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"  For more on Esquire&amp;#039;s Americans of the Year, pick up the December 2011 issue and check back here for the full list She was a young American traveling through Indonesia when she almost fell into the abyss. She&amp;#039;d been told about an inspiring place, an active volcano that erupted every fifteen minutes. But to reach it and peer inside, she&amp;#039;d have to climb up the steep and dangerous side of a dead crater. So she did. And when she reached the precipice of the crater, she crawled along its rim, terrified, her knees gripping the sharp volcanic rock and her eyes focused on the path in front of her, until she reached the volcano&amp;#039;s edge. She looked inside and saw lava boiling in the brightest, deepest shades of yellow and red she&amp;#039;d ever seen, and she no longer felt terrified at all. She felt wonder. And joy. And then she slipped. She righted herself quickly, but not before a piece of rock took out a chunk of her leg. She hobbled down to the nearest village, and even after suffering debilitating infections and permanent scarring, she didn&amp;#039;t regret the climb. How else could she have known what was waiting for her inside the volcano? &amp;quot;Oh, God, you saw Spider-Man.&amp;quot; Julie Taymor is sitting high above lower Manhattan, in her studio on the second floor of the cavernous three-floor apartment where she lives and works, and it has taken almost an hour of steamrolling through stories about her childhood outside Boston and her early theater work in New York and the time she almost fell in that volcano in Bali before my having seen Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark comes up. Her voice drops an octave as the words come out of her mouth, and her face crumples into a mix of surprise and mild embarrassment. &amp;quot;But you didn&amp;#039;t see my version of it, the first version, did you?&amp;quot;  I did not. I saw a version of the musical that had been &amp;quot;Reimagined!&amp;quot; as the twenty-dollar souvenir poster in the theater lobby put it, after Taymor, the show&amp;#039;s original director and cowriter, had left the show and after six delayed openings, five injured cast members, and a reported $75 million budget made it the most-talked-about musical since the days when people actually talked about musicals. Taymor never asks what I thought of it, and the part of me that likes to tell the truth is grateful. The story doesn&amp;#039;t make much sense, and what does make sense is pretty silly, and the less said about the music, the better. But what gets the audience going \u2014 and what makes it easy to see why the show consistently grosses more than $1 million a week and is one of the best-selling tickets on Broadway \u2014 is its visual and technical audacity. Massive skyscrapers drop from the ceiling. Miniature subway trains run over big houses in a feat of forced perspective. And then there&amp;#039;s the flying, up over the audience, all the way to the mezzanine, across the whole two-thousand-seat theater, eliciting honest-to-God gasps. This might not be &amp;quot;her version,&amp;quot; but the stuff that makes it watchable, and at times even thrilling, carries the same streak of ambition and imagination that transformed a second-rate Disney cartoon into a Broadway phenomenon and made Titus and The Tempest the rare Shakespeare movies worth watching. Which is to say: What gets the audience going is Taymor. It also helps that everybody here has read about the delays and the injuries and the blown-out budget, and that knowledge colors the experience of sitting through Spider-Man. It&amp;#039;s a cockeyed example of what Taymor has called &amp;quot;the double event&amp;quot; in theater, in which puppeteers and other technicians aren&amp;#039;t hidden from view but rather visible to the audience. We still lose ourselves in the story and suspend disbelief, but because we understand how the magic happens, we believe in the magic that much more.  So we&amp;#039;re riveted as the actors soar through the air because we read about all those nice kids who got hurt during rehearsals. We&amp;#039;re mesmerized by the sets because we know how much has gone wrong with them in the past. And we&amp;#039;re amazed at the drive and determination of the woman behind it to create a spectacle unlike anything we&amp;#039;d ever seen, because we know the price she paid for it. Taymor, it must be said, is a beautiful woman. Her face at fifty-eight has sharp, expressive features \u2014 she actually frowns when she&amp;#039;s unhappy, and her eyes seem to light up when she laughs \u2014 and she still has the long black hair she had when she was a young actress, &amp;quot;a very pretty eighteen-year-old,&amp;quot; as she puts it, who &amp;quot;didn&amp;#039;t want to play Cinderella or Snow White. I wanted to be the Wicked Witch of the West.&amp;quot; On this mid-September day, she&amp;#039;s just returned from a few weeks in Madrid, where she was directing the nineteenth worldwide production of The Lion King \u2014 a musical she first directed on Broadway fourteen years ago \u2014 and Los Angeles, where she was taking meetings to figure out her next job. Her light-filled studio space is free of clutter, save for a table piled with Tonys, an Emmy, and other shiny, pointy objects, and as we chat, she makes it clear that she doesn&amp;#039;t want to dwell on the past year. &amp;quot;If we only concentrate on Spider-Man,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;it just goes on and on.&amp;quot; So we talk about other things. Her progressive, encouraging parents. (Burton Hersh, in his 2010 book Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography, describes her mother, Betty Taymor, as the &amp;quot;Mother Superior of Massachusetts liberals.&amp;quot; Her father was a pioneer in the field of in-vitro fertilization.) The four years she spent in Indonesia after college, contracting malaria and mastering the ancient art of Javanese shadow puppetry. Her no-money, nothing-to-lose, off-off-Broadway days. Taymor is a generous and earnest storyteller, gesturing and impersonating and speaking at full clip for minutes on end without any lost trains or tangents. She is the anti \u2014 Nora Ephron. And yet Spider-Man pops up unexpectedly when she starts talking about the challenges of putting together The Lion King. She was a little-known avant-garde theater director with a MacArthur genius grant \u2014 a &amp;quot;nobody,&amp;quot; she says \u2014 when she got the call from Disney and came up with the revolutionary idea of mixing masked live actors with puppets to stage the musical. &amp;quot;They said we want what you do, we want your vision,&amp;quot; she remembers. &amp;quot;But Michael Ovitz and others from Hollywood would say, &amp;#039;I don&amp;#039;t think you can do it with puppets, it won&amp;#039;t have emotion.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; But she staged a series of trial performances with and without puppets for Disney CEO Michael Eisner, and as Taymor recalls, &amp;quot;He said the greatest line: &amp;#039;They all work, but I want to go with your first idea [involving the puppets] because it&amp;#039;s the bigger risk, and the bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; And she adds: &amp;quot;I believe that would have happened on Spider-Man as well.&amp;quot;  What&amp;#039;s more, nobody seemed to care much about the production budget of The Lion King. &amp;quot;It was really expensive ... $29 million. No one knew that, because nobody gave a shit. And by the way, Spider-Man cost $35 million,&amp;quot; she says, citing an estimate given to her by an executive close to the production. (The reported production budget is $75 million, but Taymor&amp;#039;s estimate, and presumably her source&amp;#039;s, does not include the cost of the extensive renovations made to Foxwoods Theatre to prepare it for the show.)  Spider-Man proceeds to come up a few more times, and while she may not want to dwell on it, she seems almost relieved when we start talking about the show head-on. She loved the story of Peter Parker, an outsider faced with superhuman challenges whose journey &amp;quot;falls within every single thing I&amp;#039;ve done.&amp;quot; And after she&amp;#039;d proven Ovitz and the other cynics wrong with the success of The Lion King, she had huge ambitions for her follow-up. &amp;quot;I wanted Spider-Man to be in a tent on top of Madison Square Garden,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I thought if it was on Broadway, people would think it was just another musical, but we were very careful never to call it a musical. It was a rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll circus drama, meaning its own beast.&amp;quot; She worked on the show for nine years (the Bush administration, give or take), starting in 2002, when Bono and the Edge of U2 enlisted Taymor to direct and cowrite the musical. Then Tony Adams, the lead producer who&amp;#039;d secured the stage rights from Marvel, suffered a stroke in the Edge&amp;#039;s apartment minutes before signing the papers to finalize the deal. (He died two days later.) Adams&amp;#039;s business partner took over, despite having no theater experience whatsoever, and he oversaw the show as it spiraled toward insolvency. Production had to shut down while new producers came on board and raised more cash. Meanwhile, during rehearsals and the extended preview period, Taymor and her team grappled with the technical challenges while members of the cast were getting injured during the aerial sequences. Bono and the Edge, who once championed Taymor&amp;#039;s original script (written with Glen Berger, a relative newcomer to the big leagues), were away on tour, but when they came back, complained that the show wasn&amp;#039;t working. The New York tabloids had a field day with the setbacks. Theater critics published reviews before the long-delayed official opening, and many ripped the story and the music to shreds. And through it all, Taymor quietly endured the second-guessing and ridicule until last March, which she describes, with uncharacteristic understatement, as &amp;quot;very dark times.&amp;quot; She lays out her story with the calm, even voice of someone who&amp;#039;s told it many times before \u2014 to friends, to lawyers, but never, until now, to a journalist. She says her dismissal came as a &amp;quot;complete shock.&amp;quot; Press reports at the time indicated that her producers gave her an ultimatum \u2014 accept fundamental changes to the show, or leave \u2014 which she strongly denies. &amp;quot;This thing that I refused to do the big changes and so they let me go? No. There wasn&amp;#039;t [an ultimatum],&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;That was not something that was brought up to me. &amp;quot;  Over the next few months, Taymor went silent while the new team shut down production, overhauled the story by scrapping most of Taymor&amp;#039;s second act, and orchestrated some damage control, mostly at Taymor&amp;#039;s expense. Bono told The New York Times in June that he had never loved Taymor&amp;#039;s version of the show. (I ask her about this, and though she declines to comment, the look on her face \u2014 annoyed and hurt \u2014 doesn&amp;#039;t.) According to the Times, the producers are painting her as &amp;quot;inefficient&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;inflexible&amp;quot; in her ongoing arbitration suit against them over $500,000 in royalties. And the Edge has spoken of her as being &amp;quot;exhausted&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;overwrought&amp;quot; before her firing.  That pissed her off. Of course she was exhausted, she says \u2014 she&amp;#039;d been working on the thing for nine years. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no doubt by the end of February, when I felt all of this stuff happening, that I was exhausted by that, but not by the show and not by the inspiration that I was getting from the actors,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;What was exhausting was the fact that the producers were absent... Those people weren&amp;#039;t there, so how does Bono know? I&amp;#039;m sorry.&amp;quot; Of the descriptions of her as overwrought, she says, &amp;quot;I think that those were important to paint a picture of a director who you needed to release in order to make this big change. I had to be characterized that way in order for something to happen.&amp;quot; And that she was fired for doing what she was hired to do \u2014 think big, take risks, break the rules \u2014 baffles her. &amp;quot;I say they asked me to get involved, they&amp;#039;ve seen my work&amp;quot; \u2014 what else did they expect? The thing that seems to frustrate her most, and it comes across in the edge of her voice, is that she still believes in her vision of the show. &amp;quot;I love the script. I like the music. Our version was way too long and needed to be cut, but I still think it was a valid story ... and by the end, it was really working.&amp;quot; She pauses. &amp;quot;This is the process. We unfortunately had people blogging that process. Some people say, &amp;#039;Oh, well, it&amp;#039;s the twenty-first century and you better get used to it.&amp;#039; Fine, but that means people will not be able to experiment and not be able to take risks, because you make mistakes along the way.&amp;quot; The rap on her over the years has been that she doesn&amp;#039;t like to compromise. It came up in tales about her movies \u2014 she had public feuds with the studio brass behind Frida, her 2002 biopic of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, and Across the Universe, her 2007 musical ode to the Beatles, over the films&amp;#039; running lengths; in both cases, she got the upper hand \u2014 and it came up in the reporting about Spider-Man. &amp;quot;I compromise all the time. All the time.&amp;quot; On the story or staging or \u2014  &amp;quot;Of course! I don&amp;#039;t know how you could possibly be in the world of opera, theater, and movies if you don&amp;#039;t compromise. Compromise is very different than selling out. Compromise is about saying, Let&amp;#039;s get on the same track. Our ending [of Spider-Man]didn&amp;#039;t work, so I was having to make compromises, and many of the things that were suggested, and changes that were offered by Bono, were made.&amp;quot; After 183 preview performances \u2014 the most ever for a Broadway show \u2014 and three months after she was fired, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark opened in June of this year with a star-studded premiere. Bill Clinton was there. Robert De Niro and Lou Reed were there, too, as was Julie Taymor. &amp;quot;It was a last-minute decision [to go]. I got letters from a lot of actors, and Bono had wanted me to come, so I went. I applauded all of the people I worked with, and I think people were happy to see me there. I watched the show for the first time, but I had already read the rewrite of the script...&amp;quot; She pauses a few seconds and looks away. She takes a deep breath. &amp;quot;I think the show is what it is, and we&amp;#039;ll see if it lasts. I would like it to last so I get paid.&amp;quot;  She sounds weary. She says she has been paid only $125,000 so far for nine years&amp;#039; work; royalties usually kick in after the start of previews, but her payment has been in dispute, and arbitration proceedings with the producers are likely to go on for months. Still, she&amp;#039;s glad she didn&amp;#039;t distance herself from opening night. &amp;quot;I would have felt really horrible about that, too. Because I think that&amp;#039;s sort of saying this isn&amp;#039;t mine, but it is mine. I say that&amp;#039;s my show up there.&amp;quot; Bono and the Edge have said they would never have gotten involved in Spider-Man had they known it would take this long to come together. Taymor agrees, in part: &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think I would want to go through this again ... not with this group of people. Not with these producers.&amp;quot; But it is not as simple as wishing a decade of her life away. &amp;quot;Nine years on Spider-Man, I still love what we were all trying to do.&amp;quot; Did Julie Taymor fail? She clearly doesn&amp;#039;t think so. And insofar as she set out to make her version of Spider-Man \u2014 taking dramatic risks, showing sometimes breathtaking ambition, and pressing her conviction \u2014 she prevailed.Critics and audiences may complain about the story (which changed radically after her departure) and the songs (which are all Bono and the Edge), but they still marvel at the vision, the scope, and the sets. They still marvel at Julie Taymor. The future of Spider-Man isn&amp;#039;t clear, and it might make some serious money yet. As for her plans? &amp;quot;Thank God for Lion King,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t do projects I don&amp;#039;t completely love, and therefore I&amp;#039;m completely invested in them.&amp;quot; Her confidence is a little shaky these days. &amp;quot;You know how people always say get back up on the horse and just go and do another theater piece? That ain&amp;#039;t gonna happen.&amp;quot; In Los Angeles, she says, &amp;quot;I could tell people were going &amp;#039;Hmm, is she the one who spends all the money, is she the one who didn&amp;#039;t collab \u2014 &amp;#039; Pffft.&amp;quot;  And yet there will always be another volcano to climb. Next, she will likely direct a movie musical version of the Thomas Mann novella The Transposed Heads. She first adapted it for the stage back in the 1980s, and the film will feature music from her longtime partner and collaborator, composer Elliot Goldenthal, and will be set, she says, &amp;quot;in contemporary New York City, contemporary India, and a completely supernatural, mythical India.&amp;quot; Mann begins his 1941 novella (about two men who literally switch heads) with a warning: &amp;quot;It requires, if anything, more courage to tell such a tale than to hear it.&amp;#039;&amp;#039; Sounds like a job for Julie Taymor. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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