Quotes from Julie Taymor

I have never had a problem with people not being able to understand the words and the meanings in Titus.

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.

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.

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 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.

I really do believe that if you don't challenge yourself and risk failing, that it's not interesting.

You program music with an image and then people are desensitized.

My God, it transformed me. My life changed.

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.

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.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.

What I don't have in theater is editing.

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 use cinematic things in a theatrical way on stage, and in film I use theatrical techniques in a cinematic way.

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.

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.

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.

It's people who are repressed and cannot express their fears that are dangerous.

I am, to be quite honest, sick of hero stories.

There is incredible power in the arts to inspire and influence.

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.

Everything amounts to nothing if you don't love someone or something.

What I adore is the juxtaposition of high tech and low tech. It's sort of like I love the sacred and the profane. I love to put these extremes in the same hopper.