Taylor Swift sat down for a conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, where she screened her short film All Too Well: The Short Film for the first time on 35mm. “I will always want to tell human stories about human emotion,” she said, shouting out fellow women directors such as Nora Ephron, Chloe Zhao and Greta Gerwig as influences. Swift also said she would consider directing a feature film. “If it were the right thing, it would be such a privilege and honor.”

Swift, who recently announced a new album, Midnights, also talked about her unconventional journey to filmmaking. “I didn’t go to film school. I’ve been on the set of around 60 music videos and I’ve learned a lot from that process,” she said. “But when I did it on my own, I really began to learn everything, because you have to,” Swift said about directing her first music video for “The Man,” from 2019’s Lover.

“It was always a part of the process, establishing visuals,” Swift added of earlier in her career. “The more responsibility I took on, the happier I was.”

The 15-minute film, written and directed by Swift, features Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien and won video of the year at the MTV Video Music Awards. “I think you can tell a lot about people how they fight or argue,” Swift said of the two stars. “It’s about this entire molecular structure where she feels out of place and he feels unequipped to handle that. It all comes back to being in different places in their lives, having this huge gap of age difference between them: She’s still got one foot in girlhood, one foot in this very adult world. His life is very cultivated.”

Swift cited the ’70s films The Way We Were, Love Story, and Kramer vs. Kramer, as well as 2019’s The Souvenir and Marriage Story, as influences on her All Too Well short film. She said John Hughes’ movies have been a long-time inspiration, naming The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles as influences on her album 1989. And during the pandemic, when she wrote Folklore and Evermore, she watched Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth back to back, “so my whole world turned into folk tales and forests and mythical creatures.”

According to USA Today Swift also revealed an obsession with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window: “It was very voyeuristic. He is watching his neighbors and sees a murder. I haven’t experienced that, but I did experience combining some of those cinematic inspirations and films that I loved, so you end up with an album that is me telling stories from other people’s perspectives.”

Swift also opened up about the famous “All Too Well” red scarf, which fans have been convinced is part of the story of Swift dating Jake Gyllenhaal in 2010. According to Swift, the red scarf is actually a metaphor. “Basically, the scarf is a metaphor and we turned it red because red is a very important color in this album, which is called Red. And, I think when I say it’s a metaphor, I’m just going to stop.”

Watch Swift talk about the red scarf below.