James Taylor; 'The Danish Girl' director Tom Hooper

I felt like it touched on a universal theme, which maybe I was exploring slightly in "The King's Speech" — we all have blocks between us and the best versions of ourselves, or the true version of ourselves, whether it's shyness, insecurity, anxiety, addiction, depression...but to not identify with the gender you're assigned at birth, I can't imagine a more profound block that a human can experience.



But you have to ask why this transition happened in the 1920s, when there was no roadmap for change, the word "transgender" didn't exist, the medical establishment pathologized this sense of self. And I think it's because of this extraordinary love between the couple — the love between the couple creates a space where transformation can happen. If you're a blocked soul, to be truly loved and seen by someone close to you is perhaps you're greatest chance to find your true self.

That's what makes the story so fascinating. Love is a transformative space, and the other key transformative space is art. At the beginning of the film, Gerta, played by Alicia Vikander, is an artist in search of a subject — she's in search of portrait commissions, and in one of the first scenes she's doing a portrait of the guy who manages the local department store. But you can tell she's frustrated, and even her husband Einar thinks she hasn't found her subject.



It's her observation of the latent femininity in Lili, when she's living as Einar, that starts to lead her on this journey of finding her subject, which I suppose is her husband's true feminine identity. So that fascination with the hidden self drives her art.



One thinks of gender fluidity in relation to Lili, but I think Gerta is also challenging gender stereotypes in the 1920s — here's a woman saying, "I have a right to be a professional artist, openly driven, openly ambitious," and all of this is quite radical for a woman in the 1920s. For centuries, it's been men who have defined what they want a woman's gender to involve, and the early 20th century was this extraordinary movement where women were starting to reclaim the construction of their own gender identity.

I think the thing that "Theory of Everything" did with Eddie — because it was the only way he could do that transformation — was it forced him to be really inside his body and learn to use his body very thoroughly. I think he brought that knowledge to "The Danish Girl" in terms of us discussing the idea that, if Lili was always a woman and had had to put on the armor of masculinity, what does that mean physically?



What's it like to reawaken this long-suppressed, long-dormant femininity through the body, as well as through the mind? We talked a lot about this idea, not of a transformation but of a revealing — if Lili was always there, how do we create a sense that she's being uncovered, rather than that he's transforming from one thing to another thing.



And Eddie, from his meetings with trans women, some of the women talked about a period of hyper-feminization they'd go through — in order to reconnect with their femininity, they'd almost go too affected in their feminine body language, their clothes choices would become highly feminized, and they'd maybe wear too much makeup. Eddie talked about it as a kind of version of adolescence, where you're trying things out, and we built that arc into the story. Lili slightly overreaches at certain aspects of femininity, and then settles into a much simpler self at the end.

I think that listening to music is so close to the experience of writing it and making it. If you're a songwriter or musician, you know that it's 95% the same thing to listen to music as to make it. As a non-songwriter or non-musician, that may be hard to believe, but it really is. I think the thing that's most compelling when we're performing live with an audience is that there's this sort of shared experience and there's something that happens when you take this emotional ride. It can actually be pretty intense and I'm really strung out on that. I love that communal thing that happens at a concert. 

Well, you know, sequencing an album is really important. The way the song sets up the next song and what the dynamic is, and that's really an important thing to get right. But the song, "Today Today Today," is — on the surface — about getting started and about actually recording this album — as we used to say, "cutting a side." 



It is reflective in a way. It talks about starting a new project, trying to put down these songs for my audience. And I'm reminded that this is the sixteenth time I've done this. It's something I've learned to do and gotten better at over time. It is my creative process, so some of it is reflective, looking back over the entire thing. 



I think one of the surprising things about getting older and being in the second half of your life is that when I was 20, I couldn't imagine that a 65-year-old was the same person at all. In my mind, they were different species, there was just no point of communication. I think that what you find out as time goes by is that you become who you are in your late teens, maybe, and maybe even sooner than that. That's the person you will be when you're 80.  

[Laughs] Yeah, exactly! That's the ultimate test of your character is how you're going to age, but that song, "Today Today Today," does talk about the present moment of getting started and setting forth and, at the same time, it connects the experience with what I've been doing for a lifetime. 

Well, yeah it is. That theme of recovery is so central to me and it's such an everyday part of my life that I've written a lot of recovery songs. There's one, sometimes two on every album since I sobered up 1983. It is a joyful thing, and that particular verse about the damage done is about the wreckage — about the guilt and shame that accompanies that kind of out-of-control life — which is how you know you have a problem because you've lost control of it. 



I think that that's something you have to engage and hopefully get beyond, because that kind of negative baggage can really pull you down and send you back for another lap through the mud. I think it's that sort of recovery song I guess. 

It's funny, there are some songs that I didn't really understand what they meant until I lived with them for a year or so. I know that sounds strange because, after all, I did create them and summon them up and put them down on paper. But sometimes you get the feeling that you're channeling something or that something is coming from a mysterious place that's beyond your conscious comprehension. 



There's a song, "Never Die Young," that was one of these songs that just ... I woke up in the morning, sat on my stairway in a little patch of sunlight coming through the window, and the song just came out, it just presented itself. It took me a long time to really understand what the song was about. That's a song that's changed over time — listening to it and performing it, it sort of emerges what it means.