SOURCE: De Luca, Maria and Mary Lindroth. “Mayhem, Madness, Method: An Interview with Julie Taymor.” Cineaste 25, no. 3 (2000): 28-31.

[In the following interview, De Luca and Lindroth record Julie Taymor's thoughts on her film adaptation of Titus Andronicus, including her awareness of significant differences between Titus and stage representations of the drama, and her feelings about the role of violence in the film.]

Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus “is not meant to be read,” says Julie Taymor, “but to be performed.” This bloody revenge tragedy is rarely performed, however, because of its controversial and disturbing nature. Its infamy stems largely from scenes of mutilation, rape, and murder and the play's macabre mixture of comedy and tragedy. Titus Andronicus was popular with the audiences of Shakespeare's day, but fell into disfavor in the eighteenth century (when King Lear was rewritten with a happy ending) because its horror, pathos, and nightmarish humor didn't adhere to the rules of classical taste. It was successfully revived by Peter Brook in a 1955 Royal Shakespeare Production (with Laurence Olivier in the title role and Vivien Leigh as his daughter, Lavinia), which harked back to Greek and Roman tragedies but which was also informed by a contemporaneous perspective that saw a spotlight glare on recent horrors like the Holocaust.

It was precisely the play's shocking juxtaposition “of heightened drama, ruthless violence and absurdist black comedy,” says Taymor, the Emmy and OBIE award-winning theater director best known for her Broadway presentations of The Lion King and The Green Bird, which attracted her to it, resulting in her 1994 stage presentation of Titus Andronicus at the Theatre for a New Audience. As evidenced by that production's blending of stylized and naturalistic imagery, Taymor felt strongly that the play lent itself to adaptation as a film, especially because of its thematic resonance in an era when audiences “feed daily on tabloid sex scandals, teenage gang rape, high school gun sprees and the private details of a celebrity murder trial … a time when racism, ethnic cleansing and genocide have almost ceased to shock by being so commonplace and seemingly inevitable. Our entertainment industry thrives on the graphic details of murders, rapes and villainy yet it is rare to find a film or play that not only reflects the dark events but turns them inside out, probing and challenging our fundamental beliefs of morality and justice.”

While Taymor's film retains the play's Roman Empire setting, it also makes quantum but seamless leaps into an unexpected and thematically reverberating variety of time periods, from the present day, to Mussolini's (and then Fellini's) Italy, and today's Bosnia. The story begins with the victorious return of General Titus Andronicus (Anthony Hopkins) from war with his trophies, Goth Queen Tamora (Jessica Lange) and her three sons. Although four of Titus's sons survived the war, including Lucius (Angus Macfadyen), who is destined to succeed him, Titus has lost twenty-one sons in the conflict, and accepted social practice demands the sacrificial slaughter of the Goth Queen's firstborn. Despite Tamora's plea for mercy, Titus orders the ritual execution of her son Alarbus carried out. Tamora vows vengeance and, with the deliciously devilish help of her lover, Aaron the Moor (Harry Lennix), the political power of her flamboyant new husband, the Emperor Saturninus (Alan Cumming), and the loyalty and lechery of her two remaining sons, Chiron (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and Demetrius (Matthew Rhys), the chronicle of intrigue and tragedy ensues.

The emotional experience of the film is an unpredictable, daring, wild ride and its insights into human nature are unsettling and deeply disturbing. The dramatic arc of Shakespeare's play follows the evolution of the Roman General Titus from a man who honors his country's laws and cultural traditions, through the tragedies that this blind allegiance fosters, eventually leading to his descent into apparent madness and the awakening of his individual conscience.

In the film, Taymor's design is in every detail. Unafraid of confronting issues of violence, she uses stylization and underscores the play's dark humor to heighten its profound impact and to prevent the film from deteriorating into exploitative sensationalism. Her cinematic adaptation also utilizes surrealistic cinematic montages, which she calls “Penny Arcade Nightmares,” devised, as she explains in Titus: The Illustrated Screenplay (Newmarket Press), “to portray the inner landscapes of the mind as affected by the external actions. These stylized, haiku-like images appear at various points throughout the film counterpointing the realistic events in a dreamlike, and mythic manner. They depict, in abstract collages, fragments of memory, the unfathomable layers of a violent event, the metamorphic flux of the human, animal, and the divine. By the last of these surreal sequences the line between illusion and substance becomes blurred. The nightmare takes over … madness becomes clarity and the unimaginable is realized.”

Her dazzling layers of imaginative juxtapositions, notably her sensitive and original framing of the tale through the eyes of the boy Lucius (Osheen Jones), take us beyond the brutality and madness, and provide viewers with a catharsis, an insight into the emotional vulnerabilities behind the violence and the human tragedy it ultimately causes. The film's visually stunning final image evokes a fragile but clear sense of hope about the future of humanity.

We met with Taymor, several weeks after the opening of Titus, to discuss the differences between her film and the original stage production, the function of art in the presentation of violent material, and the timeliness of this early Shakespeare play.

[De Luca and Lindroth]: Though highly faithful to the text, you begin and end your film without using the spoken language. So, on the surface, it would seem that the beginning and ending of your film depart from Shakespeare quite a bit.

[Taymor]: Even when I did it at the Theatre for a New Audience, I actually opened it the same way, with the child at the table. I have to find my way into this piece, every individual does, especially a piece that is so much about the darkness and violence of human nature. You can tell this story, but what do you feel about it at the end of the day? I mean, is it just a wonderful entertainment? Is it just a nasty tale that just leaves us feeling, “Well, that was then and this is now.” Who knows why Shakespeare wrote a revenge tragedy? Revenge tragedies were a popular form then. It was a good way to make a buck. But I was intrigued with this idea of the child's experience of violence—even though young Lucius is in only two scenes—and the opportunity to have this child be the eyes for the audience and give us a view into this bloody family tragedy. It works even better in the movie than it did on stage because you can have him disappearing behind columns. I didn't want him to be there when the child wouldn't be invited. For example, he wouldn't be at the orgies or in the forest or at the rape.

One of the scenes you place the young Lucius in is in Act 3, Scene 1, when Titus is presented with the heads of his two sons and his own hand. Why did you want the young Lucius in this scene?

You know when the elder Lucius says, “Now will I to the Goths and raise a pow'r / To be revenged on Rome and Saturnine”? TA 3.1.299-300—ed. There's no child in the Shakespeare scene. The young Lucius is in mine because he's watching that event. In the play I had that as a soliloquy at the end of Part One. I thought those are words that he should say to the child, they are horrific. He's kissing this boy, they're saying goodbye, they're hugging each other, and it just gave so much resonance to how we justify—“Don't worry, we're going to avenge”—whatever it may be that we say with love to our children. These are things I explored in rehearsal. I had very good, intelligent actors who brought up lots of interesting ideas, who were very inspiring.

What did the actors contribute to the filmmaking process?

I feel very good about the cast. Jessica Lange—whether you always like her accent or her voice—she's never done anything like this. Harry Lennix and Alan Cumming … they're all good. As for Anthony Hopkins, Hannibal Lecter was nothing compared to this. This is everything he's done and more so. He bared his soul. He became Titus and we were aware of it while we were doing it. It was fantastic. That bathtub scene—when he spit on the wall—he was totally in the moment. I said, “I'm gonna want you to get up at the end of the bath scene and stand naked against that window.” He said, “I won't do that.” And I said, “All right, don't do it, but I'm telling you it's going to be a wide shot, it's going to be very dim, no one's going to be concentrating on your body.” Then, at the end of the day, he said, “Let's do it!”

How does the film's ending differ from the ending of your stage production?

In my stage version, the baby was in a coffin that was delivered by the clown onto the banquet table and, when the child opened up the baby coffin, you heard many babies crying, the birds, the bells. That was too oblique and abstract for a movie because that would be saying that the child is dead. In the theater it's symbolic. So I changed it and I put him in the cage, which is even darker, in a way, because you say, “My God, this child is an animal in a cage and he's black and … what will his life be?” So with Lucius opening that cage and taking the baby out of the coliseum, this child, now of his own free will, takes the baby and exits out of the coliseum, this theater of violence, of cruelty, and into this bleak but open landscape that has water, which means there's possibility for fruition, of cleansing, of forgiveness. It's also a movement towards the sunrise, which is the next generation or the next one hundred years or the next millennium. But it freezes on that image, just that slice of the sun coming up. It's not a full sunrise. It's about possibility and hope but it's not about solution.

Why did you want your audiences to view Shakespeare's play through Lucius's eyes?

I felt, “Why am I telling this story now? What can we do as a people about the sickest thing in our lives, which is our incessant need to be violent, and racism and the whole business?” You're not going to erase it, but we can propose a certain consciousness and an understanding that the children are the only possible way. It's idealism but you can't survive and live as an artist or as a human being without that. In the last century, we had Hitler, Rwanda, East Timor, Bosnia, Littleton, the whole shebang, and, because we have conscience, there's constantly a need to find a solution or hope or another way to deal with violence. So there's an enormous irony in being this kind of black and white human being.

Why do Demetrius and Chiron respond the way they do in the scene in which Aaron kills the nurse?

Even Demetrius and Chiron are not cold-blooded killers and they're shocked when Aaron kills the nurse with a pool cue. In the theater we did it with a knife. We had the three beer cans, to set up the humor. I put the pool table into the scene and Harry Lennix, who had also played the role in the theater, said, “What if I did it with a pool cue,” and I said, “Brilliant, Harry.” It just made so much sense because we used the pool cue as a weapon—you know, where he's holding the scimitar and the pool cue—and he creates a knife by breaking it.

The forest scene, where Tamora encounters Lavinia and Bassianus, seems like the cinematic equivalent of theater in the round.

You're talking about the Steadicam shots. I'll tell you the history of that scene. That scene on the stage bugged the hell out of me. It is a very difficult scene to stage because how do you trap these people? The only person who is speaking is Tamora, and it's a long monologue. In the theater you can get away with monologues and less movement. Theater is three dimensional, so the static nature is not as obvious as it is in a film, which is two dimensional. I did two to three weeks of rehearsal with the actors and, when I rehearsed that scene, I walked around them. I said, “All right, instead of me staging this as if the camera is in one place, Jessica, boys, do whatever you want. Move! Move! Keep it going and alive.” I didn't have a cameraman with me at the time, so I just walked around and went in and out. That's when I decided to use a Steadicam and to be very free with it, to have the Steadicam operator move and follow each actor. I wanted a dizzying effect to give you the feeling that Lavinia and Bassianus would have, the nauseating feeling of not knowing where Demetrius and Chiron are. This was easier to achieve in film than it was on the stage.

The Penny Arcade Nightmares are very strategically placed. They're also very definitely yours, something that you brought over from the stage version, only here they're very cinematic as opposed to theatrical. One could say that they don't seem to have anything to do with Shakespeare's text, but they do appear in what could be considered act breaks. Why did you include the Penny Arcade Nightmares in those particular places? Did you see them acting as a kind of interlude between major moments?

Well, I think the first one does, absolutely. (The first PAN occurs at the end of Act One, just prior to Aaron's soliloquy, and features Titus and Tamora facing off amidst flames—ed.) It comes at the end of Act One, and it is a real transition. Tamora is now becoming the goddess, the queen, and Titus is left at the bottom of the stairs. It really works as a kind of rounding up, a way of saying, ‘All right, these things happened, she's pretending it's all cool, and he's keeping his mouth shut, but, baby, the shit is going to hit the fan.’ You can see the blood, the fire, that's between them.

The PAN on the crossroads, which is very tricky, is not the end of the scene but it is a transition where Titus really has hit his first bottom note. (This PAN occurs in Act 3, Scene 1, while Titus is on the crossroads begging for the lives of his two condemned sons, and features angels, sheep, an altar, and Mutius's human head—ed.) This great general is on the ground, crying. He's been reduced to mud and dust, and he's crying for these two boys who are going to die. Well, what about his other child, Mutius, whom he killed? I kept thinking, he had twenty-five children that he buried, but what about this son he kills on the steps so easily? When people point out the weak parts of this play—like, “How could he kill his kid?”—it doesn't mean that the effects of his actions don't live with him. The reason I kept this in ancient Rome, blended with contemporary elements, is because such an action was legal. If a child disobeyed you in ancient Rome, they could be killed. We would have a very hard time with this in a totally modern setting. So there are actions here that we have to accept as part of a culture or a period.

So the PAN at the crossroads, with the angel, is to recall this sacrificial lamb. I don't even remember how I came up with this, but it's the idea that Abraham was ready to kill his son because of the law of God. That is exactly what Titus did. There is a larger law outside of his own, which is how he operates, but he has to learn. He is becoming a fully vulnerable human being and he has to learn that he must also act as an individual. You cannot just say, as the SS officers did, “Well, I was just doing my duty.” No, no, no. There's a certain point where you have to operate on your own moral code as an individual. So I wanted him to actually see his son again as that sacrificial lamb, and that knife is the same sacrificial knife used to kill Tamora's son. The angels with blaring trumpets may be dark angels, but they are angels of mercy, which is such a Christian concept.

In a way, the two heads in the jars in the theater were absolutely a Penny Arcade Nightmare. (In this scene, the carnival wagon delivers the “freak show” of the bottled heads of Titus's sons and of Titus's own hand to the audience of Titus, Lucius the elder, Lucius the younger, Marcus, and Lavinia—ed.) In the play, I used the red revenge curtain to inaugurate each of these images. I had that in the screenplay, too, but it didn't work because it was too theatrical. The frame of the cinema is its own frame. So, I dumped it, but the wagon has this red metal cover, so, in a sense, the curtain is still there! Then there's a red curtain through which Titus walks out of the kitchen and into the banquet.

The PAN with the tigers and the doe happened in the theater in a very different place. (In the film, this PAN occurs in Act 4, Scene 1, when Lavinia reveals the identity of her rapists, and features a doe, tigers, Lavinia, Marilyn Monroe, Demetrius, and Chiron—ed.) It happened right after the pit scene, before you actually saw Lavinia on what in the theater was a column, and in the movie a tree stump. It just didn't make any sense there, it didn't work. You didn't want to see her in an abstract, stylized way before you actually saw her, but I was very wedded to making the images of the tiger and the doe present. You see the doe and the tigers in the forest earlier, when the boys are trying to hunt. You know, what is a tiger doing in a forest? That's weird! I get all my imagery from Shakespeare and I loved that notion. All of a sudden it hit me during the editing that the right place for that PAN was in the flashback, as Lavinia is writing in the sand with the stick. I love it there because when a woman has to testify at a rape trial she is re-experiencing the rape.

I switched the order of dialog in the last one, the Rape, Revenge, and Murder scene. The last PAN occurs during Act 5, Scene 2, when Tamora, Demetrius, and Chiron perform their Revenge masque for Titus and features ferris wheels. Tamora as Revenge with knife headdress. Demetrius as Murder/Tiger with jaw hands, and Chiron as Rape/Hawk with bra and panties—ed. In the original Shakespeare you know right away that Titus knows who they are. I'm sorry, dear Willy, but I think that's weak because the idea of madness is just not clear. I mean, he is most reasonable when he is most mad. Finally in his madness there is clarity. When he says there is no justice on earth, therefore we have to seek out heaven, that is the smartest thing he says because it's true. So, the fact that he's in his tub, and he sees these characters in that surreal world before he actually sees them, is very interesting. What is the reality of that? At that moment the absurdity, the Penny Arcade Nightmare, has taken over reality and we are inside of this nightmare. In the theater, it might have been a little clearer because we had a big gold frame that framed the entire play. The symbolism was more direct and easy but I like the uneasiness that you have in a film. You wonder, “Wait a second, is this a figment of his imagination?” And it is, but it isn't.

Although the conventional wisdom is that Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is ‘over the top,’ you have insisted that it's absolutely not over the top, and that one of the things that drew you to the play was that it had “outrageous humor juxtaposed to potent tragedy.” What do you see in this juxtaposition that allows you to communicate something new or fresh to today's audiences?

Titus Andronicus is not over the top in the sense that all of these events can and do happen. The way that it's structured makes you feel like you're on a rollercoaster—it keeps accelerating and, just when you think you can go no further, he pushes you even further. So, I don't think ‘over the top’ is the right phrase. This play is an unbelievable ride, and it becomes even more so by condensing it—I cut at least an hour and a half out. I think opening up the play and making it really cinematic allows people to really get into it.

What is your response to the critics who suggest that Titus is a violent movie?

I hate that response because, quite honestly, this is not a very graphically violent movie. The press would say, “It's the bloodiest …”—no, it isn't the bloodiest … Braveheart is bloodier—and I think such comments scared away a lot of older viewers. They're frightened but kids are eating this up like crazy. I've gone to screenings at universities where they scream, they cheer, they're just blown away by it. We had high school students say, “Move over, Schwarzenegger, here comes Titus!” They were really into it. But older moviegoers are terrified and the poor critics don't know what to do. They're so intimidated. They go to the Internet—“Oh, they say it's a bad play.” Well, even bad Shakespeare is better than anybody else. In my estimation it's a great play. It's a rough, crude, great play.

If Titus is not ‘over the top,’ then what is the function of combining violence with humor?

I think that when we're in our deepest, darkest circumstance, whether you're a prisoner or in a concentration camp or something similarly awful, the only way to survive is through humor. That realization about human nature is why I think Shakespeare always puts the clowns in. It's also Brechtian, because you don't want the audience to get so locked into the sentimentality that they can't also step out of it and be aware of what's happening, and of their own feelings about it. It's simultaneously disturbing and exciting. It freaks you out. Nervous laughter is an incredible thing—it's off-setting. Shakespeare gives you an incredible ride because you don't know what to expect. People are going, “Oh my God,” because you just don't know what is going to happen next.

Do you think that audiences today have a hard time understanding Shakespeare's characters in Titus Andronicus?

I think modern-day audiences have never seen anything like what Shakespeare's written here. The complexity of these characters—Tamora, Aaron, Titus—frightens the modern audience. What is so ingenious about what Shakespeare does is that for the first twenty minutes you think Titus is an asshole—he makes one mistake after another—and then for the rest of the movie you root for him. But even though you root for him, you wonder, “Is he doing the right thing?” That's what's frightening because maybe we would all do that. What about this woman (the mother of murdered teenager Martha Moxley—ed.) who for twenty-five years has been waiting for her daughter's death to be avenged and she says, ‘For twenty-five years I've been waiting and now this is the happiest day of my life.’ I mean, what is that? You read about this doctor who carved his initials on a woman's body. Every day I'll read something that is right out of Titus Andronicus, so when people think this is ‘over the top,’ they're absolutely wrong. What could be more ‘over the top’ than the Holocaust?

Why confront audiences with such a bleak vision of humanity?

Today there are bride burnings in India. There are honor killings in Arab countries. People kill their daughters because the daughter's chastity belongs to the family or the tribe. So these things go on now. People say, “My God, Titus killed his daughter.” Absolutely, he killed his daughter and they're doing it today in Bosnia and in many Muslim countries. It's seen as necessary. Lavinia's there as a bride. She gives herself to him. She's ready to die. She has no life. And he has no life. This is where all this violence leads you.

What do you think motivates the violence that occurs in the film?

When hate is embedded in people, which is what happens in that scene in the mausoleum (when the victorious Andronici demand a sacrifice of the defeated Goths, the death of Tamora's eldest son, Alarbus—ed.) an outsider—whether it's Hitler or Aaron—can harness that hate and turn in into violence. I want people to see that if you instill hatred and racism into any person—whether it's the average German in Germany … I keep using the Holocaust because it's the biggest event of our century—it can be twisted and manipulated. People in groups can justify their actions. I love the way Tamora says to Lavinia, “Hadst thou in person ne'er offended me, / Even for his sake am I pitiless. / Remember, boys, I poured forth tears in vain / To save your brother from the sacrifice, / But fierce Andronicus would not relent. / Therefore away with her, and use her as you will; / The worse to her, the better loved of me.” (TA 2.3. 161-167—ed.) That just says it all. These boys have been given license to kill. I think that violence is such an integral part of the human psyche and physicality. We live in our bodies—boxing and football and all of these sports are sublimated violent urges. They're codified. I mean, why do we play football in a coliseum?