Shared Uncertainty
In its 11th year, American theatre and film director Julie Taymor’s stage adaptation of The Lion King for Disney remains an international sensation. “I am a storyteller,” she likes to say. Stories may be told in many media, and Taymor has proved herself the master of many, from puppet theatre, a form in which she excelled early in her career, to grand opera to the movies. She mixes techniques freely. Her skills in spectacle are unsurpassed, and she is a dazzling entertainer.
As the third cycle of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative began, she was facing the final ascent up a daunting mountain. Grendel, a new opera co-created with composer Elliot Goldenthal, was a cherished project, decades in the planning. Thanks to a joint commission by the Los Angeles Opera and the Lincoln Center Festival, in New York, the score had at last been completed. Conceived on a Wagnerian scale, shot through with epic battles and sea voyages, Grendel would challenge Taymor’s skills of theatrical invention to the utmost.
Taymor is not easily daunted. Essentially self-taught, she has confidently expanded her portfolio from the most intimate to the most elaborate forms of entertainment. Yet Grendel gave her qualms. “It could be a disaster,” Taymor warned, even as she invited her protégée Selina Cartmell to watch the show take shape, warts and all.
Cartmell alone observed the entire backstage drama as it unfolded over many weeks. “Selina was surprised watching me struggle on Grendel,” Taymor would remark towards the end of the mentoring year. “I let her see my confusion and insecurity – because I have enough security.” Concurrently with Grendel, Taymor was also editing her movie Across the Universe, built around songs of the Beatles; Cartmell witnessed that process, too.
Watching Taymor in her various spheres proved a revelation. “It’s lonely to be a director,” Cartmell said, looking back. “Directors know more about other directors’ private lives than they do about how they work. Even if you’ve been an assistant director, you don’t know. You’re too busy making and helping. That’s not the same thing as purely observing. Julie was working at a different scale than I do – Grendel was an expensive, gigantic project – but the uncertainties she faced were the same uncertainties I have to live with. And it’s very comforting for me to know, right now, that somewhere out there, Julie’s going through the same things I’m dealing with here.”