Today, Taylor Swift made an appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival, where she screened the short film accompanying her song, “All Too Well (10-Minute Version),” on 35mm film. “All Too Well” was first released on Swift’s fourth studio album, Red, which came out in 2012. The first version of “All Too Well” Swift wrote came out to be 10 minutes long, however, she cut it down to five minutes and 30 seconds for the album’s original iteration.
Fans didn’t hear the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” until last year, when Swift released a re-recorded version of Red. While the song had been a fan favorite among Swifties, there also wasn’t a music video for the song until last year, which came in the form of the Swift-directed short film, starring Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien.
Variety reports that when speaking to the audience at TIFF, Swift shared that the song didn’t receive a music video until nine years after its release because it hit too close to home at the time.
“For me, the song was so tough because it was about something that at that point was very current for me,” she said. “I would have a really hard time performing it at the time. I had to force myself to focus on other things to try to get through it during tour. So there would be no world in which I could have made a visual element to that song at that time. I needed ten years of retrospect in order to know what I would even make 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.”
As the adage holds, good things take time. Last month, the short film took home the Video Of The Year award at the MTV Video Music Awards. During her acceptance speech, she teased her 10th studio album, then took to social media to reveal its title, Midnights.
Midnights is out 10/21 via Republic. Pre-order it here.
