Taylor Swift on directing films: "I will always want to tell human stories about human emotion"

Last Friday (9 September) Swift attended Toronto International Film Festival to attend the first 35mm screening screening of her All Too Well: The Short Film, and also took part in a discussion with TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey, where she spoke about her desire to direct feature films.

"I’d love to keep taking baby steps forward," Swift said of directing. "And I think that I’m at a place now where the next baby step is not a baby step. It would be committing to making a film. And I I feel like I would just absolutely love for the right opportunity to arise because I just absolutely, absolutely adore telling stories this way."

Speaking about the types of films she'd want to be involved in, Swift said, "I think I will always want to tell human stories about human emotion. I never say never, but I can’t imagine myself filming an action sequence. If it happens one day, honestly, that’ll be funny character growth, but at this point, I could see it going in a more comedic, irreverent place. I don’t always see myself telling stories about extreme, guttural heartbreak at your most formative age that debilitates you emotionally for years and then you have to develop the scar tissue in order to move on with your life, and limp your way to your typewriter and write a novel about it. I think I’ve done that."

Swift also discussed why it took her a decade to visualise a film for "All Too Well", "For me, the song was so tough because it was about something that at that point was very current for me. I would have a really hard time performing it at the time. I had to really like force myself to focus on other things to try to get through it during tour. So there would there would be no world in which I could have made a visual element to that song at that time. I needed 10 years of retrospect in order to know what I would even make to 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."