Interview: Sam Taylor-Wood, artist and film director

Published on Tuesday 15 December 2009 14:39

Just like John Lennon, artist Sam Taylor-Wood was abandoned by a mother who was later found living nearby. The shared experience has led to her first feature film, but having survived cancer twice, she is used to making great art out of adversity

WHEN Sam Taylor-Wood was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 29, just three months after giving birth to her first baby, she would have loved a T-shirt saying, "For God's sake, I'm fine." It's a clear indication that she does not like people feeling sorry for her. We're in Glasgow and it's the morning after a private screening of her first feature film, Nowhere Boy. I've asked if people's attitudes towards her changed when she was ill. In some ways, she says, they did. She remembers feeling sick of the way people looked at her. The heads tilted with sympathy. The knitted brows of concern. The never-ending gallery of pitiful looks from people who cared. Though she was the one battling cancer, those looks made her feel she had to hold everyone else's hands too.

These days, Taylor-Wood could do with fishing that T-shirt out of the laundry basket once more. People are looking at her again, though this time with more judgment than pity. Perhaps a more aggressive slogan would be better. "Don't tell me how to live." "Why would I care what you think?" "Leave me alone." Instead, Taylor-Wood goes for something cheeky, ironic and more subtle for our meeting. Her black woollen jumper has a single word stitched in white across the chest. "Girl." The message is simple, coming from one of the original Young British Artists who arrived on the scene in the 1990s with a photograph of herself with trousers around her ankles, defiance on her face, and a T-shirt saying, "F*** Suck Spank Wank." The YBA has since mellowed and the expletives have gone, but she still wants us to know she doesn't care a jot what we think. Especially when it comes to her love for a man 23 years her junior. Girl or woman, she will fall for whom she pleases.

Since Taylor-Wood filmed Nowhere Boy earlier this year, she has been in a relationship with her 19-year-old leading man, Aaron Johnson. He is also in Glasgow and they chaired a Q&A at the screening together, Taylor-Wood the seasoned and eloquent professional, Johnson the surly and awkward pretty-boy teenager who kept swearing and looking to his older lover for reassurance. It wasn't hard to read the audience's minds as we watch them interact – "What could they possibly have in common?" It's something, she points out when we meet the next day, that would never be asked of an older man with a younger woman. "If I was a man, no-one would question it," she tells me, chewing the words carefully before letting them out. "It's sexist. I think people are frightened of women making big decisions."

Does she see advantages, then, that come from the age gap? I had wondered whether being with someone so young and blissfully unaware of his own mortality was refreshing for a woman who has defeated cancer twice. "The thing is I don't think about it," she insists. "I honestly don't. It's only when people throw it at me as something I ought to think about. It's never an issue for either of us. We are completely immersed and compatible. Age shouldn't really make a difference."

Though Johnson doesn't join us, he feels very present in the conversation. He plays the young John Lennon in Taylor-Wood's emotionally intense film of the music legend's teenage years in Liverpool. The director and her bright young star got together towards the end of the shoot, and days after they walked down the red carpet arm in arm at the London Film Festival premire in October, they announced their engagement. Taylor-Wood may be more than twice Johnson's age (she's 42) and he may be just seven years older than her eldest daughter (who, to thicken the plot, plays his sister in Nowhere Boy). It may be less than a year since Taylor-Wood divorced her husband of ten years, Jay Jopling, the art dealer who continues to represent her at his gallery, White Cube. And it may be only months since Jopling got cosy with singer Lily Allen, his junior by 22 years.

Never mind all that; Taylor-Wood is clearly having the time of her life. She has the flushed, embarrassed, slightly silly look of someone who is smack-bang in the middle of falling in love. It's not the jumper that makes me think she looks like a girl, in fact. She keeps beaming then looking stern when she realises her face isn't doing what she wants. Over and over, she talks about the joys of living in the moment. "Life is great," she says, also not for the first time. "I've got a fantastic relationship, two great kids, a great film. On all fronts, everything feels pretty strong... and lovely."

It has all happened very quickly though. "We tried to keep everything a secret but you know what the press is like," she says, eyeballing me, perhaps only partly in jest. "They sniff everything out." Taylor-Wood has compared interviews to root-canal surgery and she is very careful when we speak about her engagement to Johnson, never forgetting for a moment the dictaphone on the table between us. But she is also more open and softer than I expected from someone who is no stranger to scrutiny. Perhaps it's because her art is so confessional, so resolutely about her, whether she's photographing Hollywood men weeping or capturing herself suspended in her east London studio, harnesses airbrushed out, so she looks as though she may be sleeping. Taylor-Wood wears her heart on her sleeve in art and life. All she says is that if I go "too far" she'll stop me. But she never does. "To make one thing clear we didn't actually get together until almost a week before we finished filming," she goes on. "We managed to keep everything at bay until then. Then when we were on the home run and it felt safe ..." She pauses, then decides to leave it there.

"I've always lived my life fearlessly, and what I want to do with my life, I do," she continues. "I step into all sorts of challenging situations. It doesn't make a difference to us. It only seems to bother other people. I just have to ignore that because they're not people I know and they're not part of my life. I can't let it worry me because on so many fronts if I'd listened to other people... well I might not have made a film. People probably would have said, 'Are you up to it?' And the last thing I want is for people to be opinionated about my personal life."

She laughs sourly. "What can you do? When you live life the way I do, everyone feels they have something to say. You just have to ignore it." The way Taylor-Wood does that is through wilful ignorance. She never reads reviews of her work, Googles herself or flicks through paparazzi shots of herself in celebrity weeklies. It's odd to learn that an artist who has so often taken celebrity as her subject – a sleeping David Beckham, a pieta with her as the virgin cradling Robert Downey Junior – avoids any representation of herself as one. Taylor-Wood rents the studio below her to the Pet Shop Boys, opened up her drawing room for her friend Kate Moss's legendary 30th birthday party, and invited Elton John to her daughter's christening. Yet she is assiduous when it comes to blanking out the trappings of fame.

Getting together with Johnson might be the chapter of the story that has got the gossipmongers salivating but it isn't even the most intriguing one. The reason Taylor-Wood was drawn to the Nowhere Boy script was because of the extraordinary parallels between Lennon's and her own childhood. Both their mothers walked out when they were five. Years later, Lennon learned that his mother was living just down the road. For Taylor-Wood, the discovery came quicker. Her mother, a yoga teacher who had taken Taylor-Wood and her siblings from their home in Streatham to live in a commune where everyone wore orange robes and took Sanskrit names, one night handed her a note for her stepfather and walked out. Taylor-Wood was left at the age of 14, holding a goodbye note that wasn't meant for her. Six months later, walking down her street, she saw a woman opening the blinds on her window a few doors down. It was her mother. "I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance," Taylor-Wood speculates. "In the actual moment all you think is, 'Shit, that's annoying.' I don't even necessarily think it was a defining moment for me. It was just one of many things I've had to deal with in my life. People make more of it than I do."

Taylor-Wood has a tendency to play down her experiences, many of which really are extraordinary by anyone's standards. At first when I point to the similarities between her and Lennon's life she laughs it off. "Oh yes, my rock'n'roll style, the band I set up in the Sixties ..." Then she makes out that Lennon had it worse. "It was hard but he didn't know his mum lived around the corner for a good ten years." Finally, she gives in and says the affinity between her and Lennon comes from the way they arrived at art.

"I understand what it is to go through emotional trauma and retreat and go into the world of your imagination," she says. "I understand how art and music can be a place of safety in a world of reinvention. Art, for me, was a real salvation because it was a world I could get lost in. It had a similar lack of boundaries to the place I grew up in. It felt familiar and comfortable." The more we talk, the more I understand why falling for Johnson on set must have seemed the most natural thing in the world. Art and life have always been tangled up like lovers for Taylor-Wood.

This is surely how she drew such astonishing and moving performances from her cast. Johnson is incredibly charismatic as Lennon, the lens lingering over his every macho move. Kristin Scott-Thomas is brilliant as the pinched, put-upon sister who brings Lennon up, Anne-Marie Duff equally so as the damaged, feckless mother who can't meet her responsibilities. As a director, Taylor-Wood is sympathetic to each of them. "I'm quite a forgiving person," she says, and now it seems she's talking about her mother. "I also work very instinctively. I feel like I understand most states of being, so that helps, especially when I have to lead people to a place of trauma. I think that's why I chose to make such a deeply emotional film."

Taylor-Wood once described art as a form of reinvention. In the film, it's after Lennon is rejected by his mother that he goes home and tells his aunt he wants to start a band. It's a moment of transformation, like the one Taylor-Wood experienced when she decided to go to Goldsmiths to study art. "At school I always felt the art room was the place where you could sit and talk," she says. "It was a place of solace. I wasn't the best artist at school by a long shot, it was more the understanding and the support that came from that room." She was a worrier as a child, she recalls, and a dreamer. "Away with the pixies," she laughs. "I still am."

Art would provide solace again when Taylor-Wood was diagnosed first with colon cancer at 29, then with unrelated breast cancer at 33. Overcoming it twice has made her fearless, and the only thing that frightens her now is hospital doors, "because your life can change, just like that, when you go through them". I suggest Taylor-Wood's fearlessness, her determination to ignore what others say, the way she seizes opportunities – whether that be a whirlwind romance or the chance to direct a film because "I read that script and it twisted my guts" – stems from having fought cancer. "I really have learned to live in the moment," she agrees. "I don't question things too much or try to project into the future. That's how life should be. If I worry about what people will think of my relationship, then I'm living life by other people's opinions. I love life. I think it's fantastic. Sometimes it deals hard things, and when it deals great things you have to seize them."

She was married to Jopling for a decade, through the years when she was ill, and they have two children together. Once seen as the golden couple of the art world, they are still great friends. He continues to live in the house they shared off Harley Street (the one that hosted Kate Moss's party) and she is in Primrose Hill with Johnson and the children. "It's ridiculously amicable," says Taylor-Wood. "I go out of my way to keep relations good with everyone in my life. I just feel with Jay that he was such a strong and important person in my life and will always be. I think we've managed everything pretty well, and continuing to be friends is a good blueprint for the children to live by. Life is short as well as long."

She smiles again, ever the survivor, the mother keeping her family together, the older woman reassuring her younger lover. It's obviously how she likes it. She looks fantastic too, thanks to a regime of eating no dairy products, yoga and running. Compact, toned and strong, tired but happy. "I feel I have more energy than most," she says. "I think that's because of what I've been through. I can wear most people out. I get excited about everything." Next, she plans to take some time off to "relish" life, which means spending time with Johnson and her two daughters, now 12 and three. "I want to take time and enjoy life and do the school run and bake cakes and be a little more straightforward," she says. I can't imagine her doing nothing though. "I'm not great at it," she admits. "But I'm going to try to learn."

Nowhere Boy has been such a success on both a professional and personal level that I have a feeling Taylor-Wood will be directing more and making less art when she returns from her break. "My world is film now," she admits. "I tend to just follow where life leads me."

Talk turns to that defiant image of 1997 that launched Taylor-Wood as an artist. She seemed less grimly confessional than Tracey Emin, not as aggressive as Sarah Lucas, more concerned with beauty and death. "I just think, 'God, I was chubby,'" she laughs. "You know it's difficult. Sometimes I look at my work and don't necessarily feel it's mine." I ask her why, because it's a strange way to feel about such a personal body of work. "It seems so far away from who I am now," she says. But I'm not so sure. The bravado, the refusal to justify herself, the for-God's-sake-I'm-fine posturing that is all there in that image of Taylor-Wood with her trousers round her ankles is all here now. "Well, I constantly try to live in the moment," she says again. "I'm the sort of person who doesn't really look back."

Nowhere Boy opens on Boxing Day