Taylor Swift used ‘secret agent-y’ tactics to keep ‘All Too Well’ film a surprise
Taylor Swift knows “All Too Well” how to keep her projects top secret.
“I’m really secret agent-y about people not finding out about what we’re making while we’re making it,” the singer, 32, told fans during the Tribeca Film Festival screening of “All Too Well: The Short Film” on Saturday.
“So everything was codewords, and writing things in codes that only certain people knew … I’m so weird with stuff like that.”
Swift wrote, directed and filmed the short movie, featuring actors Dylan O’Brien and Sadie Sink, in New York City last year.
Throughout her wide-ranging conversation with filmmaker Mike Mills over the weekend — which concluded with a surprise performance — Swift remained coy about former flame Jake Gyllenhaal, who is widely rumored to have inspired the heartbreaking track.
“I wanted it to feel like them falling together was inevitable and them falling apart was just as inevitable,” she said of the couple portrayed in the film, whose noticeable age gap mirrored the nine-year difference between herself and Gyllenhaal, now 41.
“I wanted it to feel like there were forces at play and they couldn’t stop from colliding or being dismantled.”
O’Brien, 30, shed some light on his character when he and the “Stranger Things” star, 20, made a guest appearance at the Beacon Theatre on Saturday.
“I’ll never forget. You said, ‘We need this guy to be likable even though he’s going to execute some really unlikable things,’” the “Teen Wolf” alum recalled of his first conversation with Swift.
“It’s such a nuanced perspective Taylor has. It’s not black and white. He’s not a monster. He’s just a narcissistic, egomaniacal child,” he added, to roaring applause from the crowd.
Throughout the evening, Swift — who looked every bit the businesswoman in a striped Max Mara look — also addressed her highly publicized feud with music mogul Scooter Braun over ownership of her master recordings.
“It was a very hard time for me,” she recalled. “A lot of my hardest moments and moments of extreme grief or loss were galvanized into what my life looks like now.”
