Taylor Swift knows “All Too Well” how to keep her projects top secret.
“I’m really a secret agent for people who can’t figure out what we’re making while we’re making it,” the 32-year-old singer told fans during the Tribeca Film Festival screening of “All Too Well: The Short Film” on Saturday.
“So it was all about code words and writing things in codes that only certain people knew… I’m so weird with that sort of thing.”
Swift wrote, directed and filmed the short film, starring Dylan O’Brien and Sadie Sink, in New York City last year.
During her extended 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 believed to have inspired the heartbreaking track.
“I wanted it to feel like their coming together was inevitable and that their breakup was just as inevitable,” she said of the couple portrayed in the film, whose noticeable age difference is the nine-year difference between herself and Gyllenhaal, now 41. , reflected.
“I wanted it to feel like forces were at play and they couldn’t stop crashing 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 Theater on Saturday.
“I’ll never forget. You said, ‘We need this guy to be nice, even if he’s going to do some really nasty stuff,'” the ‘Teen Wolf’ alum recalled from his first conversation with Swift.
“It’s such a nuanced perspective that Taylor has. It’s not black and white. He’s not a monster. He’s just a narcissistic, selfish kid,” he added, to thunderous applause from the crowd.
Throughout the evening, Swift also talked about her much-discussed feud with music mogul Scooter Braun over ownership of her master recordings.
“It was a very difficult time for me,” she recalls. “Many of my most difficult moments and moments of extreme grief or loss were sunk into what my life is like now.”