When Taylor Swift and Director and playwright Martin McDonag sat down for their Variety Directors on Directors special we got some new insight in to Taylor Swift’s passion project, “All Too Well: The Short Film,” a 14 minute short film that’s been viewed more than 80 million times on YouTube and is inspired by events in Taylor’s life. The film was written and directed by Taylor Swift and stars Sadie Sink, Dylan O’Brien and Taylor Swift.
“I wrote it knowing I wanted it to be a short. I wanted to treat it differently than I’d ever treated a music video.” Said Swift “I wanted to shoot it on 35 millimeter, and I wrote it with Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien in mind.”
When asked about how she came across Dylan and Sadie’s work, Taylor replied. “I’d never met either of them, but I’d seen their work. I’d seen Sadie in “Stranger Things,” and I thought she has such a presence. She has such an empathy to her. I mean, you can just see micro emotions flash across her face in a way that I don’t usually see in performances. And I thought, “She’s never been a romantic lead and I wonder if she’d be interested in playing a young woman who goes through her first catastrophic, cataclysmic heartbreak.”
Courtesy of Evan Agostini/Invision/AP/Shutterstock
So how did the two actors react to Taylor’s question? She goes on to say, “I wrote the manuscript, and I had visual references of the art direction. I put together a PDF of what I wanted to make, because I’d never made a short before, and I’m in the mode where I’m trying to persuade these two actors, and trying to convince them. They both said yes immediately when I texted them.”
While speaking on the script, Taylor went on to say “It had dialogue. I’d scripted out some scenes of them falling in love, the scene of them falling apart, breaking up. And then I’d had this argument — the argument was the one we ended up keeping as a scene without music because I thought it was just important to get a potent glimpse into their dynamic.”
Remember that intense fight scene that can be considered the turning point of the film? Well it turns out Taylor has some help in making that scene what it was.
Courtesy of Taylor Swift
“It was partly improvised. I had written out that fight with the same arc. There were just some things that Dylan would blurt out or Sadie would say, and I’d just be sitting at the monitor, going, “Oh my God. We are keeping that in the cut.”
Taylor Swift truly managed to prove herself as a storyteller and a director with this short film. Captivating her audience and entrancing them in a story that was told All Too Well.
“It’s structured narratively in a way that I felt had to be different than any music video I’ve made. I wanted people to be in that world with these two characters.”
What’s next for Taylor Swift? Soon she’ll be making her feature film directorial debut in association with Searchlight Pictures, and All Too Well is a favorite for The Oscars.
Fangirl and Writer with a huge passion for entertainment.
