How Julie Taymor Found a Zest for Life in Cinema

In the Criterion Channel’s ongoing series Adventures in Moviegoing, we invite renowned artists to open up about their personal journeys as cinephiles, and also to guest-program a series of their favorite films, so they can share their movie love directly with you. The latest installment spotlights a director with one of the boldest visual imaginations in the business. Julie Taymor, the woman behind the spectacular stage adaptation of The Lion King, as well as inventive and arresting films such as Frida and Titus, sets off on this month’s Adventures with critic Michael Sragow, discussing her formative experiences at the movies, and in the process offering a window onto the formation of her theatrical, bursting-with-life sensibility. Check out the trailer above for a taste of the revealing conversation, in which Taymor talks about discovering world-cinema classics like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel, and Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria as a teenager studying mime in Paris, and marvels at the respective high styles of the pre-Code melodrama Baby Face and the Soviet war film The Cranes Are Flying. To watch the whole interview—and to cue up one of the movies that opened Taymor’s eyes to the possibilities of the medium—head on over to the Channel.