L'interview intégrale et en anglais de Julie Taymor

Rencontre avec la metteur en scène du Roi Lion.

Photo : DR

Are you going to be involved in the French adaptation of “The Lion King”?
Well, yeah, in the sense that I’ve met with the translator and we’ve talked about where I want him to go in certain things, but I’m not writing it. We have a very good French writer who’s going to adapt it.

The music is the same though.
The music is the same. The thing that changes is that all the lyrics which were in English will be put in French and all the African lyrics will stay the same.

You’ve lived in some exotic places. How did that influence you and do you think that some rituals in African and Far East countries are like theater?
The theater of Asia and Indonesia is incredibly prevalent and powerful, and in Japan as well. I lived in Indonesia when I was 21 for four years, and after two years, I ended up starting a theater company of Javanese and Balinese mask dancers, actors and musicians. So I worked in all kinds of Indonesian theater and created original theater there with traditional performers doing modern, contemporary stories. And that blend of the traditional with the new is always something that interests me. And then I spent a lot of time in Japan and modern Japanese theater, which is fabulous as well.
So a lot of that has inspired me and influenced my theatrical vocabulary, but I always had it filtered through my own aesthetic and my own eyes. What I don’t believe in and try not to do is to just pick up another person’s culture and plunk it down in the middle of my work. You’ll see the influence and the inspiration from techniques that come from many other cultures, but filtered through the artists of “The Lion King”. They’re filtered through my eyes, my choreographer’s eyes, the composer’s eyes.

What are the main differences between the movie and the Broadway show?
Unlike the movie, the South African music is brought to the foreground. You are very aware of the chorus, the style of singing and even many of the soloists, and even one of the leads, are South African. That just gets you in a way. Yes, it plays against the pop music of Elton John, but it kind of works because the characters that Elton’s songs are much more of the European style characters. The choreographer is American and Jamaican. His roots are African. He’s not a Broadway choreographer, but he’s a contemporary modern dance choreographer. I picked him because I love him and he’s brilliant, but also I could see how he uses the body would be perfect for this landscape of animals. It’s a very sophisticated movement and very hard for traditional Broadway dancers.
When you asked about ritual, I think people will feel… what happens is that when the piece begins, people will feel that they’re going to something that they’ve been to in their deep paths, something ancient in our blood, which is the origins of theater and why people put theater on. They put it on to celebrate holidays or a death of a person or the coming of age. It’s to honor certain transition in human life. Theater is performed in traditional societies not just for money and entertainment and to be in the magazines, but because they have to. So part of “The Lion King” is entertainment, but the other part is when the audience and whoever they come with watches the story of the rite of passage of this child, of this young man – the prodigal son – moving through this experience of life that touches on their own experience. And that’s the ritual part of it.
A family came once. They had two children and they and ordered the tickets six months in advance. During that time, the elder daughter died, and they didn’t know whether they wanted to bring the younger child to the show. Everybody said, “Go anyway. You need a lift in life.” So they came and they watched the show and they were still in mourning, but there’s a point in the story where the child knows that his father is going to die and he asks his father, “Will you always be there with me?” The father sings this very beautiful song called “They Live in You”, and he talks about how the great kings of the past are the stars, and you see them up there “They live in you, they live in me”. It’s a song that says, “Even if my body is gone, I’m always there with you.” At that moment, the child of the family turned to his parents and he said, “Sarah’s with us, isn’t she? She’s with us.” See, that’s why people did theater originally. That’s is the whole reason why people performed to take people through that dark moment. The Lion King is colorful and beautiful and all of those things, but there’s another part to storytelling, which is we’re taking you to something and a lot of people have been touched. My father never showed up at the first performance. He died. He went into hospital on the opening night of Lion King. My mother sat next to me and she just grabbed me during “He Lives in You, He Lives in Me”, and I had no idea he was dying at that moment. She did. She was forced to come to the theater because it had taken me two years to work on it.
So theater has such potential to excite people artistically, but also excite them in how they lived in their world, how you get through all of these moments of not just joy but darkness as well.

From the way you depict it, I gather it’s more helpful or therapeutic than organized religion.
I do, because I believe that religion doesn’t have to be organized. I believe in the power of the spirit and I think that art is always elevating you to another place, like when you hear phenomenal music. The only thing that I do is beautiful is when you go into a great mosque or synagogue or church, the aura and the awe that you fell, that brings something to you. So if you can go to the theater and all of a sudden, around you, there’s this image and this music and it just penetrates you, it’s very much the same. And it’s like a camaraderie. It’s not like going to a movie where you don’t know who’s sitting next to you. It makes you feel something other than your banal. It takes you off of your every day ordinary existence, and hopefully, you look at life through a new lens. I show you life but not directly. That’s why I don’t like theater that’s so much like kitchen sink. I can watch television for that. For me, you come to the theater to see yourself completely differently. I’d rather show you a mirror like Picasso; I would rather make a Cubistic version and you say, “I never knew I looked that way before.” I don’t want you to see yourself exactly the way. People like to look at themselves on stage.
Look at something like Spiderman, which I’m doing as a musical (Bono is composing the music). Why is it so popular? Because somehow, the ordinary man in Spiderman, Peter Parker, is able to put on a mask and a costume and be a superhero. It’s simple, simple, simple. Why is he so popular with young black people? Because there’s no race. That little unassuming, non-strong geek puts on this and he could be any race. It’s about what’s in here and about what he does physically. So I think the strength of those movies is that there’s something that’s very real, because the characters are. They take you to a place that you’ve never been, so when a child sees Simba on stage, it’s a lion. It’s not a kid who goes to school and wears a lion’s costume!

Tell me about your upcoming film, “Across the Universe”. That’s the title of one of my favorite Beatles songs!
I’m very excited! It’s 33 Beatles songs reconceived, put into a context that’s got nothing to do with the Beatles, with six young people set during the sixties and yes, there’s a love story between two young people. And as the Beatles songs change from Chicklet bubble gum songs – which were great like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” – you watch the characters as the war becomes more present, as racial riots happen, as they drop out of college, one from England comes to America and can’t go home again… And as you watch them grow, the songs transform and we go into the psychedelic and the drug era and “I Am the Walrus”, “The Benefit of Mr. Kite” and “Revolution”. And the lead girl becomes a radical and a serious protestor because her brother’s drafted to Vietnam and her boyfriend’s Jude – Jude, Lucy and Max: they have all the (Beatles) names. And two of them are rock ’n roll singers. One of them, Sexy Sadie, becomes very ambitious and leaves the band and goes away. The other one is black and a guitarist. So I created the story around the songs and it does feel like the songs are coming from the people. And then in small cameo roles, we have Bono, and he’s great. He plays Dr. Robert, a kind of LSD guru who sings “I Am the Walrus” with an American accent. He plays an American from California with a big walrus moustache. He’s great! Eddie Izzard, the comic, plays the ringmaster in “The Benefit of Mr. Kite”, the circus, and Salma Hayek – I multiplied her five times – is the bang-bang shoot-shoot pin-up nurse in “Happiness is a Warm Gun”, which is set in a Vietnam veteran’s hospital. Joe Cocker is in it and he sings “Come Together” and he’s amazing as a pimp and an old hippie and a bum! Evan Rachel Wood is an extraordinary singer and she sings live. We’re introducing about four or five new young talents, and the lead – he sings ten songs – is going to be a big star. Sony just went, “Who is this guy?” It’s nothing like “Dreamgirls”, “Chicago” or “Moulin Rouge”. It’s more real and it goes into my style of animation and whacked-out theater. “Strawberry Fields” is “Strawberry Killing Fields” in Vietnam with strawberry bombs and strawberry paintings being made. It’s very real and surreal.