The $160m movie Aaron Taylor-Johnson compared to an indie film: “More than anything I’ve worked on”
Aaron Taylor-Johnson might be a Hollywood star these days, having appeared in the likes of Bullet Train and Kraven the Hunter, but most of us will always associate him with his role as Robbie in Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging.
The teen romantic comedy was a massive hit in the United Kingdom upon its release in 2008, and almost 20 years on, it’s still worshipped by nostalgic fans who related to one of the most accurate depictions of British teen girlhood ever put to screen. Taylor-Johnson was a big first celebrity crush for many young girls at the time, although he tried not to play into that image too much.
By 2009, he’d taken on the role of John Lennon in the biopic Nowhere Boy, which was directed by his soon-to-be wife Sam Taylor-Johnson, who was 24 years older than the 18-year-old actor, lest we forget.
It often seems like the actor is more talked about in the media for his age-gap relationship, which gave him two kids by the age of 21, and a step-daughter just seven years his junior, rather than his career. Yet, he’s a great actor, one who has divided his time between big blockbusters and slightly smaller projects over the years, from Kick Ass and Nocturnal Animals to Tenet and Nosferatu. In fact, Taylor-Johnson has racked up a pretty impressive list of well-known collaborators, such as Oliver Stone, Danny Boyle, Robert Eggers, Christopher Nolan, and Tom Ford.
But despite the fact that he has worked with various auteurs over the years, he once, rather surprisingly, compared his experience of working on an incredibly expensive film to the experience of an indie movie. The actor appeared in 2014’s Godzilla as Ford Brody, a lieutenant in the US Navy, with the likes of Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, and Bryan Cranston also starring.
It was a huge financial success, further cementing Taylor-Johnson’s bankability as a leading man, although it wasn’t exactly a work of high cinema; well, at least not on the surface. While the movie performed fairly well with critics, it hasn’t exactly endured as anything more than a rather enjoyable monster movie. But the actor claims that the experience was like working on an arthouse movie with a “big budget”.
In fact, he told Total Film, “The Godzilla crew is such a small group of people that it feels more like an independent movie than anything I’ve ever worked on. I’ve hardly done any green screen stuff for it; he’s [director Gareth Edwards] really clever at doing the special effects. We’ll shoot everything raw on location, on the streets, and he’s going to put it all around us.”
It makes sense that his experience felt like an indie movie, despite the film’s massive budget, though, because Edwards had actually made his directorial debut just a few years before with the indie sci-fi horror movie Monsters, which had received widespread acclaim. The British filmmaker won various awards for his low-budget movie, and he used this success to go on to much bigger projects, like Godzilla.
So, even with his huge budget, Edwards still maintained a rather intimate approach, which Taylor-Johnson greatly appreciated.
