Swift doesn’t take directing lightly
Fans in New York’s Beacon Theatre were cheering for Taylor Swift before she arrived, belting out her songs before she stepped on stage.
That energy remained throughout her recent stop at the Tribeca Festival, where Swift discussed transitioning into the director’s chair, the nuances of visual storytelling and the possibility of future film projects with Mike Mills.
It wasn’t Swift’s first time on a film festival stage — her Netflix documentary “Miss Americana” premiered at Sundance in 2020 — but it was her first time as a director. As Swift and Mills compared and dissected their processes, it was clear that was an honor she didn’t take lightly.
“I always thought that it was something that other people did,” Swift said of directing. Being on sets and making music videos, “the lists of things I was absorbing became so long that eventually, I thought, I really want to do this.”
Her 13-minute film, “All Too Well: The Short Film,” was a product of that learning process. Released in November alongside her re-recorded album, “Red (Taylor’s Version),” the video put imagery and a fictionalized story to an extended version of “All Too Well,” a fan-favorite from her 2012 “Red” album.
With the film, Swift said she hoped to explore girlhood through the lens of someone who’s curious and mature, but who finds themselves out of their depth in a relationship. It’s a feeling she said she can relate to, and one she compared to stepping into the ocean. “It’s so fun, the idea of going so deep that your feet don’t touch the ground, but you can get
swept away.”
That tension was something she wanted people to feel while watching the couple in the film. “I wanted it to feel like their falling together was inevitable and their falling apart was just as inevitable,” Swift said.
Actors Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien were Swift’s vessels for executing that vision. With a focus on the details of filmmaking, Swift explained why she sought Sink and O’Brien specifically, and the conversations they shared in creating the characters. It was a process, Mills and Swift noted, that both mirrored and diverged from that of songwriting.
Sink and O’Brien later joined Swift and Mills on stage, and discussed how Swift directed them.
“There wasn’t a set script or movement that you had to stick to, so there was just so much freedom, and I think that’s how we
got such real moments,” Sink said.
“(Swift) possesses these innate qualities in a director,” O’Brien said. “Trust, her ability to make a decision, her confidence.”
When asked about future directing projects, Swift didn’t rule out the possibility of directing a feature film, but said she wouldn’t necessarily want the scale of her next film project to be much bigger than this one. “I would love to,” she said. “It would be so fantastic to write and direct something.”
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