Taylor Swift made a rare public appearance Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival, in a conversation with indie director Mike Mills to talk about her short film for “All Too Well.” He spoke with Mills for an hour at the Beacon Theater in New York City, giving a fascinating look at his creative process. This was a completely new face of Dr. Swift: Meet Film Geek (Taylor Version).
Taylor has been silent on social media radio for most of the year. He gave his undergraduate speech at New York University last month, but it was even more personal here, revealing how his filmmaking has been influenced by John Cassavetes and Barbara Stanwyck. (His mind!) He screened the film and starred Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien. And to top it all off, he ended up with a solo acoustic rendition of “All Too Well,” all 10 heartbreaking minutes.
Taylor switched to hardcore filmmaking mode, appropriate for such a prestigious film festival. He summed up his goals with a quote from Cassavetes: “I have never seen a helicopter explode. I’ve never seen anyone go flying off someone’s head. So why should I make movies about them? But me to own seen people destroying themselves in the smallest way. “Swift added,” Go, me sense that. ”
Mills was a totally empathetic host: like the father of the song, he was delighted with his modest jokes. He has directed videos for The National, so, as Swift explained, “We’re both in Aaron Dessner’s film universe, which is a nice place to be.” She talked about how she was inspired by the 2019 Mills short film I Am Easy To Find. They had a perfect relationship: when she praised her narrative style, she said, “Are you very good at …” She interposed with “Drama?”
They also joked about his tenacious insistence on doing things his way. He had one of the biggest laughs of the event when he said, “Often people underestimate me a lot when I get upset to prove a point.”
Mills is an artist who is clearly not used to hearing a theater full of screaming fans. As he joked, “That’s how all my questions and answers go.” He was visibly surprised by the enthusiasm of the fans. There was an emotional moment when Mills joked that he would feel depressed when he mentioned his movies and no one called. Swift said, “I’ll show you. Who saw a movie called Come On Come On here?” After a massive roar from the fans, she said, “They’re very nice. Not just me.”
He went into the nuts and bolts of his steering process, down to the fountains and the camera lenses. “This is not a music video,” he explained. “We’ve approached everything differently.” In the kitchen scene, he said, “I wanted to be so close that we could count the freckles.” He first became interested in making films on the sets of his music videos. As he joked, “it started with an intrusion.” His first time directing was his video for “The Man” in 2019. “Once I started directing music videos, I didn’t want to miss it.”
He talked about his identification with heroin, played by Sadie Sink. “I really write a lot about childhood,” he said. “I’m very fascinated and I’ve always been in this phase of becoming a young woman at this very fragile and vulnerable age. I think 19 and 20 is such a deep age for young women.” He described the heroine as “an effervescent and curious young woman who ends up over her head.”
Swift noted that the Easter eggs buried deep in the film, like the red typewriter the heroine uses to write her novel first appeared in the boy’s apartment. As Swift sees the story, the typewriter is a gift she gave her, to encourage her as a writer, because she saw her creative spark from the beginning. It was amazing to hear her talk about identifying with the male character, which she sees as both positive and negative. Mills added: “It’s a fucking trip to be a boy, let’s be honest. He’s swimming in a man.”
In one of the most startling revelations, he talked about how the end of “All Good” was influenced by a movie classic from the 1930s. That scene of the ex-boyfriend standing in front of the heroine’s book reading, in the cold? Swift was inspired by the final scene of King Vidor’s 1937 film Stella Dallas, when Stanwyck has to watch his daughter’s wedding through a window.
(Swift / Stanwyck connections are deep: one of Barbara’s most underrated mourners is My Reputation. FWIW, the film’s legend was born in Brooklyn, where the song takes place, and died in 1989. It could go on, but Let’s just say now is a good time to be a Swiftie who is also a Stanwyck fan.)
He took out Sink and O’Brien to talk more about the characters. (“I called her and him,” Swift said.) They revealed that the key scenes (the plot of the kitchen, the final breakup) were written in advance, but when it came time to do the dialogue kitchen, they left out. the script. Swift said, “What you’ve seen is mostly improvisation.”
They also talked about the strange journey of the song, which is unlike anything else in pop history: an underestimated deep cut that became a number one hit in its extended 10-minute version. As Swift pointed out, he was never one, “because the label was never going to pick him.” However, the lost 10-minute version became an obsession with fans. “I promoted so many albums, toured so much and made so many encounters and greetings. And every time I said, ‘When will you release the 10-minute version of’ All right? ‘ You will not let go. “
He entered the quote from Pablo Neruda, which serves as the epigraph to the short film: “Love is so short, oblivion is so long.” She called it “a line that haunted me and still haunts me. It’s a violent thing to read something so moving.” (The great Chilean poet was a world legend during his own lifetime, but even Neruda will probably never imagine what future generations would literally shout at his name. One of the applause of the house: Jim Jarmusch, one of the largest on the planet). legendary directors. Pray for “Stranger Than Paradise (Taylor’s Version).”)
But the highlight of the event came at the end, when Swift picked up her acoustic guitar and asked the audience, “Do you have 10 more minutes?” Not surprisingly, everyone did. Swift performed the full version of the song, strictly solo, which he was only able to do once before the film premiered last November. (Which was also on Broadway, a few blocks away.) As in the screening of the film, the strongest moment was the audience shouting the phrase, “Fuck the patriarchy!”
The key line of the extended “All Good” is when she asks, “Between us, the love story also mutilated you.” One of the things that has always set her apart as a songwriter is her unique ability to make even the biggest gestures the size of a stadium look like an intimate “just between us”. His appearance in Tribeca was a very rare in-depth look at how he does in film, just as he does in music.