Taylor Swift appears at the premiere of her short film All Too Well: The Short Film in New York on November 12, 2021. Swift spoke about her short film at the Tribeca Festival on Saturday, June 11, 2022, detailing her transition to director. president.Evan Agostini / The Associated Press
Fans outside New York’s Beacon Theater were cheering on Taylor Swift before she arrived, singing her songs before taking to the stage.
This energy was maintained throughout her stop at the 21st Tribeca Festival on Saturday, where Swift spoke about the transition to the director’s chair, the nuances of visual storytelling, and the possibility of future film projects with Mike Mills, writer and director. of Come on come on i Women of the twentieth century, before surprising the fans with special guests and an acoustic performance.
It wasn’t the first time Swift had been on stage at a film festival: her Netflix documentary Miss American she debuted at Sundance in 2020, but it was her first time as a director. And as Swift and Mills compared and dissected their processes, it became clear that it was an honor that was not taken lightly.
“I always thought it was something other people were doing,” Swift said of the direction. Being on set and making music videos, “the lists of things I was absorbing became so long that I finally, I thought, really wanted to do that.”
His 13-minute movie, Too good: The short film, was the product of this learning process. Released in November with their last re-recorded album, Red (Taylor version)the video put images and a fictional story in an expanded version of All too wella fan favorite of 2012 Red album. Since its release, the video has garnered more than 67 million views on YouTube.
With the film, Swift said she hoped to explore childhood through the lens of someone who is curious and mature, but who is out of her depth in a relationship. It’s a feeling he said he could relate to, and one he compared to going into the ocean. “It’s so much fun, the idea of going so deep that your feet don’t touch the ground, but you can let yourself be dragged along.”
That tension was something she wanted people to feel as she watched the couple in the middle of the movie. “I wanted her to feel like their fall together was inevitable and that their fall was just as inevitable,” Swift said. “They couldn’t stop crashing, and they couldn’t stop being dismantled.”
Actors Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien were Swift’s boats to execute this vision. Focusing on the details of the filmmaking, Swift explained why she sought out Sink and O’Brien specifically for their roles and the conversations they shared in creating the characters. Mills and Swift noted that it was a process that was mirrored and separated from songwriting.
Sink and O’Brien surprised the audience halfway by joining Swift and Mills on stage, reducing their characters’ motivations and how Swift directed them to portray the strained relationship at the center of the film.
“There was no script or movement that you had to respect, so there was so much freedom, and I think that’s how we had such real moments,” Sink said.
“She possesses those innate qualities in a director,” O’Brien said. “Confidence, your ability to make a decision, your confidence.”
Swift is among several speakers at the Tribeca Festival and film themes from the world of music. The festival opened with Netflix’s “Halftime,” an intimate documentary that follows Jennifer Lopez in her 50th birthday and co-hosted the Super Bowl. Swift’s talk was one of the few public appearances he has made this year, the most recent of which was his graduation address at NYU’s 2022 graduation, a speech Mills said could serve as a letter. to a future Swift film director.
“In your life, your life as a film director, you will inevitably speak badly, you will trust the wrong people, you will react little, you will react too much, … and I will not lie, these mistakes will make you lose things,” he read. verbally noting Swift’s speech. “What a beautiful thing to say.”
Recognizing his privilege as a filmmaker with an existing platform and the ability to fund his own projects, Swift said the idea of losing things went back to what catalyzed this film in the first place: the process of re-recording. his albums, which he started because he was not able to own his master recordings. “I think when he talked about losing things, he didn’t just mean losing,” he said.
When asked about future directing projects, Swift did not rule out the possibility of directing a feature film, but said he would not necessarily want the scale of his next film project to be much larger than this.
“I’d love to,” he said. “It would be great to write and direct something.”
He stayed on his roots when he closed the event, picking up a red guitar for an acoustic performance of the extensive “All Too Well” interspersed with the shouts, screams and shouts of the audience.