I’ll never forget Evan walking in the hallways with this Bowie T-shirt, because at one point we’d asked David Bowie if he was going to play Mr. Julie Taymor: We rehearsed it like a normal musical in theater … and it bonded everybody. And then I got the part and we all spent about seven or eight months in New York together. And I won’t let anybody else do it!” It just had to be. Once I heard Julie was making a Beatles movie, I remember just thinking, “There’s nobody else that can do this. There’s no film quite like Across the Universe, so I’d imagine making it was a unique experience.Įvan Rachel Wood: It was one of the best experiences of my life. (Given the timing of the interview, we also threw in a few Westworld season-finale questions.) The film polarized critics (Roger Ebert loved it, Ann Hornaday hated it) and opened to limp box office, failing to recoup its budget.Īnd yet - in the past decade, the audience for Across the Universe has grown, its inevitable cult-classic status realized. At the present moment, the film’s portrayal of ’60s activism and art as weapons against government oppression seems especially resonant. In the lead-up to the Fathom Events release, Vulture had a candid conversation with Taymor and Wood about the unusual process of making the film, the bizarre logistics of Wood’s first nude scene, the ongoing challenges facing female directors, and the potential influence of Across the Universe on millennial activists. Taymor fought back hard, and while she won final cut, she was smeared in the press (industry publications used words like “ballistic” and “hysteria”) and, she says, torpedoed by Sony’s marketing department. Without her approval, the studio test-screened an alternate cut that eliminated much of the film’s political content and minimized the nonwhite supporting characters. Even in more traditionally constructed scenes, the scale is breathtaking the entire film was shot on location and, according to Taymor, employed 5,000 extras.Īcross the Universe also runs well over two hours - not a big deal in this age of bloated superhero adventures, but in 2007, the length of Taymor’s cut alarmed Sony executives. Kite” is a psychedelic circus featuring collage animation and 20-foot puppets. “I Want You” becomes a nightmare ballet about Max’s recruitment and subsequent dehumanization in Vietnam, ending with an image of soldiers carrying the Statue of Liberty as they crush villages underfoot. The magical-realism elements Taymor brought to her Oscar-winning film Frida and her Broadway hit The Lion King are blown to epic proportions in Across the Universe. Taymor’s film is as visual as it is musical. Fictional characters become entangled in real events (the Detroit riots, the Columbia student protests), using songs from every Beatles era to express a nation’s political and psychedelic awakening. Their stories coalesce in New York City, where they befriend blues musicians, acid heads, radical extremists, a closeted lesbian, and Bono in a ridiculous mustache. Using 33 Beatles songs and minimal dialogue, Across the Universe tells the story of three young adults in the late 1960s: Lucy (then 17-year-old Evan Rachel Wood), an all-American girl who wants to change the world her brother Max (Joe Anderson), a rebel who gets dragged into Vietnam and Jude (Jim Sturgess), a working-class artist from Liverpool who follows his dreams across the ocean. But no director has ever used the Beatles’ music as inventively and audaciously as Julie Taymor, whose 2007 film Across the Universe is being rereleased in theaters for three days by Fathom Events. The Beatles have always had a cinematic presence, from the 1964 faux-documentary A Hard Day’s Night to the experimental shorts of John and Yoko.
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