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...with feature filmmaking. Nevertheless, the films "do obey one central rule of spontaneity, and that's the interview. What people actually say on camera isn't scripted for them; they come into a studio and they say it. They write it for me, if you like, and then the text becomes the script for what follows...
...original work was not itself historically situated; it mixed myth, history and pure fiction to create a world equal parts Ancient Rome and post-medieval Europe. So even though she allows monumental flights of historical fancy, Taymor is able to successfully preserve a greater portion of the original text than has been used in any recent film adaptation of Shakespeare with the exception of Kenneth Branagh's 1996 Hamlet...
...liberties taken in this version, then, are not in language; they are visual. Titus is, regardless of how modern audiences react to it, surprisingly faithful to Shakespeare in that it does not contradict much of his original text, which lacked any stage direction. This is precisely why Taymor succeeds where other directors have failed: although she does feel free to invent on her own just as Shakespeare did, her invention is not in any way at odds with his. Her work does not second-guess Titus Andronicus or steal its fire; it expounds on it and creates...
...perhaps such resonance, the free-wheeling association of Taymor's images and the magic of the text itself, that make watching this adaptation of Titus a sort of dreamlike experience which continues well after the film itself ends. The images of the film have a way of growing in the imagination rather than fading away, leaving the audience curiously marked by the passing of this marvelous sensory experience...
...about the loss of Christian morality that come across as even more depressing than Tom Stoppard's musings in Jumpers and show-stoppers about the benefits of being a male nun, Durang's songs are more bizarre than his scripts, if that can be believed. Add to this a text that switches languages as quickly and gleefully as it does literary allusions, and you have what very easily could have been a confusing and tedious wreck of a play...