I was nervous about interviewing Sam Taylor-Wood, 43, director of the current John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, because I knew I'd eventually have to ask her the Question: What was it like to be a 41-year-old visual artist making your feature directorial debut while falling in love with your 18-year-old leading man?
But after Taylor-Wood greeted me with, "Do you mind if I finish this text? I'm writing a friend how I've just stashed my breast pump so as not to alarm the journalists," my jitters dissolved. The woman obviously believed in open communication.
Nowhere Boy focuses on Lennon's teenage years, when he was torn between two powerful women: Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), the stern, cultured aunt who raised him, and Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), the charismatic, probably bipolar mother who briefly reappeared in his life. But Taylor-Wood had been tabloid fodder in her native England long before she cast Aaron Johnson, now 20, as Lennon.
A Turner Prize-nominated photographer and video artist, she'd always made provocative work. In her Self Portrait Suspended series, she hangs in the air, wearing only a grey undershirt and white bikini panties; in Pieta, she cradles in her arms a skin-and-bones Robert Downey Jr. In her photo series Crying Men, her weepers are all actors (including Sean Penn, Steve Buscemi and Robin Williams), deliberately casting doubt on the authenticity of their emotion. And when the National Portrait Gallery commissioned her to do a video portrait of the hyperkinetic David Beckham, she depicted him sleeping.
As well, Taylor-Wood - an attractive blonde with a musical voice and a wide-open smile - was an art-party darling with a colourful past: After her biker father left her yoga-teacher mother when Taylor-Wood was 9, the family moved into a rural commune whose members wore saffron robes. Taylor-Wood made headlines when she settled down - and subsequently had two daughters, now 13 and 5 - with powerful art dealer Jay Jopling, whose White Cube gallery represented superstars such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Then she made more when the marriage split after 11 years, amid rumours that Jopling was worth £100-million ($162-million). To top it off, Taylor-Wood has survived two bouts with cancer: colon at age 30, and breast at 33.
It's perfectly in character that she'd tackle an icon such as Lennon in her first film, and shoot it on his home turf, Liverpool. Or that she'd tuck a breast pump under her blouse during a recent dinner - at a restaurant. "Whilst we were eating it was going, 'Pshwi-kuh, Pshwi-kuh,' " she told me with a grin, mimicking the pump's sound. "People were going, 'What the hell is that?' I thought, 'You're in for a sharp learning curve with me.' " So if her critics squealed when she began dating Johnson (a London-born actor best known for playing the title character in Kick-Ass), shrieked when they got engaged, and camped outside the hospital when they had their daughter Wylda Rae this past July, she shrugged and kept going.
The Question didn't faze her a bit. "For me, it's just, you fall in love," she said. "You don't know whether it's going to be someone your age, creed, colour. It doesn't matter. If we're not hurting anyone, why should anyone else care?" She stopped, and raised her strong-looking, long-fingered hands. "But we seem to be breaking the last taboo," she continued. "It's pure sexism, because no one gives a [damn]about older men with younger women. I just think it's not cool for a woman to seize her power and make her own decisions."
While I agreed with Taylor-Wood in principle, I had to push further: Wasn't the furor because Johnson is not just younger, but really young? I mean, he was born a full decade after Lennon died. "For us it's no issue," she replied.
In a separate interview, Johnson was equally forthright. In person, he's shockingly beautiful, with lean forearms, a wild tumble of brown curls, and features so fine he makes James Franco look coarse. It's easy to imagine any artist, from Michelangelo to Bruce Weber, being drawn to him. An actor since the age of 6, he's self-contained, with a thoughtful, measured delivery.
"My characters are often outcasts," he said. "I relate a lot to that. I grew up in a pretty rubbish area outside London, and I knew I didn't fit in. I had to break out and find what I wanted to do. I was drawn to Kick-Ass because I was interested in playing someone who was not a typical superhero. I'm fed up with the restrictions of the leading-man type. I don't like what that has to mean."
Johnson's youth was occasionally apparent - when, for instance, he admitted that he knew Lennon more as an activist than a musician, but "the generation after me knows the music better, because of PlayStation Rock Band." He was refreshingly unafraid of parenthood, though, and of serious relationships. "I love that my life is not about me, it's about the kids," he said. "The only thing I've ever been 100-per-cent sure of in my life is that I wanted Sam, and I wanted a baby with her. If I didn't have Sam, I don't know where I'd be. With her, I have my feet solid on the ground, I know who I am, and I don't give a crap what anyone says." And when he added, "There are people who are much older than me who are immature and just … idiots," I couldn't disagree.
Still, the most memorable scene in Nowhere Boy - Julia pulls John to her breast and holds him more like a lover than a mother - makes viewers squirm, and that's no accident. "It's a dangerous moment," Taylor-Wood said. "But Lennon himself told a biographer, 'My mother came so close to me that I touched her breast, and in that moment I could have had her.' " She smiled. "Typical Lennon provocative statement. But at the same time, I understood what he was saying. We felt we had to touch on it, and then run away." Because if it isn't a little dangerous, it's not Taylor-Wood.