WASHINGTON, D.C. -- It didn't occur to director Julie Taymor at first, all the ways in which her life is similar to that of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's.

"No," she says, shaking her head. "I didn't think about those things when I was making this film."

There were so many other technical and aesthetic problems to think about instead, such as how to rescue Kahlo from the feminist view of her as a victim overshadowed by a powerful older man ("Of course she suffered, but she also had a lusty life," Taymor says. "She made beauty out of these incredibly dark moments"); and how to re-create 1930s Paris and New York while shooting in Mexico on a tortilla budget (Taymor's solution: She created montages of period photographs and stock images and had the actors move through them).

It was only after Frida had been edited, after it had made its debut in movie theaters to a praising review in The New York Times, that Taymor began to wonder if her attraction to Kahlo's story was less straightforward and more complex than initially it had appeared.

"Who knows why you're attracted to do a project about a specific person?" she says. "There are many reasons on the surface, and also many reasons you may not immediately understand."

For instance, both Taymor and Kahlo were badly injured in bus accidents. Both suffered debilitating injuries to a leg: Kahlo in the accident, and Taymor when she nearly fell into a volcano.

Both became deeply involved, romantically and professionally, with another artist: Kahlo with her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, and Taymor with her partner of more than two decades, the musician Elliot Goldenthal.

And then, of course, there is the most obvious similarity. Both Kahlo and Taymor have developed an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary, the former with paint and canvas, the latter in the theater and on film. Saturated with color and deceptively primitive, their creations are as startling as an ice cube placed against the back of your neck.

Artist Andre Breton famously described Kahlo, who died in 1954 at age 47, as a ribbon tied around a bomb. Her paintings are transparently and disturbingly autobiographical, with images of the fetus that she miscarried while in New York, her severed torso held together by a corset, her exposed heart dripping blood after she and Rivera briefly divorced.

As with Kahlo, Taymor's appearance also can be deceiving. She is long and slender-boned, and her willowy prettiness resulted in her being cast in ingenue roles until she stopped acting in a fit of frustration at age 21 and started directing. But Taymor also is the recipient of a 1991 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." And although it might be less obvious, Taymor's films tell her story as surely as Kahlo's paintings tell hers.

Taymor, 49, is perhaps best known for her stage adaptation of The Lion King, for which she became the first woman ever to win a Tony Award for directing a musical. Other directing projects include the opera Oedipus Rex, starring Jessye Norman; Juan Darien, a play about a leopard who changed into a boy (it played three sold-out runs on Broadway); and Taymor's Academy Award-nominated film version of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

Extreme expressions

Not for Taymor is the quiet little slice of life. She is drawn to the totemic, the mythic and the archetypal. Her productions often involve face and body masks that make giants of the actors. Others use puppets, which she sees as distilling and intensifying human traits. Taymor designs the masks and puppets herself, often basing them on exaggerations of her own expressions. So visually arresting are Taymor's creations that they were compiled in a one-woman show in 1999 that visited museums in Ohio, Chicago and Washington.

Taymor's stage work has been described as cinematic because she plays with scale to create the equivalent of close-ups and distance shots. Similarly, she describes her movies as theatrical, by which she means that they are not literal, but incorporate dream sequences and other flights of the director's -- and audience's -- imagination.

"I don't try to create a realistic perspective," she says. "I try to create a skewed perspective, so that members of the audience can see themselves in a different way."

What is most striking about Taymor is her intensity. For instance, she seems to speak with the slightest possible Spanish inflection, tending to emphasize the penultimate syllable, so that "miraculous" becomes "mir-ac-U-lous." Is this perhaps a result of 10 intensive weeks of filming in Mexico? Taymor grins and doesn't say yea or nay, but instead launches into a wicked imitation of Frida's star, Salma Hayek. And there's something about her manner that makes it easy for others to catch her enthusiasm, to feel as though they are being conscripted into a glorious crusade. It may be the way she leans close when she speaks, her brown eyes aglow, and punctuates her words with a light touch on your arm.

Taymor grew up in the Boston suburbs, the youngest of three children. Her mother, a political activist, and her father, a gynecologist, met when they were undergraduates respectively at Goucher College and the Johns Hopkins University. Even as a teen-ager, Julie was inquisitive and fearless almost to the point of recklessness.

At age 10, she began acting with the Boston Children's Theater, where she reveled in improvisation and other activities that stretched her imagination. Before Taymor entered college, the age at which most American teens first go off on their own, Taymor had lived apart from her family for a summer in Sri Lanka and India, and later in Paris, where, officially, she studied mask-making and, unofficially, the films of Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa.

After graduating from Oberlin College in 1974, Taymor won a fellowship to study theater in Indonesia and Japan. "I was going to stay for four months," she says. She stayed instead for four years.

Pure theater

Perhaps Taymor's most vivid memory of that time is of a mountaintop ceremony that she witnessed in the Lake Batur region of Bali. Sitting under a tree at night, Taymor watched elaborately costumed village elders do a war dance. "I was sitting in the shadows so they didn't see me, and there was no other audience at first," she says. "They were performing for themselves. It was so pure and so amazing, so amazing to me."

Earlier that same day, Taymor had climbed the Batur volcano, her feet protected by just a pair of rubber thongs. The volcano was active and spewing clouds of smoke and lava. As Taymor straddled the rim on her hands and knees, she slipped and nearly fell in. "I almost died," she says. "A piece of volcanic rock took a chunk out of my leg."

After Taymor returned to the capital city, she met by chance a Vietnam veteran living in Bali. "He examined my leg, told me it was infected and on the verge of gangrene, and said, 'I can fix that,' " she says. "He slapped a boiling hot washcloth on my leg and I fainted. Then he dug out the wound -- without anesthesia. Somehow, it healed."

After she recovered, she traveled to Jakarta, where she formed a company of Javanese, Balinese, Sudanese and Western actors called Teatr Loh, which translates as "The Source." The troupe decided to embark on a national tour, and, in April 1978, members of the company boarded the night bus. Moments after entering Java, there was a head-on collision with a truck. "There was glass breaking, glass falling," Taymor says. "People's bodies were broken. The truck driver was killed. There was glass embedded in my face and neck."

Nonetheless, the performers persevered, and the company ultimately toured Indonesia.

Two decades later, Taymor would re-create on film the catastrophic 1925 accident between a bus and an electric train that broke the teen-age Frida's spinal column, collarbone, ribs and pelvis, and punctured her vagina. She was temporarily unable to walk, and was in pain for the rest of her life.

It's odd, Taymor acknowledges, that she didn't connect the two until recently, although falling shards of glass is one of the predominant images in that sequence. "When I was conceiving the bus accident, deciding how to shoot it, it didn't register that I had been in a bus accident as well," she says.

Fidelity and loyalty

After Teatr Loh completed its tour, Taymor returned to the U.S. She embarked on a New York-based freelance career as a set designer and director that included two stints designing sets, costumes and puppets for Baltimore's Center Stage in 1979 and 1982.

And, in 1980, she met a talented young composer named Elliot Goldenthal. A mutual friend introduced them like this: "This is someone whose work is just as grotesque as yours."

Goldenthal, 48, is known for creating the soundtracks for roughly two-dozen films, including Drugstore Cowboy and the Academy Award-nominated scores for Michael Collins and Interview With A Vampire. He also has composed music for nearly every one of Taymor's films and staged plays since they met, including Frida. But, like Kahlo and Rivera's, the close professional collaboration between Taymor and Goldenthal didn't immediately become romantic. "We didn't get together for five years," Taymor says.

Although the couple describe themselves as "happily unmarried" it has, nonetheless, been a lasting union. Perhaps that's why at times when Taymor talks about Kahlo's relationship with Rivera, it seems to have echoes of her own. "Diego truly respected Frida as an artist," Taymor says. "They supported each other. I wanted to film their story, because it's not about falling in love. It's about staying in love."

At one point in the film, Rivera admits to his shortcomings while proposing to Kahlo. Ultimately, the couple make a deal that allows them to wed:

Rivera: Unfortunately, I'm physiologically incapable of fidelity. ... Is fidelity that important to you?"

Kahlo: "Loyalty is important to me. Can you be loyal?"

It is one of Taymor's favorite moments in the film.

"That's a truly provocative distinction," she says, "Wouldn't it be great if couples would go on a date and see this movie, and it would help them reach a deeper understanding of what fidelity and loyalty mean to them?"

It is impossible not to ask. Did the movie help Taymor and Goldenthal come to a deeper understanding of their own?

For once, Taymor is speechless. "We don't ... " she says, and then moves one hand back and forth. Finally, she says, "That's private."

Yes, it is. And just as with Kahlo's paintings, we may have to divine the answer from the art that Taymor leaves behind.