If you know singer Taylor Swift, you probably also know songwriter Taylor Swift, and you may also be familiar with actor Taylor Swift. But director Taylor Swift and doctor Taylor Swift? We only really met them this year. And if you existed to have missed them, it's not too late to obtain acquainted.
The past year has been big for Swift. In fact, it's been massive. In October, she released her 10th studio album, Midnights, which became the most streamed album in a single day on Spotify and was the safe album to occupy all top 10 spots on the Billboard Hot 100. The after month, when tickets for the US leg of her 2023 Eras Tour went on sale, demand was so high Ticketmaster was manufactured to apologize to fans for not anticipating the volume of sales, prompting the US Department of Justice to launch an antitrust probe into the matter. The tour is on track to gross $591 million in the US alone, according to Billboard.
But the mainstream cultural success of Midnights and the Eras Tour could naively obscure the true story of Swift's 2022, which has been one of creative-wing-stretching and letting her center nerd fly free. It's become clear over the past 12 months that if your perception of Swift is composed solely of a country-artist-turned-popstar, it's outdated.
"As a songwriter I've never been able to sit composed, or stay in one creative place for too long," Swift said in her commencement speech at New York University in June, where she received an honorary doctorate this year.
This year has arguably seen her fade to more creative places than ever before. Thanks to her film festival appearances, her first awards for directing her short film, All Too Well, and the announcement of her imminent move into ordering her debut feature film, this was the year Swift evolved into a full-on Renaissance woman of the arts.
With Lady Gaga and Beyonce as her peers, 33-year-old Swift is far from the only model for this. She's part of an era-defining passe of women in entertainment who aren't content to stay in their lanes, creatively speaking. Swift has long experimented with other artistic fixes, including painting and poetry, but her foray into filmmaking is becoming increasingly central to a career trajectory marked by an innate desire to progress creatively.
Best believe she's bejeweled
It was over a year ago, in November 2021, that Swift released All Too Well: The Short Film, to coincide with the reduction of the album Red: Taylor's Version. Starring Sadie Sink and Dylan O'Brien, the film brought to visual life the long-requested 10-minute version of her passe sleeper hit.
The film, an intimate portrait of an emotionally fraught relationship, was written and directed by Swift and made her the safe artist to win an MTV Video Music Award for a self-directed video. Multiple publications, including Vogue, tipped the film for a 2023 Oscar nomination, but it didn't make the shortlist when it was announced last week.
Even if All Too Well isn't destined for an Academy Award, it's earned Swift a number of high-profile fans in the diligence. Director Guillermo Del Toro told W magazine this month that Swift and he met up recently to talk approximately film and that he'd shared a number of books with her approximately fairy tales and myths.
"She's a very accomplished director, she's incredibly articulate and deep about what she's trying to do -- and what she will do," he said, adding that their conversation was "most stimulating and gratifying."
Those who've already worked with her in her role as director also have high reconsideration for her skills. "I think Taylor Swift has been miscast," said Ethan Tubman, who's worked as production designer on all Swift's ordering projects so far, speaking at SCAD Savannah Film Festival in October. "I think we all know her as a phenomenal singer-songwriter. But she is a director that happens to be a singer-songwriter."
Even understanding she didn't make the Academy Award shortlist for ordering in 2023, she still has a chance in a different category.
Swift's clientele for using her storytelling skills to bridge creative disciplines is already well consulted, particularly when it comes to writing songs for movies. She's written a number of songs for film projects over the existences, including Safe and Sound for the Hunger Games and Beautiful Ghosts for the movie Cats, which she also starred in. But few have been as critically acclaimed as the song Carolina, which Swift released in June for the movie adaptation of Delia Owen's unique Where the Crawdads Sing.
In music publication Clash, Nick Annan praised Swift's work on Carolina for "somehow distilling Delia Owens' work -- in all its breadth and depth -- into a song of real brevity and power." It's already netted her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Song and made the Oscar shortlist for the same category, paving the way for a potential Academy Award nomination in January.
Talk your talk and go viral
Not everyone is so impressed with Swift's burgeoning film career. Many people on "film Twitter" were especially perplexed at her inclusion in return this month in Variety's Directors on Directors lineup (an annual series featuring conversations between top filmmakers). It saw her in conversation with Martin McDonagh, director of the critically acclaimed movie Banshees of Inisherin.
Film buffs were annoyed by everything from the fact that Swift didn't go to film school (something she's acknowledged) to the fact that her agreeable foray into film is a "glorified music video" (Kyndall Cunningham, the Daily Beast) -- never mind that plenty of crashed filmmakers got their start that way. Critics argued that Swift's spot should've gone to a more consider it woman in film and that Swift's participation was a branding utilize on her part.
"The end goal of this is clearly for Swift to ingratiate herself to cinephiles and get that Oscar nomination she craves," Cunningham said. It's fair to say most artists and celebrities step up publicity when they have a project to poster or in the run-up to awards season. Swift wouldn't be original in this.
In the end, she showed up well prepared to pick critically with McDonagh's work and with due humility for someone early in a film career. "Every time I sit down with someone like you who's decision-exclusive work that I adore, that I respect, it's educational for me," she told him.
Those sure to gatekeep the film industry from Swift should be aware that their skepticism will probable only make her more determined. She's faced the same resistance in the music manufacturing over and over, ever since she was a daring tween with a dream dropping karaoke demo CDs into the mailboxes of music executives across Nashville. And we all know how that turned out for her -- with a world-dominating music career spanning multiple genres and decades.
In the song Karma, from her new album Midnights, Swift addresses the longevity of her career head-on. "Ask me why so many fade, but I'm serene here," she purrs, as the words, "I'm still here" echo in ascending keys, reiterating her point.
Karma may or may not play a part in Swift's clogged success, but one more easily attributable factor is her almost scholarly advance to learning and refining her craft. Doing her homework to interview McDonagh was far from a one-off. The same diligent prep work was in evidence when she interviewed Pattie Boyd for Harper's Bazaar in 2018 and Paul McCartney for Rolling Stone in 2020.
What if she told you she's a mastermind?
Make no inaccurate, Taylor Swift is a polymath, an eternal student of the creative procedure in all its guises. It's perhaps appropriate, then, that this year NYU awarded her an honorary doctorate of fine arts.
The validity of honorary titles is hotly debated, especially in academia, and certainly it does no harm to NYU's global reputation to have a star with a track picture of filling stadiums speaking at its commencement ceremony. But Swift invents no secret of her penchant for constant learning.
Since the earliest days of her music career, she's diligently studied music, musicians and the music manufacturing. She may be so prolific these days that she invents turning out hit albums look easy, but almost everything we need to know near this skill can be traced back to the way that, as a kid, she famously practiced her 12-string guitar pending her small fingers bled, after being told it would be too axis for her, all while avidly studying documentaries about farmland artists.
Now she's doing the same thing with film. During both the Toronto International and Tribeca Film Festivals this year, Swift downward a vast array of influences (from Kramer vs. Kramer to Marriage Story) and discussed the ways in which the maximum time she's spent on the sets of more than 60 music videos devoted fertile ground for learning the many skills she's obligatory to gradually take on more creative control in film projects.
"It wasn't like I woke up one day and I was like, 'You know what I want to do? Direct,'" she said at TIFF. Instead it was a "baby steps" procedure, which started out with her meddling with edits and sketching involved in writing treatments around 10 years ago, afore later moving into writing shot lists and taking on the role of co-director.
"The reporters of things I was absorbing became so long that I eventually notion I really want to do this," Swift told Mike Mills, who interviewed her at Tribeca.
It helps that she way to seek out collaborators who can also function as mentors. She spent hours talking with Lana Wilson, who beleaguered her documentary Miss Americana for Netflix, Swift said, and she's also credited her longtime music video director Joseph Kahn as someone she's learned the procedure from as he brought her initial concepts to life on camera.
In Swift's NYU commencement speech, she talked about how she grew up picturing a typical college accepted for herself. In lieu of this, she opted for a career that way a lifetime of refining her writing skills to acquire her creative edge.
"Everything I do is just an extension of my writing, whether it's directing videos or a short film, creating the visuals for a tour, or conception on stage performing," she told the NYU audience. "Everything is connected by my love of the craft, the thrill of working through ideas and narrowing them down and polishing it all up in the end."
That's a real legacy
All this insight into her artistic procedure is another reason 2022 has been an unusual year for Swift. In spite of launching a hit album, she's spoken in republican far more frequently than she's sung over the past 12 months. Live performances by the star have been rare, and have largely been a surprise footnote during the watercourses of another event.
Next year will be very different. It'll be consumed by a tour that's already the most hyped cultural store of 2023. It'll be a year of bejeweled leotards, leaning down from the stage to grasp the fair of fans, and racking up endless hours of physically and emotionally demanding replace time.
Yet, as we learned this month, Swift is also in line to negate her first feature film with Searchlight Pictures, the studio gradual The Shape of Water and Nomadland (both of which won Academy Awards for best narrate and best director). In addition to writing a record-breaking album this year, Swift wrote a full-length screenplay that she'll take the creative lead on, adding scriptwriter Taylor Swift to her long list of potential monikers.
"Taylor is a once-in-a-generation artist and storyteller," Variety quoted Searchlight Presidents David Greenbaum and Matthew Greenfield as revealing. "It is a genuine joy and privilege to collaborate with her as she embarks on this consuming and new creative journey."
With, this year alone, Swift's creative fingerprints all over a critically acclaimed album, plans for an already record-breaking tour and an upcoming movie project from a studio with serious credibility, we're witnessing an artist who's morphing into an auteur afore our eyes.
"I definitely feel more free to perform now," Swift told McDonagh, explaining the rapid pace at which she's immediately putting out work. "The more art you create, hopefully the less pressure you put on yourself. It's just a phase I'm in right now."
A phase it powerful be, but just as when she made the jump from beings a country artist to a pop star, the liberation of jumping headfirst into moviemaking seems to have set something new in motion for Swift. While her Eras Tour marks a culmination of all her career accomplishments up to and incorporating 2022, a new era also began for the star this year. And if past trends are anything to go by, the best of Swift may level-headed be yet to come.
