Written by Negan Fu
Acclaimed director Julie Taymor stopped by the SCAD Museum of Art this month as a guest speaker, and many students were able to hear her talk about her work. Taymor’s current project, “The Glorias: A Life on the Road,” is being shot entirely here in Savannah and India. Spanning from the 1940s to present day, the film, based on the best selling memoir “My Life on the Road,” will revolve around feminist icon Gloria Steinem’s life and career.
Multiple actresses, including Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander and Lulu Wilson, will portray Steinem at different stages of her life. Steinem herself will even make an appearance. However, the structure of the film will be a little unconventional for a biographical picture. Rather than just beginning with the youngest age and progressing chronologically, the film will feature multiple scenes in which the various Glorias will interact with each other on a bus. “[T]he ideograph is a bus out of time, because if you’re an activist you’re forever riding that bus,” Taymor said.
The scenes on the bus, which will be the only black and white sequences in the film, will help show how Steinem changed and developed throughout the multiple periods of her life to become the “Gloria that people are familiar with,” Taymor said. The film will also include several other notable feminists, such as Dorothy Pitman Hughes (played by Janelle Monáe) and Flo Kennedy (played by Lorraine Toussaint). “All of these fabulous, extraordinary women in their own right, who deserve their own movies, are the women that [Steinem] learned about the movement [from],” Taymor said.
Taymor also spoke about working in the collaborative fields of theater and film, in both of which she has built an impressive resume. Her past directorial work in the latter includes “Titus” (1999), “Frida” (2002) and the Beatles-inspired musical “Across the Universe” (2007), all of which garnered an Academy Award nomination (or in the case of Frida, six of them). In 1997, Taymor’s adaptation of “The Lion King” debuted on Broadway and has since become the highest grossing Broadway production of all time. Of course, Taymor didn’t accomplish these feats on her own. “I get my best ideas talking with my collaborators. Not to my collaborators, but with my collaborators,” Taymor said. “You don’t need to be better than your collaborators; you need to have people who inspire you . . . I think that’s the joy of it, and if you don’t have that joy then don’t do it.”
The Glorias: A Life on the Road is currently searching for more extras of “all types of people, [and] especially a lot of women,” Taymor said. If students are interested, they should email Glorias.MHC@gmail.com as soon as possible with the following information.
