The Beatles have become so ubiquitous that their music can be heard in countless films, but never before have their songs been represented in this way. Award-winning director of Broadway’s The Lion King and the film Frida, Julie Taymor, OC ’74, is releasing her latest film, Across the Universe, which she describes as a “Beatles rock opera.” The movie opens nation-wide today.

“I’m into entertaining people with something they didn’t even know they wanted,” Taymor said.

A love story set in the psychedelic and impassioned ’60s, the landscape of the film is a steroid-infused look at a time in American history when the country’s youth united to stand up for what they believed in. Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) find themselves in the midst of turbulent times that strain their relationship.

Several nebulous characters, including a Neal Cassady type named Dr. Roberts (Bono) lead the couple on a cross-country road trip in a colorfully painted bus, inspired by Ken Kesey’s trip, Furthur, on the Merry Pranksters bus.

According to Taymor, the film uses only 30 minutes of dialogue; the story is told through the lyrics of 33 Beatles songs.

“The whole point was to be a musical derived from the Beatles’ catalogue,” Taymor said in an interview with the Review, “This wasn’t [to be like] Moulin Rouge, which is a tapestry [of different artists].”

Unlike other productions, which use rearrangements of the Beatles’ music, Across the Universe maintains the songs’ original versions. Live action filming was used whenever possible, rather than pre-recording the songs in a studio.

“In most [movie] musicals, the actor speaks and then they go into a singing voice. For most people, a singing voice is an entirely different voice — something they did in a studio two or three months earlier….Because the lyrics serve as dialogue in this movie, you want to hear the little bit of bounce off the walls, you want to hear people moving around,” explained sound mixer Tod Maitland in the film’s production notes.

Taymor’s vision for the film involved creating a world that young adults today could relate to, but that also conveyed a sense of what it was to be alive in the ’60s.

“Everything was a rebellion, from your hair to your values,” Taymor said, “It was an unbelievable time of change, and that change was coming from the youth.”

Today’s youth has not responded to the Iraq war in the same way the youth of the ’60s responded to the Vietnam War. The Columbia University student riots were followed by a series of similar protests across the country. The primary difference between the past and the present, Taymor noted, is that without the draft, students are not as intimately connected to the war and therefore not motivated to organize an uprising.

“[People in America] have to feel it before they become active, but they do respond to what happens to them on a personal level,” Taymor said.

Taymor remembers the decade through a child’s lens, watching her family “go through the insanity of the ’60s.” At a young age, her heightened perception of the period created a highly sensory experience, reflected in Across the Universe. The movie’s set was inspired by San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood and New York’s East Village.

Today’s youth has not responded to the Iraq war in the same way the youth of the ’60s responded to the Vietnam War. The Columbia University student riots were followed by a series of similar protests across the country. The primary difference between the past and the present, Taymor noted, is that without the draft, students are not as intimately connected to the war and therefore not motivated to organize an uprising.

“[People in America] have to feel it before they become active, but they do respond to what happens to them on a personal level,” Taymor said.

Taymor remembers the decade through a child’s lens, watching her family “go through the insanity of the ’60s.” At a young age, her heightened perception of the period created a highly sensory experience, reflected in Across the Universe. The movie’s set was inspired by San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and New York’s East Village.

“We made an impressionistic collage of the world of youthful self-expression,” wrote production designer Mark Friedberg.
Professor of Theater Roger Copeland mentioned Taymor’s firsthand experience of the ’60s as an important influence in her direction.

“She is a creature of the ’60s...totally, totally unapologetic,” Copeland said. “She really is a ’60s idealist...Hope is always alive in Julie Taymor’s universe.”

When Taymor enrolled at Oberlin College in the 1970s, she planned to focus on academics. Once here, however, she became heavily involved in theater, working “six hours a day,” which helped her to “develop a sense of being a director and an actor.”
“I loved the freedom at OberlinÉto tailor my studies,” Taymor said. She graduated with an independent major in folklore and mythology. As a recipient of the Thomas J. Watson fellowship, she then traveled to Indonesia to study experimental theatre and puppetry, where she also developed a mask/dance company, Teatr Loh.

According to Copeland, Taymor gave “the most fantastic lecture” during her campus visit a few years ago. “Students were literally inspired,” he said.

Taymor has had a whirlwind career, achieving great success in her endeavors. She recently collaborated with composer Elliot Goldenthal (who also wrote the original score for Across the Universe) on an original opera, Grendel. The production premiered at the Los Angeles Opera in 2006 and was later performed at the Lincoln Center Festival. Taymor has also directed The Magic Flute for the Metropolitan Opera with conductor James Levine.

She is the only person to win both best direction and best original costume design at the Tony Awards, for The Lion King. In 1991, Taymor received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and has also been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Off-Broadway Theater Awards. A major retrospective of her work opened in 1999 at Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts and appeared in Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of Women in the Arts and Chicago’s Field Museum. 

Copeland thinks a highlight in Taymor’s career was her 1992 direction of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex in Japan under the baton of Seiji Ozawa. The film of the opera, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won an Emmy Award, can be found in the Conservatory’s library collection.

Across the Universe is being released in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the “Summer of Love,” the summer of 1967. That season saw a flood of youths coming into the San Francisco area, celebrating with free food, free drugs and free love, increasing the nation’s awareness of hippie counterculture. “Summer of Love” is being remembered across the country with commemorative exhibits on display in New York’s Whitney Museum and Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.