Julie Taymor Talks TITUS, LION KING, Being Fired and Doing What Film Can't

Julie Taymor recently made an appearance at the LA Film Festival, where she chatted about everything from The Lion King to The Tempest, Titus, and more, according to LA Weekly. On the violence in her film adaptation of a Shakespeare classic, Titus, Taymor commented: "What that poetic aspect does is make you step outside of the violence in a way and reassess what it is."

She continued: "In the theater, it was a very simple production. Just plastic legs with photographic reproductions of black and white columns on them. And that was the set. And then I adapted the script, and all of a sudden there's 150 locations." 

On bringing The Lion King to the stage over a decade ago, she added, "What I wanted to do was to make sure it did things that film cannot do. I wanted to show the rods and the strings.... It's the very transparency of creation that becomes the story. I wanted to burst through the space of theater."

Taymor's absence from center stage - a place she once frequented as a performer - may be coming to an end soon.  When asked about plans to return to acting she joked: "I just got fired. I'm available."  

Taymor is widely known for directing the stage musical, The Lion King, for which she became the first woman to win the Tony Award for directing a musical. She had been the director of the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark before leaving in March 2011, after four months of previews (the longest preview period for any show in Broadway history), following artistic differences with the producers.

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