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SHE WAS the girly geek on the trail of the machines in Transformers, now she’s the newly wed in Shutter getting scared out of her wits by a Japanese ghost who is always ready for her close up.

In between, she squeezed in a small indie movie that had her mixing with those creative types at the Sundance Film Festival.

And she’s about to start work on a small Australian film that looks at the life of Lebanese men living in Sydney.

Rachael Taylor, the girl from Launceston, clearly likes to mix things up.

“I think after you do something like Transformers, it’s remiss to continue to do commercial things,” she says.

“Or after you do something like Shutter, it’s remiss for me to go and make a bunch of horror movies. A thriller that won’t make you Shutter

“The only thing I’m really shooting for and I will fight tooth and nail for to have in my career is longevity.

“It’s good to do three films in a row in Hollywood. And then it’s even better to go and do a film in Australia that really matters to you because it’s not about other people, it’s about developing yourself as an artist.”

Watch a trailer for Shutter

That Australian movie that really matters to her is Cedar Boys, a $1.5 million drama which starts production in a few weeks, directed by Serhat Caradee.

“It’s basically the cultural melting pot of Sydney,” Taylor says on the phone from Melbourne, where she’s spending a few days doing promotions for the latest addition to the genre of Japanese horror films before she heads home to Launceston to visit family and play with her dog, Millie.

“It’s really about the way Lebanese men see themselves and how they’re seen by others, so it’s quite a relevant story. I play a character that’s really interesting and very different to anything I’ve done before.”

Taylor says after the experience of a big budget action flick, working on small budget films such as Cedar Boys and Bottle Shock has its own rewards.

Taylor travelled to the Sundance Film Festival in January for the premiere of Bottle Shock, the tale of a small American winery that takes on the world, and rented a house with her fellow cast members for the week.

“We all hung out in the snow,” she says. “It was me and Alan Rickman, Bill Pullman and Chris Pine and Freddy would just sit around the breakfast table and shoot the table and catch up.”

Watch a trailer for Bottle Shock

As a person who thrives on variety, Taylor was in for a treat when she signed to play the lead in Shutter as an American woman, Jane, who gets plenty of boo for her buck when her husband, Ben (Joshua Jackson of Dawson’s Creek), takes on a job as a photographer in Tokyo.

“I loved it but it’s also a challenging place to spend three-and-a-half months in. It’s such a city and I’m from Tasmania,” she says.

Along with surviving the big city, she also had to overcome a communications barrier with Japanese director Masayuki Ochiai.

“He completely didn’t speak a word of English, which has its own challenges,” she says.

“But at the same time, it was interesting to find a way to communicate. There is a common bond in the filmmaking process, no matter what country you go to. There are certain basic things that people understand.

“And even though he couldn’t speak English, he certainly had a good barometer for performance. It was something I could kind of bounce off.”

In Shutter, which is a remake of a popular Thai horror film of the same name, Jane and Ben are haunted by a car accident and find weird things start to happen.

There could be a clue in the strange images that appear in the photographs they take.

A local Japanese superstition explains the images as “spirit photos” of a dead soul looking to make contact.

Taylor is not the first blonde in Hollywood to sign up for a Japanese horror film, nor even the first Aussie blonde working in Hollywood to follow that path.

But what attracted her to the role was not the ghostly content but the human story.

“From the moment I read the script, I thought the bones of the script were really strong,” she says.

“If you take the supernatural element out of this movie, which is if you take the phenomena of spirit photography out, if it’s gone completely, there’s still a really interesting story about a couple who move to Tokyo.

“They’re strangers in a strange land, and there’s a betrayal and a secret inside this relationship.

“That’s a really interesting film to me, regardless of the genre or whether it’s a remake or a reinterpretation or whatever.”

Taylor says working with Jackson was “easy off the bat”.

To play the part of the loving bride, Taylor was required in a few scenes to strip to her undies and get romantic with the pretend man in her life.

“The only weird part of it is that there are 11 Japanese dudes standing around while you’re in your underwear,” she says, praising her co-star for helping her relax in what is clearly a fairly weird situation.

“There’s a couple of things you should know about Josh, and number one is he’s just a good guy,” she says.

“He’s salt of the earth, he cares about you as an actor and cares about you as a human being.”

Taylor, while relishing meaty roles in interesting films, is grateful for the opportunity Transformers gave her.

“It made people aware of me in the US,” she says.

“But at the same time, there’s something to be said about having a balanced career and being in a career that has different things in it – being able to surprise people.”

Source: News.com.au