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 across the universe interview
Director Julie Taymor subverts the musical. The director of Frida joins forces with veteran British scribes Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (Porridge, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet) to create a late-60s-set movie musical built around 33 Beatles songs. Across The Universe, then, is nothing if not unusual. "There is no formula for this movie," says director Julie Taymor, who developed the project with Clement and La Frenais, creating an elaborate love story with a backdrop of Vietnam and social tumult.  It must have been quite a challenge, especially in the face of the protective passions of certain Beatles fans. "It's a very big burden to carry, an honour and a burden as well. One of those double things," says Taymor. "But for 40 years there's been some pretty brilliant, brilliant covers – Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin – of Beatles songs, and some horrendous ones." Despite being an elaborate film with multiple set-pieces, special effects, and half a dozen key characters performing the songs (led by impressive relative newcomers Jim Sturgess, Evan Rachel Wood and Joe Anderson), the result are remarkably fluid. "It was very organic," says Taymor. "Where you become spontaneous is where you see what the performers can do… Where there's freedom I really go for the freedom. Like with Eddie Izzard in the recording studio he said, 'I'm not a singer', and I said, 'That's fine – learn the song as best you can and then improvise.' So we cut his track from ten extraordinary improvisations, and on set he did it live. Ninety per cent of this movie is sung live on film, it's not lip-sync." As well as being a love story, the film is very politicised, with Taymor and co drawing parallels between the late 60s and today. "I feel like I'm on a soapbox," says Taymor, but continues: "We have a war going on, and people just live their lives normally while other young men and women - the poor - are fighting a war that nobody understands. And we shouldn't even be there, we should never have been there. A lot of lines in the movie - like 'if bombs start going off here, maybe people will listen' - are very pointedly post-9/11 and very present. That content in the film is as important to us as the fun, the love story and the beauty of the music and the imagery."  It's not every day that a big studio (Sony) releases a movie that features musical set pieces involving young men being processed into grunts for Vietnam, or a lesbian cheerleader singing I Want to Hold Your Hand while American footballing students balletically clash around her in slow-mo, or Bono and Izzard as counter-culture gurus (inspired by Leary and Kesey), or a supergroup that throws together fictionalised variations on Joplin and Hendrix. It's the most inventive, audacious film you'll see in years. Love it or hate it, you can't fault the ambition of Across The Universe.
Daniel Etherington
Across The Universe, on selected release 28 September 07.
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