Yahoo Finance Taylor Swift Shares Behind-the-Scenes Video of the Making of 'All Too Well: The Short Film'
Taylor Swift is giving fans an inside look at her creative process in making All Too Well: The Short Film.
The "Anti-Hero" singer, 32, shared a nearly seven-minute video on Thursday of behind-the-scenes footage from the set of the film, which she directed and released in November 2021.
"The first seeds of this short film were planted over 10 years ago, and I'll never forget the behind-the-scenes moments of the shoot," she wrote on Instagram. "I owe everything to [Sadie Sink], Dylan O'Brien, my incredible DP [Rina Yang] and my producer [Saul Germaine]. I also want to say thank you to our wonderful background actors and crew who made this story come to life so naturally."
Swift continued: "I loved every second of it and I will always remember it. All. Too. Well."
The video sees Swift instructing O'Brien, 31, and Sink, 20, in various scenes as she works to bring her visions to life for the film. The clip accompanies the 10-minute version of the fan-favorite track, which she released on Red (Taylor's Version).
"I feel like you guys have the kind of natural chemistry that like, comes around once in a lifetime and just like, happens and it's sweet and it's playful and you could be laughing in the middle of it but it's also got like, the elements of physical chemistry to it," she tells O'Brien while shooting a scene in the woods. "Try it a few different ways."
Next, Swift guides the pair's kiss, and as she tells them to kiss and then laugh, the final take plays next to the behind-the-scenes footage.
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Fans also see the film's famous dinner party scene, in which cracks begin to surface in the characters' increasingly fraught relationship.
The singer instructs the extras attending the party as O'Brien's character's friends to have "the best time" as they bask in O'Brien's "peak charisma," and she even feeds him a faux punchline: "And it was my foot!"
Eventually, things move to the birthday party scene, in which Sink's character is celebrating her 21st birthday without her boyfriend.
Terry Wyatt/Getty Taylor Swift
"We should always see a falseness to your smile, it should be contrasted by how real your smile in the last shot was," Swift tells Sink as the finished take plays beside them.
The video concludes with the film's final scene, in which Swift steps in front of the camera to play the grown-up version of Sink's character. Later, she and her crew watch back the footage as they set it to music.
"We're watching a person lose a sense of innocence and naivety, we're watching her figure out how to turn it into something beautiful. And in the older her, there's a stillness and a stoicism and a seriousness and a stillness but a sadness. She's fine, but she's not who we met," Swift says. "Like, so it's just sort of one of those things of like, what's lost and what's found and like we're watching a person come of age."
The 11-time Grammy Award winner opened up about making All Too Well: The Short Film at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and said she needed the benefit of time and hindsight in order to complete the project.
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"There would be no world in which I could've made a visual element to that song at that point in time," the singer added. "I needed 10 years of sort of retrospect in order to know what I would even make to tell a version of that story visually. And I'm so grateful that I was able to do that with some crazy stroke of all these different twists of fate. I can't believe it."
"It was a baby steps process," Swift added of directing the project. "It wasn't like I woke up one day and I was like, 'You know what I want to do? Direct.' That was never something that I was programmed to say to myself because I didn't go to film school. I've been on the set of 60-plus music videos. And I've learned a lot from that process."
Swift also noted that after directing a few music videos, including "The Man," "Cardigan" and "Willow," she felt confident in her skills to direct a short film. "That was when I thought, I feel like I could do more," she said. "And so that was when I decided to make the short film for 'All Too Well.' "
