It would be easy to make a Taylor Swift movie about the image she’s projected to the world: the hopeless romantic underdog who conquered the world with the power of song! But it would be way more interesting to make a Taylor Swift biopic about who she truly is: a talented artist who is also a ruthless businesswoman, relentless in her pursuit of world domination. Steven Soderbergh might just be the filmmaker for that job, because he’s apparently been studying Swift—he saw the Eras Tour concert film, for instance, and has done enough research to know she rehearsed for her shows on a treadmill—and he’s “fascinated” by the behind-the-scenes.
Speaking at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (via The Hollywood Reporter) about Kafka, artificial intelligence, the state of cinema today, Soderberg said he’d like to make “a project in which I analyze large-scale cooperative endeavors.” One example? “You look at a Taylor Swift concert, well look at that whole tour, and just go, ‘Okay, it works.’ All these people, all this effort, the coordination of it, and it works.” Later, he added “What she has done, what she’s doing in the way she’s doing it, nobody has ever done this before. The amount of control that she has taken. And she’s doing this all herself. Nobody has ever done this. It’s working. And it’s a great model.”
The director speculated that to make his “large-scale cooperative endeavors” movie, “it better be funny and there should be some musical component” in order to engage the audience in the lesson. So why not make it about Taylor Swift? She’s already a subject of interest for him: “I would like to know more about how she is on a granular level, how is she doing all of this? How does the business work? What’s her brain trust? How is the money? How does all the money move? How does it work?” He pondered. “I’m fascinated by that because it’s a success story.”
Soderbergh posited that if we had an A.I. that could track every conversation in the world, the average amount of minutes going by before Taylor Swift is mentioned would be “not very many minutes.” He hasn’t gotten to see The Eras Tour himself (too hard to get tickets), but “David Koepp took his teenage daughter to see this show. And he was like, ‘You cannot believe what it’s like to be there. It is elemental. To be with that many people with that level of emotion. You cannot not be a part of it. It’s just overwhelming.’ He loved it,” the auteur shared. Let’s line up the Steven Soderbergh rise of the Swiftie cult script, stat!
