A first award sets a tone. Just ask the folk at Aspen Film.
Saturday, the arts organization will give Tony Award- winning, Oscar-nominated director Julie Taymor its inaugural Visionary Award for extraordinary creative achievement in filmmaking and the arts.
When it comes to seeing deeply, vividly, Taymor has the vision thing down.
She’s directed operas.
Famously, fabulously, she took Disney’s animated hit “The Lion King” and re-imagined it for Broadway. She even had, as a big cat once sang, “the courage” to recast the village elder as female.
In 1999, Taymor debuted as a feature-film director with “Titus,” an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange.
In Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina, the director found a powerful pair to portray legendary artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera for “Frida” (2002).
Last fall, she turned 33 Beatles songs into a libretto for “Across the Universe,” a boldly realized gem set in the war- torn 1960s.
“The three feature films I’ve done are very different, but there is definitely a sensibility in each,” said Taymor on the phone from New York, where she lives with partner and composer Elliot Goldenthal. “You move from the sub jective experience to the objective experience, or back the other way.”
It’s the type of transit musical theater does all the time. There’s emotional revelation in song bursts.
“We’ve shown all three of her films,” says Aspen Film executive director Laura Thielen. “And we’re continually amazed by her artistry as a filmmaker. You think you know her subject — Shakespeare, Frida Kahlo, the Beatles. But she brings a sense of dazzle and awe to the topic. It has to be real, it has to be based in truth. She balances them both. You think you know where you are. But it’s pretty magical where she takes you. That doesn’t happen in a lot in movies.”
Taymor’s to-and-fro from big screen to stage, from theater to moviehouse, makes her unique. Actors travel from one to the other. Often they must. But few directors move with ease across that border.
“In film, there has been a tendency to show the surface of the story as opposed to going into the dreamscape, the inner mind’s eye,” says the director.
“Across the Universe,” which starred wonderful young actors Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood as characters named Jude and Lucy, had a lot of location shots to lend authenticity to its war- era love story.
Yet, because it’s a musical, moviegoers were already primed to go into the characters’ “inner aria.”
In a scene scored to “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” Uncle Sam sings at Lucy’s brother, a new draftee.
“Is that happening, literally? Of course not,” Taymor says. “Is he shrink-wrapped in plastic like a piece of meat in front of an Army sergeant? Of course not. But that’s what he’s feeling. That’s what he’s fearing.”
Next summer, Taymor’s “Spider-Man,” co-written with Glen Berger, is set to go into rehearsals on Broadway. Rockers Bono and Edge composed the music. (“They have written 16 incredible songs that will come as a big shock for everybody, because they found their inner girl.”)
Eye-rolling might well be the response were another director attempting to re-create the story of Peter Parker and his superheroic angst and antics for the stage. But in the care of Taymor, it makes sense.
Since her youth, Taymor has been intrigued by folklore and mythology. And what is Spider-Man if not part of an American mythos?
“I think Spider-Man in particular is a brilliant story,” says Taymor. “It’s very mythic and that’s the reason after 40, 50 years, it can still speak across the planet to so many different people.
“I’m trying to get to the essence of what Spider-Man is about. This deals with the dilemma of being a superhero and a normal human being simultaneously.”
As for the tale’s big-screen versions?
“I like the second one,” Taymor says without hesitation.
One of the great scenes in “Spider-Man 2” remains the moment when Spidey is unmasked while trying to save a subway train full of people.
“I can’t do that in theater,” she says, with a hint of regret. “It’s really hard to do some of those things they did in theater.”
Spoken like someone who knows both sides well.
(Editor’s note: For more information on Saturday night’s event, go to . Tickets are available through the Wheeler Box Office 970-920-5570.)
