take place in June at the Galleria Lorcan O’Neill
in Rome. “It has been five years in the
making,” she says. Can we expect a Taylor-
Johnson special? Will it be shocking?
“Not so much,” she says. “It just felt time,
I was ready. We’ll talk about it again.”
I had assumed that returning to her
artistic roots was where her true ambi-
tions and heart lay, that she considers
filmwork more of an entertaining side-
show. But she immediately squashes
that. “No, film is the most important
thing for me. I want to work in film all
the time.” She has three in the pipeline,
one about the painter Rothko, for which
she has cast Russell Crowe in the title role.
She can’t yet talk about the other two, but
mentions working with Al Pacino during lock-
down. A showrunner friend called her and
asked if she would direct an episode of a series
he was working on. She said no. “What if you
get to work with Pacino?” he added. “I said f
yes, where do I sign.” Did he live up to expecta-
tions? “He was f ing great, 81 and fully on his
game. I learnt so much. He has worked with
every great director you admire and you are now
giving the directions. I had to be 100 per cent on point.”
She can’t yet say what the series is.
She brings up the difficulties of being a
woman in Hollywood and how the resist-
ance she encountered with A Million Little
Pieces taught her to be more resilient in an
industry still very much dominated by
men. But she has champions in the film
world, such as the multi-awardwinning
director/producer Ava DuVernay, who called
Taylor-Johnson last year to find out why she
hadn’t seen any new work of hers recently.
“Want to do something with me?” she asked.
They tried to get something off the ground but
it didn’t work out in the end.
She cites this as a perfect example of the
power of women tag-teaming — basically looking
out for and helping each other — as the key to
cracking the male strangle hold in the industry. “The stats of
women film-makers is so low,” she says. Has she come up
against sexism herself in Hollywood? “You don’t feel it
when you’re in the room because that would be ‘wrong’,”
she says. So while women are at least now included (mostly
for appearances’ sake at the start of a project), the truth is
they are not getting any more opportunities than before.
“You’re like, ‘Wait a minute, why wasn’t I even part of the
conversation?’ But when a door slams in your face you have
to learn to kick it down. If you can see your way through, it
counts for five steps forward.”
“I’m feeling tired,” she says. That’s OK, I tell her, you go,
then I remember something I wanted to talk to her about:
cancer and how she feels about it now, having suffered from
it on two separate, unrelated occasions, three years apart.
When we met seven years ago she was reluctant to say
much. This time, and maybe because I mention I’ve been
through it too, she opens up. “Sometimes I can talk about it,
sometimes I can’t, it changes daily,” she says, looking to one
side, adding that a close friend is going through it at the
moment. “It’s that thing of trying to be there for someone
but also not destabilising your own emotional response. It’s
a fine line.”
She gets up to go, changes her mind and sits down again.
“I was in this tiny newsagent this morning and I could hear
the man behind me telling his friend he’d just found out he
had cancer. He was in shock. It was so weird but I just
turned to him and said I’d had the same thing. You’re going
to be fine, I told him, you’ve just got to look at it this way. We
talked and I came out of there thinking what a strange
encounter it was. But you have to tag-team and lift people
going through something similar.” She looks at me directly
now. “It never leaves you, does it? And it certainly comes
out with bells and whistles every time you go for a check-up.
God bless everyone going through it.” ■Humanity No 14 Sam Taylor-Johnson is available now;
citizensofhumanity.com‘I hate art festivals.
I went to Frieze LA...
It’s was a f ***ing
soulless nightmare’
The Sunday Times Style • 19