Just when we thought we couldn’t love the dynamic between Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien in the 13-minute All Too Well: The Short Film, we find another reason. In a Dec. 12 interview with Variety, Taylor Swift, 32, revealed that the kitchen fight scene between Sadie, 20, and Dylan, 31, wasn’t completely scripted — meaning the talented actors flooded the room with fiery emotion and dialogue on the spot. “It was partly improvised. I had written out that fight with the same arc,” the record-breaking musician explained to playwright Martin McDonagh for Variety‘s “Directors on Directors” series.
“There were just some things that Dylan would blurt out or Sadie would say, and I’d just be sitting at the monitor, going, ‘Oh my God. We are keeping that in the cut,'” she proudly recalled. Taylor also noted that the scene was so beautifully brought to life the first time around that they filmed it without cutting until they were about “85, 90 percent through the scene.”
Taylor also remembered that she knew Sadie and Dylan would be the right people for the film after seeing their previous work. “I’d seen Sadie in Stranger Things, and I thought she has such a presence. She has such an empathy to her,” she gushed. “I mean, you can just see micro emotions flash across her face in a way that I don’t usually see in performances. And I thought, ‘She’s never been a romantic lead and I wonder if she’d be interested in playing a young woman who goes through her first catastrophic, cataclysmic heartbreak.'”
Dylan, who rose to fame while starring in MTV’s Teen Wolf between 2011 and 2017, previously spoke about how fulfilling it was to shoot the entire All Too Well: The Short Film in two days with most of it being unscripted. “When we actually got to it, we just played out these scenes. So it was a really fulfilling couple of days, and it was an amazing exercise,” he raved in a March interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “We were just fully in it at that point, and we played out these scenes, particularly the dramatic ones, like the breakup scene or the fight scene in the kitchen.”
He also noted that the music was never meant to cut out during the kitchen fight scene, but Taylor came up with the idea on the spot. “That was actually Taylor’s call. After we did just one take of the kitchen scene, she came over and she was like, ‘This is it. I’m going to use this dialogue. We’re going to let this play. You’re right in the pocket. Let’s just do it again,'” he recalled.
In her interview with Variety, Taylor said she decided to keep the kitchen fight scene with dialogue and without music because she thought it was “important to get a potent glimpse into their dynamic.”
Taylor’s chat about her short film followed Searchlight Pictures’ announcement that it is producing a movie adaptation of an original screenplay the Grammy Award-winner. “Taylor is a once in a generation artist and storyteller. It is a genuine joy and privilege to collaborate with her as she embarks on this exciting and new creative journey,” a press release from the production company read, per Vulture. Taylor is slated to direct the film.