The night before I interview the British artist Sam Taylor-
Johnson, 55, I attend an early evening drinks party at the
Chiltern Firehouse hosted in her honour by the American
denim brand Citizens of Humanity to celebrate her take-
over of its annual magazine, Humanity. It is her first visit to
London in two years and this inherently private woman, a
member of the late 1990s YBA movement, which included
iconoclasts such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the
Chapman brothers, is clearly nervous. Not to mention that
her flight from LA, where she has lived for the past nine
years with her husband, the actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, 31,
and their children, only landed that morning.
All her gang are there: the Davids (Walliams and
Furnish); the actress Kristin Scott Thomas, who appeared
in Taylor-Johnson’s first feature-length film, 2009’s
Nowhere Boy, about John Lennon’s early Liverpool years;
the producer Eric Fellner; photographer Mary McCartney;
designer Bella Freud; her ex-husband, the YBA champion
and art dealer Jay Jopling; their daughter Angelica; and,
of course, her husband, who is slickly turned out in a
pinstripe suit. She is entertaining and full of droll, wry
comments, but her eyes dart around as friends vie for her
attention, and I’m not surprised to find out the couple later
escaped for a quiet dinner à deux.
We meet the next day in the more soporific environs of
Claridge’s, where she is staying. She bounds up smiling in
jeans and a T-shirt, an ageless and youthful spirit, with her
long blonde hair and wrists covered in jewellery. “I’m
very tired,” she says, as we sit down and order an afternoon
tea to share. Of course she has to be, but I also wonder
if she mentions it in case she wants an out. I first inter-
viewed her seven years ago at the Chateau
Marmont in Los Angeles. She was deep into the
editing process for Fifty Shades of Grey, her
cinematic interpretation of EL James’s erotic
fiction, starring Jamie Dornan and Dakota
Johnson. There had been tensions with the
author and I remember her almost
visceral rebellion when answering ques-
tions: ingratiating platitudes are not part
of her vocabulary.
How does she feel about that film
now? “Back in those wild crazy days,”
she says, her tone laced with irony. “It
feels like two lifetimes ago. What was
that Joan Didion quote, you know the
one where she says, ‘I’ve lost touch with
a couple of people I used to be’? That’s
me. It was a baptism of fire into the system
of film-making. I learnt a lot. Not neces-
sarily lessons I needed to learn.”
Her project for Citizens of Humanity,
two years in the making, has been a lot less
divisive. She was given carte blanche toproduce a large-format 155-page magazine. She printed out
rough copies of all the images she had taken during her
career, trying to find a thread that would resonate in today’s
altered world. The result is, for the most part, a historical
wander through her canon and those she has immortalised
over the years: Laurence Fishburne, Paul Newman and
Philip Seymour Hoffman among others, part of her 2002-
2004 Crying Men series; Robin Williams, juxtaposed with a
more recent image of a tree in Yosemite, symbolising a life
lived beyond the mortal. But it opens with a defiant and
reactionary self-portrait, 1993’s F***, Suck, Spank, Wank —
Taylor-Johnson, trousers down, aviators on, her implied
gaze insolent behind those tinted lenses. Seminal works,
mixed with new ones, of David Hockney, who she was
introduced to by her gardener, and an unpublished Vanity
Fair portrait of Miuccia Prada taken in 2011. The works are
underscored by interviews conducted by her daughter
Angelica, who wants to be a writer and whose remit it was
not to make her mother the focus.
Her husband, of course, plays a central role in Humanity.
His portrait, alongside the actor Billy Bob Thornton, on the
set of Taylor-Johnson’s 2018 film, an adaptation of James
Frey’s controversial memoir A Million Little Pieces, closes the
work. The book attracted controversy in 2006, three years
after its publication, when it was reported that some of the
content was fictionalised. “I found the book so powerful, so
well written. It takes you on the addict’s journey,” she says.
Together with Frey she visited the rehab centre that plays a
central role in the book and was allowed to go through his
records. “He was addicted to all he said he was, he went
through the programme and he’s still sober, and still
he gets taken down.” When news of the project
came out, the outcry was reignited, which tempered
the film’s release and reaction. “Wow, I thought,
people really don’t forgive,” she says.
She first met and fell in love with her
husband on the set of Nowhere Boy,
marrying him three years later. They have
two young children, Wylda Rae, 11, and
Romy Hero, 10. The family ostensibly
went to Los Angeles for a weekend in
2013, and have never left. She clearly
thrives there. “I think of it as living in Cali-
fornia, not LA,” she says. “It’s really a work
base. You’re in a city with no centre. What
holds me there is the nature, hiking, the
canyons and big ocean. We go off on road
trips to Yosemite and Big Sur.”
The one question that infuriates her is any
mention of their 23-year age gap. I lamely try
to say something but she cuts me off, and quite
rightly. “Imagine if I said to you, ‘Hey, Vassi,
how’s your relationship with your husband?’
You’d be like, ‘What the f ***?’ ”Artist, Hollywood film-maker and mother of four – at 55, Sam Taylor-Johnson
has seen a lot (and doesn’t hold back on what she really thinks).
She talks to Vassi Chamberlain about family life in LA, surviving cancer
and why you won’t find her hanging out on the art scene any time soon
The Sunday Times Style • 17