Taylor Swift On Reclaiming Her Music, Using “Secret-Agenty” Tactics As A Director And One Day Making A Feature – Tribeca Festival

deadline.com:

Taylor Swift delivered surprise guests and a surprise acoustic performance of All Too Well along with a thoughtful half-hour of conversation about filmmaking with writer-director Mike Mills at the Tribeca Festival.After a screening of her short film All Too Well (set to her elongated version of the song of the same name on the re-recorded version of the album Red released last year), she and Mills covered a range of topics.

In addition to drilling down on the short, they talked about the challenges for female directors, the ins and outs of collaboration and the effort to dramatize a couple’s “failure to communicate.” Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien, who play the main couple in All Too Well, were not billed to be part of the afternoon but they were brought onstage for the latter half of the talk.Quoting John Cassavetes and describing her “secret-agent-y” tactics of intentionally withholding information from cast and crew, she displayed a serious-mindedness about the craft of filmmaking but also the unerring instincts of a popular entertainer.

She gave a shoutout to a longform video Mills directed for “I Am Easy to Find” by The National (whose guitarist, Aaron Dessner, has been a key collaborator with Swift recently) but found an accessable way to do it. “It really inspired me in ways that I can’t possibly overstate,” she said.

Plus, she added, “We are both members of the Aaron Dessner cinematic universe!”The sellout crowd at the Beacon Theatre roared its adoration at intervals throughout the 90-minute event.