But I don’t think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare’s Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.

Julie Taymor made remarks like this while discussing her engagement with Shakespeare’s early tragedy *Titus Andronicus*—a play often dismissed as sensational for its extreme brutality—during the period when she was staging and then adapting it for film (*Titus*, released 1999). In interviews and promotional conversations around the project, Taymor argued that Shakespeare’s violence is not mere spectacle but an anatomizing of cruelty, vengeance, and the psychology of “violent man.” Her comment frames her artistic rationale for revisiting *Titus*: to show that the play’s depth and moral horror exceed the comparatively shallow, exploitative violence common in much contemporary screen entertainment.

Julie Taymor is arguing that Shakespeare’s early tragedy *Titus Andronicus* offers an unusually penetrating study of violence—its psychology, its rituals, and its capacity to degrade both victims and perpetrators—rather than treating brutality as mere spectacle. By contrasting *Titus* with “modern movies” and “exploitations of violence,” she suggests that much contemporary screen violence is aestheticized or commodified, while Shakespeare’s play forces audiences to confront violence’s moral and social consequences. The remark also reflects Taymor’s own artistic project: to reclaim *Titus* from its reputation as sensational and to frame it as a serious, even exemplary, meditation on violent humanity.