Julie Taymor Wants A New Generation To Know Gloria Steinem

Julie Taymor wrote and directed the 2020 biographical drama The Glorias, based on Gloria Steinem’s life, but the acclaimed director’s personal connection to the late feminist began long before the movie was even a twinkle in her gimlet eye.

The making of the film was, in a way, a full-circle moment for Taymor: Her mother inspired Steinem, and Steinem in turn inspired Taymor. “My mother and sister were very big activists,” says Taymor, 73. “My mom was in the political system in Massachusetts, and Gloria said that my mother was what inspired her to even get involved in these issues, in political issues.” It wasn’t until years later, however, that the Tony and Emmy Award-winning director — the mastermind behind films like Across the Universe and Broadway’s The Lion King — read Steinem’s My Life on the Road and realized she had to adapt it for the big screen.

“It was a [story] that needed to be told, and was a really exciting and interesting one,” she says. “She had so many wonderful, important things to say about the state of women everywhere.”

The movie stars Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander, Lulu Wilson, and Ryan Kiera Armstrong all as the trailblazing feminist, and rather than following a linear narrative, it moves through different periods of Steinem’s life, with a bus journey serving as the throughline as Gloria looks back on it all.

The Glorias premiered at Sundance in the winter of 2020 but didn’t have a chance at proper theatrical distribution due to the pandemic. Now, in light of Steinem’s death at 92 earlier this month, Taymor is eager to reflect on the movie and the attention it should have had six years ago.

“But [you] need someone to spearhead it,” she says, “so we just hope that we can get the original distributors to help get it out there again.”

Ahead, Taymor reflects on working with Steinem on such a personal project, her legacy, and why her story is more urgent than ever.

What was your experience like working with Gloria as you were making the film?

It gladdened me how generous she was, and generous to my input with my own way of telling stories — she adored the whole concept of the bus and the four different Glorias in the film. It was a road story, and therefore it doesn’t have a linear narrative. And I needed to find a way to tell that large story, which covers 80 years of her life, and be able to move back and forth. And we definitely had to have four different actresses to cover that. So the bus was the thread, the connecting device.

And Gloria loved it. She told me, in fact, that sometimes when she walked the streets of New York in her older years that she would sometimes look across the street and see herself and wonder what that person would be thinking of — where she had walked and what she had done.

So I loved working with her. And she gave her time to Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander. They wanted to talk to her, get a sense of who she was before they played her part. And she was just so ecstatic, and so surprised that I wanted to do the film.

She was very modest.

Completely. She was fierce but she was modest. But you can be fierce without being clubbed.

The other thing that really strikes me about her is that she was so much more interested in building movements than building a personal brand.

It was very hard for people to realize that the feminist movement could have leaders — not just one leader, because she was always sure not to want her face on the cover of Time magazine and Newsweek and all the other magazines that wanted to brand her. She knew that that was not what she needed to do — she needed to support other women.

And so her working with Black women, Latina women, the Native American brilliant Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller — these were natural inclinations and actions of hers. She seamlessly could move in the various worlds of race and gender. When she went out there, she always wanted to have a Black partner, a speaking partner — Flo Kennedy or Dorothy Pitman Hughes were the two main ones that we showed in the film. But they were to reach more women and more people.

Her look may have looked like a personal brand, like the streaks of hair and the glasses. She was always extremely well-dressed until she got more and more subdued in her dress. She wore a uniform, which was the black T-shirt, long-sleeve T-shirt, and black jeans.

What about her legacy do you feel is most urgent right now?

I was hoping that we could have shown The Glorias up at Telluride, but it was a very full docket. I think that there are plenty of women, and young women, who have no idea who she is and what the movement — not just Gloria, but the movement — was able to accomplish, and how we’ve gone backwards. What you are allowed to do with your own body has just been destroyed. The fact of how she changed the lives of women in all walks of life — they take it for granted. And it’s very important that young men see this film. It’s not just for young women, it’s for everybody. It’s important for them to see what the second generation of feminism, the second wave of feminism, brought because they’re completely unaware of how they’re losing it. Even watching the incredible scenes with Nixon talking about the word Ms. — “Oh, I prefer Mrs. or Miss.”

I hope the film sees a resurgence, to just see her incredible story told through your lens and the four amazing actresses.

And as we speak right now, with our democracy basically falling apart or trying to be destroyed. The end of the movie shows the millions of people during the women’s movement all over the world — Germany, South Africa, India, America, Canada, everywhere — and you see the documentary footage of her saying, “The Constitution does not begin with I, the president, it begins with We, the people.” It is a profoundly important moment to realize, “Oh, my God, we went through this already. What are we doing? Did we not learn anything?”