WASHINGTON, D.C. -- It didn't occur to director Julie Taymor at first, all the ways in which her life is similar to that of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's.
"No," she says, shaking her head. "I didn't think about those things when I was making this film."
There were so many other technical and aesthetic problems to think about instead, such as how to rescue Kahlo from the feminist view of her as a victim overshadowed by a powerful older man ("Of course she suffered, but she also had a lusty life," Taymor says. "She made beauty out of these incredibly dark moments"); and how to re-create 1930s Paris and New York while shooting in Mexico on a tortilla budget (Taymor's solution: She created montages of period photographs and stock images and had the actors move through them).
It was only after Frida had been edited, after it had made its debut in movie theaters to a praising review in The New York Times, that Taymor began to wonder if her attraction to Kahlo's story was less straightforward and more complex than initially it had appeared.
"Who knows why you're attracted to do a project about a specific person?" she says. "There are many reasons on the surface, and also many reasons you may not immediately understand."
For instance, both Taymor and Kahlo were badly injured in bus accidents. Both suffered debilitating injuries to a leg: Kahlo in the accident, and Taymor when she nearly fell into a volcano.
Both became deeply involved, romantically and professionally, with another artist: Kahlo with her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, and Taymor with her partner of more than two decades, the musician Elliot Goldenthal.
And then, of course, there is the most obvious similarity. Both Kahlo and Taymor have developed an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary, the former with paint and canvas, the latter in the theater and on film. Saturated with color and deceptively primitive, their creations are as startling as an ice cube placed against the back of your neck.
Artist Andre Breton famously described Kahlo, who died in 1954 at age 47, as a ribbon tied around a bomb. Her paintings are transparently and disturbingly autobiographical, with images of the fetus that she miscarried while in New York, her severed torso held together by a corset, her exposed heart dripping blood after she and Rivera briefly divorced.
