"The Lion King" is now the highest-grossing Broadway production of all time. Julie Taymor hadn't seen the Disney film when she was approached to direct the project, but she had spent years studying the masks, mythology, and ancient ritual drama of indigenous peoples in Indonesia. She tells host Alec Baldwin how she incorporates theater's primal magic into her many stage and screen projects: from the Beatles-soundtracked cosmic narrative of "Across the Universe;" to the elemental brutality of "Titus;" to her recent hallucinatory production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
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This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policymakers and performers, to hear their stories, what inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influenced their work. If you're going to see The Lion King on Broadway, don't be late. The first number, The Circle of Life is as miraculous an opening as you'll ever see. Life sized animal puppets parade through the aisles to African music. It's breathtaking. Julie Taymore, the woman who brought this animated Disney musical to the stage, which went on to become the most successful Broadway musical of all time, is my guest today. Since The Lion King, Julie's work has run the gamut. She's directed Shakespeare operas, films, and a solo show. Her recent staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream christened a new theater space in Brooklyn this summer. She released a movie of the production, and we prepared it over three days and shot it. But I knew the play well and I could make a shot list. I knew it very well, so I could I could really think about what would be the scenes that I would want to do. And that's it. The last week of performances. Whose idea was it to do the play itself? What was the genesis of the play. Well, the theater for new audience was getting a new new theater, and Jeffrey Harwitz, the producer, asked me if I would inaugurate the new house, and you know, he knew I wanted to do Macbeth, but he said go ahead. I said, are you out of your mind? You can't open a new theater with McBeth. So I had read, sure you can her house down? I don't think so. But we did readings of four or places Harness on our back. You've done it. I know that. Um So I decided, even though I hadn't really been all that interested in dream, I decided it was the right one to bless a new house because it's the new Amsterdam. It was it blessed that house years ago. It's it's it's was created by Shakespeare for a wedding. We hear, and that's what a new theater is. It's a wedding between a new audience and the artists. And I felt that it would bring in the audience that would cross from young kids right up through old age and deceased. And we we would, we would, um, we'd be properly doing what I think a new play has to do it in a new house. I mean, not a new play, but a production should do in a new house. So it was Jeffrey was thrilled, everybody was happy, and it worked out. How do you cast well, t Tanya Oh, Tina benk Oh, my god, well you should see you didn't know her, right, she should be a national treasure in America. She's an American New York City and come out on stage. I was like, oh my god, she's gorgeous. She's so talented and amazing. There was the most amazing representation of ever saying, well, that's great. She she auditioned. I didn't know who she was. I heard that she had done a one woman show, Jackie on Jackie Onassis and Peter Sellers had used her. But if she were in England, if we were in London was set from tempest. If we were in England now is once we were, um, she'd be known. But the person who I've cast first was Katherine Hunter, who played Puck and and She was pivotal for me because if I didn't find my Puck, I didn't know if I wanted to do the play. So I asked her over a year in advance, and I had seen her. She's she's sort of she's English and American, she can work in both places. And I had seen her in London at the National ten years ago in Carol Churchill's The Striker, and I had seen her here a couple of times, and I went, oh, my god, this woman. She is the background that I have Lecoq studying in Paris. But she's one of the greats. She's played King lear in She's one of the only women Richard the Third. She's just brilliant and uh. She came over and we did workshops with children because if I I felt if I couldn't figure out how to do the fairy world, the supernatural fairy world, I wouldn't find I had to find my way into that because I didn't want to do puppets. I didn't want to do what people expected me to do because for years, oh, you've got to do Midsummer Night's Dream, right, you know why, Oh, because you can do that? And then oh, good reason not to do it exactly, so there aren't there's a few deer masks, but I wanted to figure out if I could create this rude elemental world as opposed to fairies. I called them the rude elementals. You know. The mechanicals are the rude mechanicals. And we did workshops, three or four of them with the New York City schools, children from all over start out with eight and we whittled it down to seventeen or eighteen after a couple of months, and Catherine came over was the pied piper, and together we had these wild workshops where we try out these young kids playing the forest, the maniacal part of the forest, the malignant, the terrorizing. The What why I felt they were important is because the play, which is about marriage, is about codifying love right. It's about putting strictures. What's a marriage, but putting fetters on something that is natural, human being civilized. We need to organize. But children under a certain age or pre that they're raw, they're rude there. They don't understand those limitations. And I wanted to play that aspect because the night of Midsummer Night's Dream as a night where everything goes topsy turvy and haywire. So the kids could be many, many things, including finally the children of the court. When you said you had to have my puck. Are you from this school, I should say, or maybe you It varies where you know what you want and you go and find that, or someone shows it to you, or both both. You asked me about how I cast I knew I needed someone who understood that Shakespeare. There's two parts to Shakespeare. Of course, there's the language. Usually people separate, they go, oh, we shouldn't do spectacle Shakespeare. We want to hear the language in the Iamic Bentameter, and it's Shakespeare wrote visual effects play and by the time Midsummer Night's Dream happened, it was inside and there were footlights, and there were fairies. I'm sure that they did their little fairies coming in on ropes and stuff like that in his day. But I knew that that with Pack you needed a transformer. You needed someone who could not only deliver the incredible language, but who was neither male nor female, neither eight or nine or fifty or eighty. She's everything, She's he she and Catherine has that. She's she's your age and yet you think she's five years old. Some of the time she's four ft eight, So she mixed with these kids. You're remarkable looking actress. She's totally you know, her body is all different. She can do anything with her body. Yes, and she's got that all Julie, Let's do it like that. She always talks in this voice. Now you um, I want you to describe in whatever word you want to use, the period from when you're like ten or eleven years old and you go into Boston and your parents have you going by yourself and too well, you live very unique period there that leads to a lot of very eclectic things in France and Japan. And what was that about, you know, in those days, the early days, in the late I guess sixties and seventies. First of all, I'm a lot younger than my brother and sister, and my parents had a lot to contend with with them going through the sixties, and they let me alone. I don't know if you ever saw across the universe? Did you ever see the Beatles physical? Okay, that's the closest thing to my family and that older brother and sit my sister was very politically active. My brother was a musician and a captain. Anyway, my parents had their hands full. They were great parents, but they basically let me be free. So I literally took the the the t in Boston and I would go to Boston Children's Theater at age probably starting eight or nine, after school ten eleven and and started acting. But I was in more of the Cinderella's and Tom Sawyers and I think Cinderella was the first thing I ever played. And I always wanted to be the evil step sisters, but I was never cast. I said, I wanted to be a character actress, but I had this, you know, nice pretty little face, and so I never really liked doing that. That's why I didn't go into acting, because where I want to play is not what I look like. Probably maybe now, maybe now when you get older. But uh, then when I was about thirteen or fourteen, and this is um what is this? You know, this is a time where Gratowski and the Living Theater and many people were creating theater from scratch, from ideas, and I joined a company I was the youngest by far, Theater Workshop of Boston, and Julie Portman was the director. But they were creating work based on political ideas, and the first one they did was called Riot, which was really about the racial issues in America. The one that I got involved in was was called Tribe, and it was about Native Americans and all the people in the company. This was a younger company, probably sixteen seventeen through twenty, and I was the youngest. We would bring in the material and we were working very physically with our bodies in a church basement, the Arlington Street Church. What was exciting was we were responsible for creating the content of the material. But even at that age of fifteen sixteen, I felt that though I was good physically, I wanted more disciplined. So I graduated high school early and went to Paris at sixteen. Yeah, these parents, they went okay, fine, And I lived with this twenty one year old Deborah Tate, who was a photographer and who was wild. We're living in Paris, and and I mean, and I went to moms school. I went to it called him mean Jacques Lecoq, Yes, let Jacques Lecoq. And that's where Simon McBurney, a lot of directors and actors whom I really admire. Now, a lot of us went there and had this training, which was physical training, how to use your body to express, not to do mine, not to end up being a mime. But this is where I started really understanding the power of mask, the mask and even poppetry. She would this this crazy lady named Madame Citroen, who looked like a lemon. She was like a lemon. She was very brutal, but she would take We would take objects, brooms and candles and all kinds of objects and make them come alive, understanding what what hardness, what metal? What what kind of character? You know? How when we say someone is, you know they're they're They're as brittle as a break or something you know, eat to express it. So we would take shapes and materials and make stories and characters out of them. So it's a different approach to puppetry, but very interesting. And the mask work was there to understand to get yourself out of yourself, Like when you can wear a mask, you can transport yourself to being a completely different human being because you lose your identity. And I understood how the body then becomes a complete sculpture. So I learned a lot that year at Lecoq. I didn't stay for the full two years. The second year was clowning, and I'm not The red nose didn't appeal to me. I didn't want to go there, but but I did get a lot out of that. Where from there, Yeah, I went to college. I went to Oberlin. I went to Oberlin, and I I at Oberlin there was a man from named Herbert Blow. Did you ever hear of Herbert Blow? Us to run Lincoln Center. Then he went to cal Arts, started cal Arts, and he brought Bill Irwin Um Sharon at and about four or five actors came from cal Arts and he started a program at Oberlin, an interdisciplinary theater thing. At this point, for you, it's mostly about acting. You're an actor. No. I went to Oberlin to study anthropology and religion. Yes, No, I just couldn't stay away from theater. I didn't really want to study theater. I didn't mind doing it because that's the origins of the I loved I loved Antipope, I loved um traveling. I went I'd have to go back for a second. Before I went to Oberlin, I went to Sri Lanka one summer to Ceylon was Cylon back then and on the experiment in international living so you sort of see I constantly, whether it was Boston or out to Asia. My parents let me go and I loved. I loved experiencing other culture. There's a big part of you even touch treated parents. I'm very close to them. I never had I never went through all the crap that people do with their parents, because they treated me with enormous respect. And I was called they did, and I called them by their first name since I was little. I didn't call them mommy, daddy. I don't know what that was about, but they I never had to lie to them, and when I did lie, I lied once and told them afterwards, I said, you made me lie because you didn't trust me, And that never happened again. I was about fifteen, you know. It was about going away with my boyfriend and they didn't want me, so I lied and went anyway, miserable the whole time. That's right, Ka. Well, I lived to the family and UH and saw this extraordinary culture. I was in India, went through India a bit of India and then Ceylon, lived with the Ceylonese family and started to get my interest in that part of the world back then, and I did come to New York in between. Actually I did do at New York. I came and I went to Herbert broke Off School of Acting. I acted in the Lower east Side. I worked with Bob Californ at the in Brooklyn, at the Chelsea Theater Center. But I didn't I had my resume and I went out. But that's what I'm saying. I didn't really want to do. I wouldn't be playing the roles I wanted. So I was more interested in theater that you created from scratch. You wouldn't be playing the roles you wanted. No, I didn't want to don't No, not a seventeen right, No, I really didn't. And soap opera's and you could. You're naming all the things I ended up doing. By the way, you're you're kind of pissing on my whole early crept. But but you stayed with wanting to be an actor, right reluctantly. You look what you're doing. Well, I mean, it's it's it's it's changed so much in my lifetime. It's very different. You know. When I started, there was um it was easier to make it. It wasn't easy, but it was easier. You could slalom between the one for them, one for me, one for the one for me, go to a play, come back and do make some money backing forth. And now it's not like that anymore. No, not in any in any of those areas, it's not like that. And when do you start directing? Well, I started in college a little bit, but then I went to Indonesia. At the end of Oberlin, I got a traveling fellowship in visual theater, experimental puppet theater to Eastern Europe, Indonesia, and Japan and pronounce it for me, Oh, where's my glasses? Tatulaw Well, that didn't happen right away. I was going to spend a year in Japan with have you ever heard of the buon Rocku? Okay, So there's a folk buon Rocku called the awaji and this is where it is a very ancient technique where three people manipulate the puppet. And I was on my way to Japan, but I went to Indonesia first. I was going to spend three months in Indonesia and I ended up four years at because Indonesia Java. I was in Java first, and then Bali and then Sumatra toward I had never experienced theater in its original form. Now, going back to Oberlin, those were the days where you made up your own major, and my major was folklore mythology, and I studied shamanism. In the early forms of theater. I was in a country now where I was watching traditional theater function in all of its original ways, because there was no television. There was very little film. I mean I was forty years ago. I was in Java and Bali, and there was so little of that. Villages were distinct from a village ten miles away. They had their own culture, distinct. And I saw nine hour plays that would be from the Mahabad, the Ramayana, the epics, you know, they're like our epics, are Shakespeare there or our Greeks. And watch these plays that would go on in the audience, moving back and forth behind the shadow puppet screen or behind and in front, and see that during the nine hours of a play, teenagers were flirting with others. Where people would talk or children would fall asleep, where you you wake up for the clowns, you know, the fools, like in Lear, where politics of the day were discussed because the comedians would speak in the local language, where philosophies were all done in ancient Sanskrit kaoi, but nobody understood it except for the you know, the Hindu priests or whoever. I watched theater function in its original humanizing way, and that blew my mind as an artist, As an artist who was trying not to be an artist, meaning I could never commit to saying I was going to do theater. I suddenly found myself in a place where I understood the origins and watched it function in this most astounding way, and I decided to stay. And I got encouraged to stay by a major political theater figure who was always imprisoned in an out rendra a w s Rendra Javanese Muslim, who thought I'd be his fourth wife. And I said, now, I don't sign on. But I did sign on to do choreography for him. And um the problem with radio as you can't see facials. A Taylor of Java, Julie Tamore now makes her home in New York City. Listen to our archives to hear what Debbie Reynolds says of working with the real Elizabeth Taylor, as well as Joan Collins and Shirley mcclaim. Well, we had a lot of fun working together. That Joan never lets you watch her makeup, and she hides in her trailer and all her makeup. But we all kind of quite an operation. Well it is an operation for all of us as a certain point when you look in the mirror and everything is moved someplace else, take a listen, and here's the thing. Dot Org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. The New York Times called my guest Julie Tamore the cosmic p. T. Barnum of contemporary stagecraft. Her work draws heavily on her eclectic life experiences. In her early twenties, Julie was the director of a theater group in Indonesia. She could have stayed and lived a very different life, but she had a sense it just wouldn't work. I felt, after living that many years in Indonesia, I would never ever be accepted as an Indonesian. But if a Javanese guy came to New York, they could disappear. I was always that white woman with the bula booloo, which is I don't have it now, but hair on the arms, feathers, you know. And also I had to deal with the fact that there's two words that describe human beings in Javanny in Indonesian halusen kassar. Hallus is refined and kassar is crude. Well, being the head of a theater company at a two, you can't be hallus. I had to deal with the fact that just being in that position was really tricky because you're the boss. And I had a fifty year old master mask performer from Bali who was one of the company. But I'm the director of the company. And at that time I had a great partner of photographer, Javanese photographer, who was sort of the daddy. We were the mommy and daddy of the company, and we all lived together in this Mother Death Temple hotel and we started to create this original piece of theater and I acted in it as well. I acted as the outsider, the one who's trespassed. We'll come back to you And did you enjoy that? Oh yeah. I hadn't stopped acting then. I hadn't. I didn't stop acting professionally or literally until I came back to the States, where you have to be put in boxes and you can't be a director and a designer and an actor. You have to be one thing or another, and I had stories to tell, so I decided the best thing was to be the kind of I call myself a creator more. And then I got boxed into being a designer in New York because I designed at the Public Theater for Elizabeth Swados. I designed the Hagada, you know, the passover, which was done every three years. I was the set, cost him, mask and puppet designer. And I had never studied that. I just did it and choreographer and sort of created that with her because that was the She liked that. That was the kind of background that I had really had, which was to create from a ritual. I've just been in a country for four years where theater comes from ritual and religion. So doing the Hagada, the Jewish passover ceremony was really something I understood. I'm jumping around here, So when do you come back to the US. Well, four years of Indonesia, Well, I have to tell the story. I we created this play in Bali. We had a tsunami in the meantime, and everybody was living. They had moved that one hotel got taken away by the tsunami, and we're all living crowded in these rooms and we're ready to go on tour. And this mixture of Hindus, Muslims, um Jews, Christians and atheists, you know, we're all there, and we all get on this night bus. Uh. We take the ferry from Bali to Java and get on a night bus to go to Surabaya. And we crashed on our way to our first performance after a year of rehearsal and total truck and bus. The truck driver died and I got glass all over and people's backs. So you can imagine being the mommy of this troop. It was horrendous. It was horrendous, and I had two operations and but talk about my parents. I finally I came home and then I said to them, no, I have to go back again, and they let me, and I went back and my troop got together, and then we toured for three more months, and at the end of that I just felt I I wanted to go back to the States. I felt I needed to, but I also wanted to bring what I had learned there. And I came to New York and went to La Mama to Ellen Stewart, and we couldn't bring all of my troop. I found Indonesians here and Bill Irwin, who I'd worked with, he came and played the opposite the character with me, and that was the last thing I said, Well, I I really have to go back to making my own shows. So I worked off off Broadway, and then I started work off Broadway and started to create original shows or direct things that existed. It was Broadway, something you wanted to do, something you thought not from it, not for no change. Well, somebody like Tom Schumacher at Disney called me up one day and and I did, and I told you could do what you want. They wanted you to do what you do. That's what they did. They did. They said, do you know the Lion King? And I said, and I said no, I mean I hadn't seen the animated film. And that was a nice big laugh at the other end of the telephone because that was weird. And he said, well, I had just done opera in Japan, Odipus Rex in Japan, and I did want dot Agen at You know, I had had shows and I had won awards. It wasn't like I was in some obscure little off off Broadway theater I had. I was doing opera around the world and other kinds of theater and Lion King. I look did the movie and I went, Wow, how much fun to try and figure out how to do a stampede on stage that's like this. Also, I thought it was thrilling to try and bring that animal world to the stage. What have they seen of yours? Well? One Thienne had won many awards, you know, the Uruguay and short story that Elliott Goldenfall and I had done three times or by that time two times, and Toward It which isn't, which is a Jaguar tale of transformation. So I'd worked with My work is in the Disney World, fairy tales, myths, animal legends, the green birds, it is. It's just my aesthetic is totally different. And and when I got together with them, I said, you know my aesthetic, I'm a I'm a sculptor, plastic artist. I don't wear for using. So when you first lay out even the most primary takes on what Lion came gonna be on, probably did they kind of lean into each othern go they've got to get rid of her, or they got it? Did they get they did? Schumacher got it, Schneider got it. Other people got scared, but not the main people, including Michael Eisner. I made one of the first things I made um was the thing that we call the gazelle wheel if if you know, after eighteen years, maybe some people have seen it, but it's it. I used bicycle wheels and the idea was to create gazelles that would that would leap across. And I made a model of that, and I had done the drawings of the how you would always show the humans in the masks, in the bodies, whether it was scar or a zebra or the elephants, you'd see the people in the legs. And so the concept of not hiding the human beings, of having the strings and rods exposed. I brought my models and my drawings and they got it. And there were some people and I can leave them mentionless, but who didn't get it, and who were very high up in Disney but Disney Film, who didn't really know theater. So we did some workshops and everything were and then Eisner said the thing that I really love that he said, well, let's do your original concept. Let's go back to the one that you first presented, where all the doubt happened, and he didn't doubt, but he wanted to know for sure. He said, because the bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff. And I thought, for the head of a company, that was a really terrific motto and for them came true for them, me for that point at that point, yes, so the But at what point did you sit there and say you knew you were onto something in the early rehearsals or oh no, right from the you know. I'll tell you. The big thing that was so exciting was the movie had five Elton and Tim songs with Hunts, Zimmer and Lebo am doing all the South African stuff in mark Manchina. And there was an album that was put out at the same time as the movie called Rhythm of the Pride Lands and it was all of the South for in those languages called son Zulu and you know. And you heard Lebo and the chorus do all of these songs. And I heard that, and I said to the to the producers, what if we take those and make fill out the score with that and keep it in its original language. And they did it, and then Lebo came on as a major composer, and I wrote some of the lyrics to one of the songs, but we took those songs and we made them work into the story structure. And people love the visual but it's the It's the first thing online, King is that not's going You know when you hear the chant and they come down and and it's hard to say why, but but that kind of music, that coral, spiritual, chorl South African singing, gets you as much as any imagery. And we knew that right away in the first workshop, minus visuals. You knew that the story worked and the music worked. And even though I think imagery is a huge part of it, the book has to work, the music has to work, has to be there and work. And it did you win the Tony Award for Best Director of a Musical, And would you say that After that, there was just an onslaught of people wanting you to replicate that same kind of a little bit. One of the first things I think was Steven Spielberg. I think I got an offer to do some kind of children's maybe even the Cat in the Hat, I'm not sure, and I said, yeah, sure, if the cat's black. You know, I don't know whatever it is, but I wanted to do Titus. I wanted to do Titus Andronicus, which I had directed off Broadway before Lion King. And I think this is the perverse side of my nature, which is I don't like to be put into a box, and I like to do something that I've never done before. I've done Shakespeare, but I wanted to do a feature film of Titus, and I wanted to work with the best writer in the English language and the best actors in the English Tony, Your Tony are Tony. And so for me going from Lion King, which is brilliant actors, but it's still you know, the it's a musical. It's broad for families. Uh I was. I really felt that at that this point, which is that issue of violence in American culture and violence in general, this was what was really on my mind, as it was on everybody's minds. There was the Columbine, there was the Menendez brothers. I remember very much feeling that that this we're coming to the end of what is it, the twentieth century and lo and behold, but nothing has changed, has just gotten worse. But there was an idealism at the time that if you take this incredible play of Shakespeare's which is the best dissertation on violence ever written, ever written. It's astounding. And try and tell that story. You know that that really had meaning for me. And then Hopkins saw Lion King. I mean, this is interesting. He saw Lion King. I I. I had done workshops with Gino on doing it, but he never committed, you know, al so he would never commit. And finally I had the money, whether it was Pacino or somebody else, didn't have to be Puccino. And I called up Tony hopt where we found Tony Hopkins, and he said, well, let's have a meeting. And three hours after the meeting, I get it. He says, okay. I got a message when I come back to New York and said, well, we don't have to make a decision right away. He said, no, no, let's do it. He liked that he saw a director in line. He liked that there was a person with a concept and that I had an idea about I had done the play. So he signed on. And then I got Jessica Lang and Alan Cummings and Harry Lennox and Matthew Reason, Jonathan re Smyers and all these fabulous actors to do it. It was it was the right thing for me to do. Maybe not commercially, but so what you know, have you struggled with that about movie abdicating commerciality? Have you ever thought, oh, I'll go do that to make a living. Well, I make a them. No, I'm well aware of them. But in terms of do you just sit there and say you can make more of a living? Do you get not about making a living for me? It's about being able to do the films I want and period. Yeah, that's what governs everything or theater or opera, Yes, completely, because I make a good enough living with Lion King, so I don't have to do it to make a living. I have tremendous freedom. Is the greatest boon that an artist can have is to make that choice of the kind of work. So I can do an opera here, I can do a one woman show at the public theater like with Anne Hathaway this This Spring, which I love doing. Uh, the movies I want to make, run the Gamut and something like Frieda was very successful, didn't cost very much and made a lot of money compared to what it costs. But then I've done three Shakespeare films and If you don't have money to promote shape any movie. If you don't spend money in advertising and promotion, no movie will do well. That's a wonderful place to be to have. Uh. I mean, obviously, you direct a Broadway show, and there are like my friend Walter Bobby who did Chicago, and like Mantella with Wicked, and on and on many other people throughout history who the royalties give them some great reward. And it seems that you've done amazing things with that freedom that you've had. You really have done what you wanted to do. Or a lot of other people have this condition where they're told, well, now you can do whatever you want to do, and they don't know what they wanted to know. Yeah, it's just that I have projects that I'm still twenty years trying to do. There that's when we started this conversation. I have a movie that's still after all this time. If I don't get quote the A list actor two of them at the top, I can't get the money. Because some of the movies I want to make, they their magical realism. They combine realism with fantasy. There's visual effects. It's not a ten million dollar film. It's more like five and that that that what do you call it? But those million dollar films don't exist very much anymore. It's the five million dollar film and the two exactly and the two million. Rarely do women get offered that you know? And even the men, if you just again not naming names, there's a couple you see that they hire men that even have no experience that because everybody thinks they can make those big comic book movies by wrote or there's you know, they'd rather not have someone who's too much of an autour director doing it. I'm assuming you've done projects it didn't always go the way you wanted them to go. And when they didn't go the way you wanted them to go, did you sense it right up in the beginning If that's interesting, Yes, that's interesting. No, if you know it right at the beginning, you'd get out, wouldn't you? Maybe maybe not? Like for actors, the condition is like booking a ticket on a train. I'm going to go to work now. I've told myself, my wife, my family, in my life October fift we set sail, and all of a sudden we going we do it, and I go, oh, this is not. There's an iceberg here in the harbor. I think we're going to hit that iceberg. We should turn around. They're like, no, we're not turning. You can't turn around. It's not up to you to turn around. I don't think. I think a lot of these you can't. You're right, you can't turn around. So but I think, you know, in these projects that take so long to develop, there are points where you where you should where you could if you knew. And I won't do anything if I don't really love what I'm doing, you know, I mean I Lion King taught me that you don't condescend to your audience, that you don't patronize your audience, that you can still be the artist or do the things you want to do and reach a wide audience. It's proven it's possible take people to a place they didn't know they wanted to go. That's a tricky where where you have. Most producers say, give the audience what they want. My my raison detre is not that if you give them what they want, you're going to be bored doing it because you've already seen it, They've done it, they know it. I'm going to be investing minimum of two years in any film. As a director, you've got to feel excited every day going to work, right you have to do you know, do you go to the theater and watch TV and go to the movies? What entertainment for you? Privately? All of them? All of them? I mean, it's oh god, I I watched Breaking Bad like mentally at this one my favorite. I've watched them What's the Downtown Abbey until it? Until it sort of didn't interest me as much anymore. But I that those forms. I've got two projects for television that are in development, you know, will take a long time. But I have too that I'm working on with a writer, and I'm gonna do Grendel hopefully is an opera film. One dot An we're talking about is the film These are the non commercial you know, the word art film. That's such a bad word, isn't it. Shouldn't all films be art films? Shouldn't they all be artfully done? This is the big This is the conundrum that I have because they make art into a bad word. Means you don't make money on it. That's what art means. Whereas any film I do, whether it's a big, huge one like Across the Universe was a big film or not? You hope you're doing it artfully. Who produced Across the Universe? Well, that was Joe Roth and Revolution and we did you calaborate with any of the surviving Beatles and that at all? Or now they weren't a part of it. I wish they had been. I did meet. I sat next to Paul McCartney watching the movie in London. I was so thrilling. I he's right when Jude sings oh My Love and hit, I could hear McCartney singing under under his breath and I died because I was twelve or something when that happened. And um I met with Yoko up in her apartment with the white piano and Olivia Harrison. I didn't meet with Ringo, but I wanted their approval when we finished it. Even though they don't own the rights to their own music. It's strange, but I am trying to do that on stage. Who owns the rights to their music? Sony a TV. So when we get those worked out, I would love to do it on the stage because we rehearsed it like we were doing a real musical. When we did the movie and if in Korea. You know, I put the choreography back in that. I really didn't do much choreography in the movie because I wanted it more real. So that's one thing that I really want to do. And uh, and then these TV things and then this beautiful movie called Writers on the Storm, although we'll probably have to change the title, which is an updating of the Flying Dutchman and it takes that that myth. That's something I'd love to do, take the myth of the Dutchman and bring it into the present. And it takes place in newportant New Bedford. I love story, kind of action love story. And this is the one where I was mentioning, Okay, but I have great actors, the greatest actors for these two leads, and for me, it's more exciting that they aren't household. Well one is sort of but you know that's thrilling because then you can believe it. You know, it's fantastic. But but it's this this number that I'm dealing with, the number can we get it down to fifteen? And going yeah, But then it doesn't have sailing scenes that are of the eighteen hundreds mixed with the present, and you know, somehow, in spite of these limitations, because what you try to do is such a rich meal, you prevail. You find a way. I guess you find a way. You'll find a way, don't you. Yeah, I hope so, I have no doubt. We'll see Julie Taymor's The Flying Dutchman in our sites. In the future. You can see her film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream in select theaters in the US and the UK. This is Alec Baldwin you're listening to hear? Is the thing