Rodrigo Prieto is not exactly the guy you call for an easy shoot – whether that’s a four-hour mob epic for Martin Scorsese, a post-9/11 meditation on New York for Spike Lee or a triptych ensemble drama for Alejandro González Iñárritu. More recently, the renowned cinematographer was faced with a challenge of a different kind: taking on his second top-secret music video for Taylor Swift during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Swift unveiled her self-directed “Cardigan” video last Friday alongside Folklore, her indie-rock quarantine opus cobbled together over the past three months. The 16-track record has dominated both physical sales and digital streams, despite largely avoiding the traditional, prolonged album rollout that Swift has codified during her time on the pop charts. As far as promotional singles go, “Cardigan” barely counts, as it premiered on YouTube simultaneously with the album’s release on streaming services; you could choose, as many did, to listen to all of Folklore before ever pressing play on the video.
But rather than feeling tacked on to the project, “Cardigan” acts like Folklore’s plain-spoken thesis statement, depicting Swift on a solo journey through magical forests, stormy seas and candlelit cottages that she conjures up with her own musical capabilities. Like the album, it’s homespun and dreamlike and, in the right light, a little unsettling.
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According to Prieto, that all came from Swift on their first phone call. “She had the whole storyline – the whole notion of going into the piano and coming out into the forest, the water, going back into the piano,” he tells Rolling Stone. Their last collaboration, “The Man,” found Swift adopting a male alter ego to satirize gender inequality. From the beginning, though, Prieto says “Cardigan” was always going to be more ambiguous, and more personal: “When she called me and told me that this was more of a fantasy, I found that really appealing.”
This was in early July, when Prieto had simultaneously begun serving on a committee for the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) to conceive solutions for safely resuming film production during the ongoing pandemic, all while COVID cases continued to spike upwards in California. Prieto had just finished filming a PSA for a healthcare company when Swift asked him to work on “Cardigan,” and he was well aware of the many, many layers of risks involved in the project.
“We needed to be safe, for her sake and for our sake as a crew during the shoot, but also for the future of filmmaking,” he says. “Because we want to keep working and doing what we do, and if, God forbid, someone got sick on one of the first jobs that was filmed, it would probably close down [the industry].”
The extensive safety protocols for the shoot ranged from standard – everybody had to get tested, and every member of the crew wore a mask – to outlandish: Because Swift would need to spend a large part of the shoot not wearing a face covering, the crew used a colored wristband system, determining which members of the team were permitted to stand closest to her. (Prieto, assistant director Joe Osborne, and set designer Ethan Tobman all wore one color, lighting designers and gaffers wore another, and so on.)
Prieto actually wore two face coverings – a mask and an acrylic shield – for most of the day-and-a-half-long shoot. And just to ensure that crew members crossed within a six-foot range of Swift as little as possible, the entire “Cardigan” video was shot by mounting the camera to a robotic arm, which was then controlled by a remote operator. The “techno arm,” as Prieto calls it, is typically only used in the industry for crane shots and other establishing visuals.
“We were going to use the crane for the ocean scene,” Prieto explains, referencing the shot where the image zooms out on the wide expanse of the water before honing back in on Swift. “So then I said, let’s have it both days.”
