Taylor Swift releases never-before-seen footage from the filming of the music video “Fortnight” with Post Malone

Taylor Swift shows her fans a different side of her creative process with new, previously unseen footage from the set of her music video “Fortnight.” The featurette shows Swift as the director, explaining shots and inventing Easter eggs on the fly.

The video begins with a botched stunt in which Swift attempts to throw a cart with wheels through a mirror. Instead of breaking the glass, the cart bounces backwards as Swift is visibly startled and bursts into laughter.

“I think the whole thing takes place in ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ a city government building that studies the behavior and mindset of poets,” she explains. “One of the stereotypes about poets over the years has been that people say they’re crazy.”

“Fortnight” featuring Post Malone is the first single from Swift’s eleventh studio album titled The “Tortured Poets” section. The music video features Swift as both an institution employee and a department worker alongside Malone. At one point in their relationship, the duo work face-to-face at typewriters.

In new behind-the-scenes footage, the “Sunflower” singer appears completely overwhelmed as he learns how to use a typewriter for filming.

“You just have to move it? It’s incredible,” he enthuses as Swift shows him how the machine works. “I feel very steampunk.”

Swift replies: “We don’t see working typewriters! Millennials don’t see that shit.”

Malone immediately declares that he will buy his own typewriter “immediately”.

Swift, who wrote and directed the video, then describes the scene to her partner, explaining the moment when they will look up from their desks and look at each other.

“It’s almost like you realize that you and the other person are having the same thought in their heads at the same time,” she says. Malone is hilariously eager to please, responding to almost everything Swift says with an affirmative “Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s about these visual effects that become something else,” she notes later. “The whiteout then becomes an aerial shot of us lying across from each other in a stack of paper on a highway. The stack of paper forms something like the shape of my side profile in a cameo. All this weird stuff where one thing turns into another.”

“What I love about set is that sometimes you know what you’re supposed to do two seconds before you actually shoot, and that makes all the difference,” she reveals. “We should have just stood there staring at each other, like lying on the floor, but I thought, ‘How about a book?’ And then I put an Easter egg on the book. It’s fun. When you get here, there’s more pressure on you to put more detail into what you’re doing, and I really love it when that happens.”

The hidden message appears to be the word “Us” written in oversized letters on the back of a notebook. On Friday, Gracie Abrams, Swift’s former opening act on the Eras Tour, released a new song titled “Us,” which features Swift.

The full-length music video contains many more visual surprises, including appearances by Dead Poets Society The main roles are played by Josh Charles and Ethan Hawke.

Swift had previously spoken about the meaning of the lyrics of “Fortnight” during a premiere special broadcast by iHeartRadio.

“I think it’s a very fatalistic album because there are a lot of very dramatic lines about life and death and ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life’. Those are very exaggerated, dramatic statements,” she said. “But it’s that kind of album – it’s about a dramatic, artistic, tragic way of dealing with love and loss.”

Swift added that she “always imagined” “Fortnight” taking place in this “American city where the American dream that you thought was going to happen to you didn’t come true.”

“You’re not with the person you love, and now you have to live with that every day and wonder what would have been, maybe how you’d go out with them,” she explained. “And that’s really quite a tragic concept. So I just wrote from that perspective.”

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