favourite story

There's something about Sam | Sam Taylor-Wood | Art and design | The Guardian

When Sam Taylor-Wood first read the script of Nowhere Boy, it felt as if somebody had got hold of her guts and squeezed them tight. The story of John Lennon's childhood was uncomfortably close to home: Lennon's mother, Julia, had walked out on him when he was five, just as Taylor-Wood's had walked out on her. A strange coincidence, but hardly unique. She read on. And that's when things got weird. Lennon, who barely knew his father, discovered years later that his mother had not moved away as he had thought – she was living down the road. When Taylor-Wood was 15, six months after her mother left, she saw a woman down the street opening her blinds – it was her mother in the house she shared with her boyfriend.

Little did Taylor-Wood realise when she started making the film that things were to get weirder still. Nowhere Boy is about Lennon's relationship with the two older women in his life – his aunt Mimi, the disciplinarian who brought him up, and Julia, the promiscuous mother who let him go. Mimi, wonderfully played by Kristin Scott Thomas, is all tough love and pursed-lipped disapproval, while Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) is a good-time girl desperate to dance the night away with the dangerous young man who just happens to be her son.

It's a wet March day in Pinner, Harrow, which is doubling up as suburban Liverpool, and the sun is refusing to shine. Taylor-Wood is crouched behind the monitor. With her blond hair plaited over her head and yellow-laced trainers, she looks like a little girl. Whenever the rain comes, she runs inside the house, arm in arm with 19-year-old Aaron Johnson, who plays Lennon. They dance and laugh like teenagers in love. I've never been on a film set with such a strange atmosphere. While the rest of the cast and crew are welcoming, Taylor-Wood and Johnson seem oblivious to the world. They are wearing matching padded jackets – hers has the initials STW stitched into the back, his has AJ. I ask Taylor-Wood if everybody has them. She smiles. "No, only me and Aaron. They all know who the top dogs are on this set."

Seven months later, I meet Taylor-Wood again, at her east London studio. So much has happened in the meantime: the movie has been finished, Taylor-Wood and Johnson are an item and the tabloids have had a field day. Some columnists give her the thumbs up, celebrate the older woman and tell us that the 42-year-old will provide a great education for 19-year-old Johnson. Others label her a cradle snatcher, ask what they could possibly have to talk about, and suggest that when they dine out, they do so in dimly-lit restaurants so she can disguise her wrinkles.

The studio is bright, airy and full of favourite photographs, some of them her own. There are pictures of her children looking cool and gorgeous – Angelica, who is 12, and three-year-old Jessie ("She's a cutie little munchkin"); Taylor-Wood with Paul Newman looking cool and gorgeous ("I'd like to say that's my grandad, and doesn't he look like Paul Newman, but it's not"); Lee Marvin, Johnny Cash and the Beatles, all of them looking cool and gorgeous. There is a photograph of a hunched, diffident fox called Freya staring into the camera, which Taylor-Wood likes to think of as a self-portrait. Her friends the Pet Shop Boys rent a studio from her downstairs – she recorded the song I'm In Love With A German Film Star with them, and starred in the accompanying video. There are a series of photographs of the artist in knickers and T-shirt dangling at impossible angles from the back of a chair. She looks spontaneous and childlike, but they're elaborately constructed, requiring her to wear a number of airbrushed harnesses.

She introduces me to Johnson, who is hanging round the studio. He's got a pretty, boyish face, great hair and a bumfluff beard. They have just returned from Los Angeles and are jet lagged. "Try and get some sleep," she tells him gently as we disappear upstairs for the interview.

Once we're alone, she morphs into Freya the fox. She hunches her shoulders, hugs her knees, nibbles at some chocolate and stares at the tape recorder. "That makes me feel even more uncomfortable. I woke up at 2am today and I feel so inarticulate. I'm the perfect fodder for an interview."

At the same time, while she tells me about her experience in LA, I begin to see just how tough she can be. "I did four of my 10 meetings and just thought: I don't want to be here. So I cancelled them." At what point did she walk out? "It was when someone said, 'We're interested in making dramadies.' I said, 'What the fuck's a dramady?' 'It's a drama comedy.' The combination of the two words made me think: I'm in the wrong place. It's all motivated by box-office returns, and I'll never be able to make the kind of film I want to make next."

Taylor-Wood is new to the movies. Nowhere Boy is her first feature. She has made one short film, about two schoolchildren who fall in lust to the Buzzcocks. The aspiring punks in Love You More chat coyly before snogging, gobbing and shagging with furious intensity. It's a surprisingly explicit film – one that verges on the voyeuristic.

As an artist used to calling the shots, Taylor-Wood was amazed by how many people get a say in a feature film. "The minute you go into certain realms and budgets... I don't want to use the word control, but you lose control." She smiles. She may not like to admit it, but she knows just how controlling she is. She is even controlling about the use of the word control. (For the shoot to go with this interview, she decided on the look, called in the clothes and chose the photographer.)

When Taylor-Wood emerged in the 90s as a photographer/video artist, her work was fixated on decay, madness and death. In Method In Madness, a man laughs, sweats and screams. In Hysteria, a young woman mimes hysterical laughter. In Breach, a girl sits on a floor and cries and sniffs in silence. These films don't have a beginning, middle or end, and are all but unwatchable. In Brontosaurus, a naked man dances like crazy to classical music. In Knackered, a naked woman mimes badly to opera. Many of these films rely on visual puns and unlikely juxtapositions, and cry out for meaning where none exists. Some of the work is rather beautiful – in Still Life, a painterly bowl of fruit decays in time lapse; in Ascension, a man balances a dove on his head while tap dancing over a dead body; and in Pieta she cradles a Christ-like Robert Downey Jr on darkened steps.

Films such as Hysteria look as if they have been made by somebody with psychosis, I tell her. She flinches. "I probably did have that at the time. I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two."

In The Crying Men, Taylor-Wood took photographs of 28 famous actors weeping. She has often played with the idea of celebrity: she made a short film of David Beckham sleeping that was fascinating, largely because Beckham is Beckham and we get to ogle him while he's asleep; and one of her best videos was for the Elton John song I Want Love – there is something poignant in the image of a solitary Downey Jr (again) walking through the empty rooms of a mansion miming the words to the song. At times, however, Taylor-Wood seems obsessed with celebrity – there are few A-listers who haven't been snapped at one time or another in her company – and she is probably more famous for her friends (her 40th birthday party was shared with Elton John, who was celebrating his 60th), her former husband (last year she divorced art dealer Jay Jopling) and her suffering (she has had cancer twice) than she is for her art.

Taylor-Wood was born in London in 1967. When she was nine, her chartered surveyor father who became the treasurer of Hells Angels, left home. For a few years she lived in a commune with her hippy, yoga-teaching mother until she, too, abandoned her at 15. "She left a message with me to give to my stepdad. It just said, I'm moving out, I'll come back for you lot [her younger sister and brother] when I'm settled. I find it difficult to talk about – not for the fact that it kicks off emotional feelings, but more because I'm trying to repair my relationship with my mum, so I feel the more it keeps coming up, the more it sets us back."

Isn't making a film with a similar story going to set them back? "I hope not. My mum has lived in Australia for 22 years now, and we have a rocky relationship. But at the same time it's one I want to maintain. I need her to be my mum. The relationship took a lot of rebuilding."

Did her mother ever come back for her? "Ummm... no, I didn't live with her again after that." And did she ever have it out with her? "No, we never had the conversation – it's sort of out there in the world and we haven't dealt with it."

As a child, she says, she lacked confidence. Was she smart? "No, I was a total thickie. I just about scraped through with five CSEs first time round and no O-levels. Grade 4 maths, that's thick, that's me. I was really stupid." So how did she get into college? "Gift of the gab. I re-sat some, got three O-levels, scraped through, grade Cs."

She managed to get to poly, and from there went on to Goldsmiths, the south-east London art school that spawned a generation of British artists. She went out with one of them, Jake Chapman, for nine years, and started to believe in herself. One of her talents was for cultivating friendships and loyalties, and recognising the ability of others who could help her. For example, most of her video work has been made with the great cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, who also shot Nowhere Boy. Her previous experience of working with actors doubtless helped her with the film, which is a little drab and sentimental but contains some fine performances.

In 1997, she married Jopling, son of former Tory minister Lord Jopling and the Mr Money of the British art scene. The girl who used to queue up for free school dinners now lived in a huge house off Harley Street with a man worth an estimated £100m. "My life radically altered," she says. "It was all really exciting and new, and I felt for the first time I had got stability. In Jay I had found someone who could provide me with total stability, and I'd not really had that."

Did she enjoy the new wealth? "Money scares me, and it always has done. I've got a childish concept of money, and I like to keep it that way in the sense that I don't like to think about it."

But there must have been times when she wondered how she ended up with quite so much? "No," she says, "because I'm a chameleon – I adjust to things quite well. I don't think like that, I live in the moment, wherever I am in the world."

She says she had a simple deal with Jopling – as her agent, he took 50% of what her work sold for but never told her the figures. "I never wanted to know who was buying my work, or for how much, because I felt it would affect the way I thought about things. I've tried to remain as naive as possible to that kind of thing, which was difficult being married to Jay. I had to fight for that naivety." Again, the controlled innocence.

Just weeks after giving birth to Angelica in 1997, Taylor-Wood was diagnosed with colon cancer. She recovered from that, then in 2000 was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. Not surprisingly, the cancer has defined so much of her life and work over the past decade. Famous portraits of her wearing a single-breasted suit and dangling a hare, the celebratory gymnastic photographs and those weeping male A-listers are all commentaries on her illness.

Throughout the three years she spent photographing the crying men, she was unsure why she was doing it. Spending an eternity getting the stars to agree to being photographed, then turning up and asking them to cry, upsetting them and herself in the process, what was the point? It was only on her way home from America that it struck her. "I did it as an exorcism of tears, from not having cried through being ill. I almost never cry, and it's something I don't like about myself. I sometimes try and make myself cry. Sometimes, when I'm in pain, I say if I could just cry it would make it so much easier.

"I think that's why I made 28 men cry instead. I always say that my work is ahead of me three steps. With hindsight, I was sitting there with people who'd cry my tears for me. I suppose I didn't cry in all the cancer crap stuff because I felt I couldn't lose the battle, and part of the battle was holding myself together."

The cancer toughened her up. "It's like this core of steel I developed to deal with it, where I just had to feel impenetrable." Could friends cope with the change in her? "I think, over time, people found it more difficult. When you're no longer ill, and everyone's gotten over the fact that you've had cancer, that core of steel doesn't go away, and then I had to find other channels for it."

She came out harder? "I don't necessarily think harder, but I do think you're more free about where you want to be in life. Time is precious."

Last year Taylor-Wood and Jopling announced their separation. The stability she once craved was no longer a priority. This January, Jopling was photographed canoodling with 23-year-old pop star Lily Allen, the daughter of his friend, the actor Keith Allen. Four months later, the gossip columns announced that Taylor-Wood had gone one better than Jopling. Whereas he had dated a girl 22 years his junior, she was with a boy 23 years younger. It seemed as if they were in competition with each other, I say. She looks appalled. "God, no. No. No. As difficult as everything we've been through has been, Jay and I have retained a friendship and respect for each other, so I wouldn't be like that with him."

Is she surprised by how things have worked out with Johnson? "I'm not surprised, I'm happy," she says. "We've been living together for ages... since about March."

Is it weird that Johnson is in effect stepfather to her daughter Angelica, who plays his sister in Nowhere Boy? "I don't know – you'll have to ask him. They get on really well, and the little one loves him. It all felt strangely natural."

Did it make it harder or easier to make the film? "I managed to hold off really until almost the end of the film." I remind her of the day I came to watch them shooting and say I felt like a gooseberry. "Really? That's funny. We weren't even together then. Maybe feelings were there but unacted upon. The thing is, we had quite a psychic link when we were working together. I knew from a flicker of an eyelash what kind of performance I was going to get. I felt that link almost from day one of meeting him." She insists that her friends see nothing unusual in the relationship. Does she seriously think that they are not whispering among themselves? Again, she looks aghast. "My friends? I definitely know they're not thinking like that because they know me too well. They know I've always lived my life by my own rules and fearlessly. Why would I be any different now?"

Has she ever thought she's maybe having a midlife crisis? "No, I don't think like that ever. Ever. As I say, I've always lived my life as fearlessly as possible. And going through all the crap I've been through, I don't really listen to other people's opinions, just follow my heart and my instincts." She's desperate for the interview to end but there's still so much I want to know.

Is she happier than before? "I won't say that because I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but I am very happy, yeah." She makes quote marks with her fingers. "'She said grinning like an idiot.' Oh my God, are we nearly through?"

Jopling still lives in the massive house, and Taylor-Wood now lives nearby in celebrity-strewn Primrose Hill. Will she claim 50% of his money and art? "No, nothing like that. I don't want any battle on that front. We're all done and settled and fine."

Does her relationship with Johnson feel like it's for ever? "Yeah, it does." Does she think they'll have kids? "Oh, don't ask me questions like that. Come on, let's finish. Oh yes, we've finished!" A week later they announce they're getting married.

On the way out, there's one thing she wants to clarify. "I keep seeing in the papers that I am good friends with Samantha Cameron. I've never met her in my life." Perhaps people assume she is because she's friendly with every celeb in the world? "Not everyone," she chides. "I've not met Barack Obama yet. Hehehe. Yeah, that'll be next."

Downstairs, we meet up with Johnson. I tell him that my younger daughter loves a film he starred in last year, but I've forgotten the name. He looks embarrassed, as if Angus, Thongs And Full-Frontal Snogging was a lifetime ago. "Yes, I think I know which one you mean," he says, like a veteran with 100 movies under his belt. He puts his arm round Taylor-Wood, she puts her arm around him and they start to kiss.

"Let's go," she says. And off they skip down the street, two kids, blissfully happy.