SHAKESPEARE AT WAR

To follow The Lion King, her Broadway tour de force, director Julie Taymor has chosen another seemingly impossible project: Titus, her first feature film, due out next year, will be of Shakespeare’s most violent and least-admired play, Titus Andronicus, which she staged to much acclaim in 1994. Her cast, including Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange, shows photographer JULIAN BROAD the fearsome result of Taymor’s vision for this ancient tragedy of rape, decapitation, and hideous revenge

Career suicide, some might call it: a first-time feature-film maker taking on Titus Andromcus, Shakespeare's goriest and least-acclaimed play. For director Julie Taymor, who turned a cartoon, The Lion King, into an avant-garde Broadway hit, the film was just another day at the office—not to mention the opportunity of a lifetime. Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus is about a Roman general whose wartime victory leads to an endless web of floggings, rapes, decapitations, and severed hands and tongues. For Taymor, it was nothing less than "the greatest dissertation on violence and family and compossion and revenge that I've ever come across." — —‘" Even star Anthony Hopkins, who vowed never to do Shakespeare again after his legendary London performances in King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Macbeth, couldn't resist Taymor's ferocious enthusiasm. Equal parts Lear and Norman Schwarzkopf—with a dash of Hannibal Lecter thrown in—Hopkins's Titus descends from warrior jiero to lunatic chef who literally

makes pie out of the sons of his enemy. For co-star Jessica Lange, who plays Tamora, the manipulative queen of the Goths who has two lovers (played by Alan Cumming and Harry J. Lennix), the role recalls the fierce, stormy territory she carved out in such films as Frances and The Postman Always Rings Twice "It's written on a grand scale,'' Lange says of her character. "She's a queen Not your ordinary, recognizable, familiar American woman." Indeed, we will see little that's familiar when Titus opens next year. Set in a Rome at once ancient, Fascist, and contemporary (the movie is brimming with Bentleys and Thunderbirds, punks and graffiti, and costumes that range from armor to 1930s dinner jackets), Taymor's vision is an anachronistic extravaganza As for the film's numerous violent sequences, which the director calls "penny-arcade nightmares," expect vintage Taymor: "Humans become tigers, a woman becomes a doe, and a sacrificial lamb is part human, part animal." Mutilation may never again look so good.

EVGENIA PERETZ