Director Alan Taylor of Sopranos, Mad Men Fame Awarded Honorary Degree

^{Alan Taylor, an award-winning film and television director and Victoria College graduate, delivers his convocation address at the University of Toronto. Photos by Lisa Sakulensky.}

By Leslie Shepherd 

When the future film and TV director Alan Taylor Vic 8T1 arrived at Victoria University, he was planning a career in academia, like his mother.  

He earned a BA in history and philosophy from Vic, followed by an MA in modern European History from Columbia University. He was contemplating where to do his PhD when “suddenly I felt I was in the wrong room, the wrong world.” 

Taylor said that while he remained interested in history, he wanted to be more in the public sphere, maybe as a documentary filmmaker. He enrolled in New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he studied under director Martin Scorsese, fell in love with storytelling and earned an MFA in film studies. 

His mother, who had a PhD in art history and was curator of prints and drawings at the National Gallery of Canada, reacted “as though I was running off to join the circus,” he recalled. 

Yet Taylor went on to have a successful career as an award-winning director, writer and producer on TV shows such as Game of Thrones, Mad Men, The West Wing and The Sopranos and films including Thor: The Dark World and Terminator Genisys.
 
He won an Emmy for outstanding director in 2007 for an episode of The Sopranos and was nominated two more times. He also won a Directors Guild of America award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Dramatic Series for the series' pilot of Mad Men. 

On Thursday, he received an honorary degree from the University of Toronto for his outstanding contributions to film and television. He said his only regret was that his late parents were not there to witness the “huge and unexpected honour,” especially his mother, who was his role model. 

“I wish I could share this with her,” Taylor said of his mother, who died in 2014.  “Look Mom, it turned out OK.” 

Taylor said the honorary degree, a Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, was meaningful for him because it blends both his academic roots and his long career in television and movies. 

“It’s wonderful to see the two are coming together,” he said. “The work in one world is being acknowledged by the other.” 

Taylor said he chose Victoria College because his high school friends in Ottawa were all heading to either Montreal or Toronto. “I fell in love with it,” he said. “It’s an old school in the middle of a big city.” 

Taylor said some of his most vivid memories of Vic, besides taking an introductory Shakespeare class from Northrop Frye, were of living in Nelles House where he was residence president for a year. 

It was there that he met John Mighton, the mathematician, award-winning playwright and founder of Jump Math, which has tutored more than 2 million students. Mighton recently received a Distinguished Alumni Award from Victoria. 

Mighton was friends with Taylor’s roommate, who died of cancer after his second year of university. Afterward, “John and I consciously became best friends because of him,” Taylor said. And they remain close friends today. 

Taylor also remembers academic “ah-hah” moments, like the time in an introductory philosophy class when he suddenly grasped the essence of Plato’s Republic. “I got tears in my eyes,” he said. “It was so vivid. I mumbled something out and the teacher said ‘Exactly!’” 

He also said that as someone who prefers to work behind the camera rather than in the spotlight, his “vision of heaven” as a student was to be sequestered in the Robarts Library, “in one of the pointy windows that feels like you’re in prow of a ship, working in solitude with a stack of books and index cards.” 

Taylor said his time at Vic also made him appreciate the value of a liberal arts education, which he called the “Swiss Army knife” of academic disciplines. 

“It’s not just a first step in a prescribed set of steps to a career, it is the best step toward any career,” he said. “Those of you who have gone that route will be richer for it. If there were more going that route, the world would be a better place and more resilient to some of the forces we see at work against us these days.”

^{L-R: Victoria University President Rhonda McEwen and Alan Taylor.}

Taylor said it was important that anyone given a public platform, including himself, not remain silent about current events. 

“The times we are in ... are out of joint,” he said. “The times are not ordinary and the plans that guided us and we took for granted for a long time seems to be falling apart. The centre is not holding.” 

Academia, journalism and freedom of expression are all under attack, he said. 

“Fear is being cultivated and weaponized. Oppression is on the march ... The wealthiest country on the globe, the biggest military, once seen by many as a beacon, the place I called home for quite a while, is now slouching toward craven oligarchy, benighted fascism. Things in a very big way are not going as intended.” 

But Taylor said he sees sparks of hope, including the recent elections in Canada, Australia, and even in the Vatican. And in Thursday’s convocation.
 
His message for the Class of 2025? 

Life does not always go as planned. This is to be expected and embraced. 

“Have a plan,” he said. “Know why you have it as much as what the plan is. Hold tight to the first. Be ready to blow up the second. As you do you will be forging a path that is entirely your own, unique to yourself, a path that no one has ever taken, that no one else will ever take, the path that does not exist until you forge it.”