By PETER CALDER
No one can accuse Julie Taymor of aiming low. The avant-garde director who turned Disney's The Lion King into a Broadway smash - in the process of becoming the first woman to win a best director Tony (Broadway's Oscar) - could have picked any property she liked for her first feature film.
But she chose Shakespeare. What's more, she settled on Titus Andronicus, a blood-sodden piece of Elizabethan pulp which was a crowd-pleaser in its day but derided as hopelessly old-fashioned even before the Bard shuffled off this mortal coil.
It's widely regarded as one of the great playwright's lesser works - its characters are prototypes for later, greater roles such as Lear and Iago. What's more, many scholars doubt Shakespeare wrote all of it and think that what he did write was a revision of an earlier uncelebrated play.
But Taymor, who wrote her film version after directing the play off Broadway, won't hear a bad word said about it.
"I love it," she says down the phone line from Los Angeles where she's directing a West Coast production of The Lion King.
"It's the greatest treatise on violence ever written - incredible entertainment but at the same time condemning the idea of violence as entertainment.
"So it's overwritten in places - I cut an hour and a half out of it for the theatre and the screenplay - and maybe it's not constantly high, high poetry like some of the latter plays. But as far as drama and three-dimensional, fascinating characters, I think it's as rich as any of the plays."
She sees the play (and her film, which is called simply Titus) as one which condemns violence.
"It's about why violence is committed and what the aftermath is, what happens to the victims.
"Films like Braveheart or the great war movies glorify violence. You never go home and see the suffering of the people who were massacred.
"And then films like Pulp Fiction are very puerile and very dangerous because they make light of violence. Now that's horrific."
Taymor, acknowledged as one of the American theatre's best choreographers, designers and directors, serves up this horror show about bloodlust and revenge as a kind of wild, expressionist baroque, which mixes, with deliberately dizzying casualness, a dozen visual styles.
Stormtroopers from Star Wars, punk rock villains, chiffoned damsels, Michelangeline cherubs, starched fascists and refugees from Fellini's Satyricon share the screen in a design which can seem more confusing than potent - but is undeniably theatrical.
"Yeah, it's a theatrical film," says Taymor, "but it's a very cinematic play. It's probably more 'theatrical' than any other movie of Shakespeare, except perhaps Kurosawa's [Ran and Throne of Blood which were versions of King Lear and Macbeth respectively]."
This theatricality can seem overwhelming at times, although it can blend with text to potent effect: when the mutilated Lavinia is discovered, for example, her amputated hands have been replaced with twiggy branches. It's a stunning, shocking image which rhymes horribly with the line about the villains who have "lopped and hewed thy ... two branches" - but it's also supremely theatrical.
Taymor says she's found "cinematic equivalents to theatrical concepts" but she still sees the film as pure cinema. Unblushingly she sets herself alongside Fellini and Kurosawa who "never did theatre but they had theatrical concepts and visions.
"Early filmmakers like Melies, Murnau, the German expressionists, all had a tremendous theatricality in their filmmaking," she says.
"I just think it's a sorry state of affairs that movies have become all about making the special effects as realistic as possible."
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