Portraits come alive, crowds break into choreographed dances and buses get mystical in the award-winning work of Julie Taymor, the stage and screen director who also created Broadway’s long-running hit The Lion King.

In partnership with composer Elliot Goldenthal, who won an Academy Award for scoring her 2002 film Frida, Ms. Taymor divides her time between New York City and the Vineyard, where the longtime couple have a home and music studio in Chilmark.

This Wednesday, Ms. Taymor and Mr. Goldenthal will appear at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center to discuss their 2007 musical feature, Across the Universe, after a sold-out screening at 7:30 p.m.

Musician and actor Martin Luther McCoy, who played guitarist Jo-Jo in the film, will join the filmmakers’ conversation on stage.

Following this week’s appearance, Ms. Taymor will speak at Grange Hall on August 11 after a 7:30 p.m. screening of her 2020 film The Glorias.

Nearly two decades after its release, Across the Universe stands up as both a beguiling story of the 1960s and a masterwork of musical reinvention. The young people in Ms. Taymor’s movie meet, fall in love, march for peace and go to war — all to Mr. Goldenthal’s strikingly original settings of 33 songs written by members of the Beatles.

“Rather than being true to the band arrangement, I preferred to be true to the drama of the piece, and the heart,” he told the Gazette.

Mr. Goldenthal’s new takes on these well-known numbers, from early hits like I Want to Hold Your Hand to the psychedelia and surrealism of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the White Album, set the music free from Beatles-based expectations without compromising the original melodies and lyrics.

“It’s liberating to hear in that way, to feel the songs in that way,” he said.

Instead of the expected guitars and drums, a glass harmonica — invented by Benjamin Franklin — adds ethereal tenderness to the song Girl, while Hey Jude builds from a button-accordion intro and Let It Be pours forth from a gospel choir.

“You already know all the guitar licks. They still remain there, as ghosts,” Mr. Goldenthal said.

The film pays tribute to the Beatles as a group with such sweetly sly moments as a manic scene of campus prankery recalling their film debut A Hard Day’s Night.

A child of the 1960s herself, Ms. Taymor calls Across the Universe the most personal film she’s ever made.

“My older brother and sister, Michael and Laurie, were the models for Max and Lucy,” she said, naming the two siblings at the center of the tale.

Fun-loving Max, played by Joe Anderson, drops out of Princeton and winds up in Vietnam, while his little sister Lucy protests the war and falls for Liverpool expatriate Jude.

The rest of the characters, from sexy singer Sadie and her guitarist JoJo to a girl named Prudence who comes in through the bathroom window, also take their names — and much of their dialogue — from Beatles songs.

Ms. Taymor cast young, largely inexperienced actor-singers in the lead roles; only 19-year-old Evan Rachel Wood was a known quantity, having been Golden Globe-nominated for the 2003 film Thirteen.

“But no one knew she could sing like she could sing,” Ms. Taylor said.

She also brought in three ringers: Joe Cocker appears as three different New Yorkers singing Come Together, Bono plays an acid guru with a magic bus (I Am the Walrus) and Eddie Izzard leads a tripped-out circus as the talented title character of Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.

On the eve of Across the Universe’s 20th anniversary, Ms. Taymor believes it’s ready for new audiences.

“[We] always need to be reminded of the power of protest,” she told the Gazette, noting that the film was first released during the Iraq war.

“Another 20 years later, we are in another unpopular war,” Ms. Taymor said.

The Glorias, starring Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander in a cast that also includes Bette Midler, Janelle Monáe and Lorraine Toussaint, was released in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and has never found a distributor, making the August 11 Grange Hall show a rarity.

“The only time we saw it screened to a large public audience was at the Sundance [Film] Festival, to a thousand cheering people,” Ms. Taymor said.

Based on a memoir by Gloria Steinem, the film is an intriguing blend of documentary and road picture, tracing Ms. Steinem’s journey from young journalist to elder stateswoman of feminism.

The Glorias’ story of perseverance, resilience and change resonates with men as well as women, Ms. Taymor said.

“It’s a movie for people,” she said.

In all, four actresses play Ms. Steinem in the film, each representing a different stage of her life.

But any other seeming resemblance to a straight Hollywood biopic falls away as the picture unfolds — especially when all four Glorias are together, riding a liminal Greyhound bus and talking about their life.

Earlier this month, Ms. Taymor and Mr. Goldenthal appeared after a Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse screening of their 2002 picture Frida, starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina as the Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

In addition to Mr. Goldenthal’s Academy Award for Best Original Score, the film also won for best makeup. Among other nominations for Frida, Ms. Taymor was in the running for Best Song for Burn It Blue, which she co-wrote with Mr. Goldenthal.

Like The Glorias, Frida traces the life of a gifted, complex and powerful woman through narratives that double back, jump ahead and illuminate unexpected facets of her work and life.

Artists in love, both aflame with socialist zeal, Ms. Taymor’s Frida and Diego blaze their way through a world of vivid colors, folkloric images, deeply sensual encounters and dangerous politics, all washed down with tequila from the bottle

to the sound of passionate music.

The three films have one key element in common, Ms. Taymor and Mr. Goldenthal said: They’re all political, meant to encourage viewers to take a stand.

The couple’s next work is a stage musical called The Grand Delusion that’s planned for a New York debut next season.

“Its genre is comic-demonic, and that’s all I’m going to say,” Ms. Taymor said.

Island screenings of Across the Universe and The Glorias are sold out, but all three films are available to stream online.