Taylor Swift is sharing behind-the-scenes footage of her time on set with Post Malone while filming their 'Fortnight' music video.
Taylor Swift is showing fans another side of her creative process with new never-before-seen footage from the set of her "Fortnight" music video. The featurette shows Swift in directorial mode, explaining shots and coming up with Easter eggs on the fly.
The video opens on a stunt gone awry, when Swift attempts to hurl a wheeled cart through a mirror. Instead of shattering the glass, the cart ricochets backwards as Swift becomes visibly startled and then breaks down laughing.
"This is basically in my mind taking place in 'The Tortured Poets Department' which is a government municipal building where they study the behaviors and minds of poets," she explains. "One of the stereotypical things about poets over the years is that people said they were crazy."
"Fortnight" featuring Post Malone is the first single off of Swift's 11th studio album, titled The Tortured Poets Department. The music video shows Swift as both institutionalized and as an employee of the department alongside Malone. At one point in their relationship, the duo works face to face on typewriters.
In the new behind-the-scenes footage, the "Sunflower" singer appears blown away as he learns how to use a typewriter for the shoot.
"All you do is move it? This is amazing," he gushes as Swift shows him how to work the machine. "I feel very steampunk."
Swift replies, "We don't see working typewriters! Millennials don't see that s**t."
Malone immediately declares that he's going to buy his own typewriter "right now."
Swift, who wrote and directed the video, then breaks down the scene for her partner, explaining the moment they're going to look up from their desks and see each other.
"Almost like when you realize that you and the other person have the same thought in your head at the same time," she says. Malone is hilariously eager to please, responding with an agreeable "Yes, ma'am" to almost everything Swift says.
"It's all about these like visual effects that become something else," she later notes. "The white out will then become an overhead shot of us like laying, facing each other in a pile of papers on a highway. The pile of papers creates like the shape of my side profile in a cameo. All of this weird stuff that one thing turns into another."
"The thing that I really love about being on set is sometimes you like figure out the shot two seconds before you do it and like it makes all the difference," she reveals. "We were gonna just be standing there staring at each other, you know, laying on the floor, but I was like, 'What about a book?' And then I put an Easter egg on the book. Which is fun. Something about getting here puts more pressure on you to put more details into what you're doing and I really love when that happens."
The hidden message in question appears to be the word "Us" written in oversized letters on the back of a notebook. On Friday, Swift's former Eras Tour opener, Gracie Abrams, dropped a new song titled "Us" featuring Swift.
The full-length music video includes plenty of other visual surprises, including appearances from Dead Poets Society stars Josh Charles and Ethan Hawke.
Swift previously opened up behind the meaning of the lyrics of "Fortnight" during an iHeartRadio premiere special.
"I think it's a very fatalistic album in that there are lots of very dramatic lines about life or death and I love you, it’s ruining my life. These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say," she shared. "But it's that kind of album – it's about a dramatic, artistic, tragic kind of take on love and loss."
Swift added that she "always imagined" that "Fortnight" took place in this "American town where the American Dream you thought would happen to you didn't."
"You ended up not with the person you loved and now you have to just live with that every day, wondering what would've been, maybe seeing them out," she explained. "And that's a pretty tragic concept, really. So I was just writing from that perspective."
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