend or girlfriend, and children could fall asleep, and they wake up for the clowns. It reminded me of Shakespearean plays, where theatre was also not isolated in boxes.

ON ART’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PHYSICAL WORLD

Question from the Audience: Could you ever see doing what you do on an iPad platform?

JT: It’s not something I wouldn’t do, because I’ll do television, I’ve done television, I use technology in my work, and I make movies. But creating something for the iPad when I really believe that the physical world, the taste, smell, touch, feel, the senses need to be engaged, especially for children? I would rather make that become my mantra and religion than create something for the iPad.

Audience: Which means that many people will never see it.

JT: That’s not true. The Lion King is going on tour in Great Britain, and I’m going to Brazil in October to do the Brazilian version. But the point is, children in a backyard is The Lion King, children playing outside with a kite is The Lion King. And I disagree with where we say it’s okay for a kid to sit on a couch and look at an iPad as opposed to going outside and putting a piece of fabric to a stick with a line and flying it around to understand the physics and beauty of nature. To me, this is what has to
be impressed upon society and what we have to do with our children.