NEW YORK – Fans at the Beacon Theater in New York applauded Taylor Swift before she arrived, singing her songs before taking the stage.
This energy remained throughout her stop at the 21st Tribeca Festival on Saturday, where Swift discussed moving into the director’s chair, the nuances of visual storytelling and the possibility of future film projects with Mike Mills, screenwriter and director of “Come on, C” mon “and” 20th Century Women “before surprising fans with special guests and an acoustic performance.
This was not Swift’s first time on stage at a film festival – her Netflix documentary “Miss American” premiered at Sundance in 2020 – but it was her first time as a director. And as Swift and Mills compared and analyzed their processes, it was clear that this was an honor she did not take lightly.
“I always thought it was something other people do,” Swift told the director. As I was on set and making music videos, “the lists of things I ate became so long that I ended up thinking I really wanted to do it.”
Her 13-minute film “All Too Well: The Short Film” was a product of this learning process. Released in November with her latest re-recorded album “Red (Taylor’s Version)”, the video adds images and a fictional story to the expanded version of “All Too Well”, a favorite of fans of her 2012 album “Red”. has garnered over 67 million views on YouTube.
With the film, Swift said he hopes to explore virginity through the prism of someone who is curious and mature, but who finds himself outside the depths of his relationship. It’s a feeling she said she could connect with, and one she compared to stepping 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 be swept away.”
This tension was something she wanted people to feel as they watched the couple at the center of the film. “I wanted to feel that their disintegration was inevitable, and their disintegration was just as inevitable,” Swift said. “They couldn’t stop themselves from colliding and they couldn’t stop being dismantled.”
Actors Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien were Swift’s ships to fulfill this vision. Focusing on the details of the filming, Swift explained why she was looking for Sink and O’Brien specifically for their roles and the conversations they shared in making the characters. It was a process, Mills and Swift noted, that both reflected and diverged from songwriting.
Sink and O’Brien surprised the audience in the middle by joining Swift and Mills on stage, narrowing down the motives of their characters and the way Swift directed them in portraying the difficult relationship at the center of the film.
“There was no set scenario or movement that you had to stick to, so there was so much freedom, and I think that’s how we got these real moments,” Sink said.
“She has these innate qualities as a director,” O’Brien said. “Trust, her ability to make decisions, her 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 during the year she turned 50 and was the headliner of the Super Bowl. Swift’s speech was one of the few public appearances she made this year, the most recent being her award-winning speech at New York University’s graduation in 2022 – a speech Mills said could double as a letter to future Swift , film director.
“In your life – your life as a film director – you will inevitably speak wrong, you will trust the wrong people, you will not react enough, you will overreact,” and I will not lie, these mistakes will cause you to lose things, “he read, commenting orally on Swift’s speech. – What a beautiful thing to say.
Recognizing his privilege as a director with an existing platform and the ability to fund his own projects, Swift said the idea of losing things has returned to what catalyzed the film in the first place – the process of re-recording her albums, which began because no he could have his master records. “I think when I talk about losing things, it doesn’t just mean losing,” she said.
When asked about future directorial projects, Swift did not rule out the possibility of directing a feature film, but said she would not necessarily want the scale of her next film project to be much larger than this.
“I would like to,” she said. “It would be so fantastic to write and direct something.”
She stuck to her roots at the closing of the event, grabbing a red guitar for the acoustic performance of the extended “All Too Well”, highlighted by the shouts, shouts and screaming lyrics of the audience.
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