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Julie Taymor with Helen Mirren, the star of "The Tempest," at the movie's LA premiere.Getty Images

If Julie Taymor sounds just a tad testy during a morning interview about her new film of William Shakespeare's The Tempest, it's not unexpected.

The American director was up until 3 a.m. the night before, hard at work on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a new Broadway musical with songs by U2's Bono and The Edge, and produced by Canadian Michael Cohl, whose stormy ride to the stage has attracted worldwide attention and become fodder for fun-making by late-night comedians on Conan and Saturday Night Live.

And so we'll forgive Taymor, conjuror of stage and screen, for her short response to a question about whether she feels at all simpatico with Prospero, the outcast magician who in her new film is played by Helen Mirren under the name of Prospera.

"If you're a man directing Prospero, no one would ever ask that," says Taymor, over the phone from New York, about to wend her way back to rehearsal. "I don't feel any connection to Prospero, because I don't have any event happening in my life which calls for vengeance."

And yet … If some day it should happen that a victim must be found, there is that pesky New York gossip columnist who has had his knives out for Spider-Man for nearly a year now. And those audience members who tweeted a blow-by-blow breakdown of every stumble during the show's first preview. (For more, see Taymor's rant in the sidebar.)

But the only revenge Taymor is seeking as Spider-Man's official opening approaches - it was just bumped, again, from Jan. 11 to early February - is that of packed houses full of enthralled audiences like those that still grace her production of The Lion King 13 years after it opened on Broadway.

Perhaps the mysterious forces that control the Great White Way have put challenges in Spidey's way, as Prospera does between her daughter Miranda and prince Ferdinand, "lest too light winning make the prize light."

"You have to just put your blinders on now," Taymor says. "Let these people rant and rave, but if it's a good show, it's a good show."

But back to The Tempest, which is the subject of our chat today and a play whose track record is more sturdily established. "It's almost like a trailer of all Shakespeare's plays, backwards," says Taymor enthusiastically, clearly on comfortable territory talking about the Bard. "You have the romance, you have the treachery of Richard III, you have A Midsummer Night's Dream … You have all these various wonderful elements which show all his greatness."

Taymor's film adaptation features plenty of unorthodox choices to debate (as fans of Shakespeare love to do): an androgynous CGI-altered Ariel played by Ben Whishaw; British comedian Russell Brand as the drunken fool Trinculo; and the jettisoning of Prospera's final epilogue into the ocean along with her books, replaced with a trip-hop adaptation of the lines sung by Beth Gibbons of Portishead.

But it's Taymor's decision to cast Mirren in the role recently played by her Last Station co-star Christopher Plummer at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival that has grabbed the most attention.

Taymor has directed Shakespeare's final, full-length play three times onstage, but until now always stuck with male Prosperos.

While she was developing the movie - her second Shakespeare adaptation after 1999's Titus (née Titus Andronicus) - Taymor began pondering all the "tremendous actresses of a certain age" who might fit the part. Mirren was her top choice and, to Taymor's delight, the British star of The Queen already had the role on her bucket list.

Rather than have Mirren play the male character as, for example, Seana McKenna will when she tackles the role of Richard III at Stratford next season, Taymor transformed the character into Prospera and penned new lines fleshing out her past - explaining how her late husband, the Duke of Milan, supported her in her secret studies of science and magic "knowing that others of my sex were burned," and how her brother Antonio (Chris Cooper) accused her of witchcraft in order to seize power.

"I always felt that the [original]backstory was very weak - I think a lot of people do," Taymor says. "You have Prospero describing how he was attentive to his books and didn't really notice that his brother was stealing the dukedom right out from underneath him. Well, it seems to me that if you're not paying attention to your dukedom, you're not a very good duke."

The gender switch effects a sea change in Prospera's relationships with Ariel, her daughter Miranda (Felicity Jones) and, in particular, her slave Caliban (Djimon Hounsou).

But it also results in more subtle shifts, as when Ariel helps Prospera back into her old clothes at the end of the film, slowly tightening her corset, string by string. While she is about to set Ariel and Caliban free, Prospera is returning to the shackles of 17th-century reality. "She is going back to a very strict society - for the sake of her daughter," explains Taymor.

That daughter is to marry Prince Ferdinand, who is very sweetly played by Reeve Carney, a newcomer whom Taymor has also cast as Spider-Man's alter ego Peter Parker on Broadway.

The director discovered him when actresses Evan Rachel Wood and T.V. Carpio - from her 2007 film Across the Universe - took her to see his rock band, Carney. "He was brilliant onstage - I just thought he was very princely," recalls Taymor.

Taymor asked Carney to audition - and found he had a natural demeanour that suited the part. He won her over again when she was casting Spider-Man. "He's completely the opposite as Peter Parker - very American, just a young boy from Queens who's got a great voice," she says.

In The Tempest, Carney gets to show off that voice during a song Taymor filched from Twelfth Night (Feste's "Youth's a stuff will not endure") to flesh out the rather perfunctory romance between the young lovers.

As with her other alterations, Taymor has no qualms about mixing-and-matching Shakespeare - as she points out, the playwright lifted one of Prospero's speeches almost word from word from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

"I've had Shakespeare scholars go, 'Oh my God, that was from Twelfth Night,'" she says. "But the other day, we had an audience where most of the people had never read or heard of The Tempest and they didn't give a damn if [Prospero]was a male or a female."

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