Brian Taylor
Biography
Brian Taylor grew up in the suburban wastelands of Southern California. After a gloriously well-spent youth traveling around the world in punk bands he took an abrupt change of direction in the early naughts, enrolling in a ten-month film program to study camera. Brian wrote, shot and edited what may well have been the first full H.D. student film, the acclaimed Charles Bukowski adaptation The Man Who Loved Elevators.
He shot two independent features as a director of photography before teaming up with Mark Neveldine to form the gonzo camera/directing duo neveldine/taylor. The team signed with @radicalmedia in 2004 as commercial directors, knocking out campaigns for Nike, Powerade, Budweiser etc. before setting sights on the big screen.
Crank (2006) was written as a guerrilla attack on studio film-making. "If they love the script they've got to hire us, because there's no one else that could possibly make the thing," said Brian at the time. The film spawned a sequel, Crank: High Voltage (2009) that Quentin Tarantino called "The Gremlins 2 of action movies." The team pioneered the Red camera on the bonkers dystopian sci-fi mashup Gamer (2009) and trampled through Europe with Nicolas Cage on Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance (2011).
Brian teamed up with comics legend Grant Morrison to adapt the graphic novel Happy! for Original Films as writer, director and producer. The series premiered on SyFy in 2017. Brian and Grant went on to adapt Aldous Huxley's masterpiece Brave New World with A
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mblin/UCP as a USA series in 2018.
His first solo feature as a writer-director, the twisted satire Mom and Dad premiered at TIFF 2017 as a part of the Midnight Madness line-up.
In the role of director
Hellboy (18/04/2019)
Neil Marshall reboots the adventures of the monster hunting hellspawn in Hellboy. Hellboy (David Harbour) is a hellspawn raised by Trevor Bruttenholm (Ian McShane) of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. While on assignment in England, Hellboy comes across a plan by the pig-like fairy Gruagach (Stephen Graham) to resurrect The Blood Queen Nimue […]
Mom and Dad (02/03/2018)
A mass hysteria results in parents trying to kill their kids in Mom and Dad. Carly Ryan (Anne Winters) is a teenage girl who has a strained relationship with her parents Brent (Nicolas Cage) and Kendall (Selma Blair). One day without explanation, parents all over the country gain the sudden compulsion to kill their children. Carly, her […]
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (18/02/2012)
The directorial duo of Neveldine/Taylor had a somewhat entertaining start to their career with the original Crank. However, in every film they made since (Crank 2, Gamer, and now Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance), they have steadily become my least favourite filmmakers. Through their direction, Neveldine/Taylor took the sequel to 2007’s Ghost Rider (a film […]
Gamer (05/09/2009)
Earlier this year, I was quite disappointed by Crank: High Voltage. As such, I was understandedly skeptical of NeveldineTaylor’s follow-up Gamer. Well, it was a little better. The film, especially in the early scenes, still had the ugly cinematography and gratuitous content that was present in Crank 2. In fact, I even noticed a few […]
Crank: High Voltage (18/04/2009)
Sigh. It’s always disappointing when you see a film you were expecting to like and it ended up not being what you expected. It really seems they were trying hard to create a sequel to a film that had as complete an ending that you could think of. The result is a film that throws […]