Director Olivia Newman Explains How Taylor Swift’s ‘Carolina’ Shaped ‘Where The Crawdads Sing’: ‘Her Music Was Just So Honest’
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Where The Crawdads Sing is finally in theaters, complete with original song “Carolina” written by Taylor Swift on its soundtrack. But while most featured tracks in movies are added during the later stages of post production, director Olivia Newman explained in a new interview that Swift had submitted her song before they even started filming — which ended up shaping the entire film.
When speaking to Newsweek on Friday (July 15), Newman confirmed what Swift revealed in her initial announcement via Instagram that she’d be contributing “Carolina” to Crawdads: “When she found out that Reese [Witherspoon] was producing a movie, she raised her hand and said, ‘I’d really love to write a song,'” she told the publication.
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The 32-year-old pop star had said in her March announcement that she’d been so inspired after reading the film’s source material — Delia Owen’s novel of the same name — that she knew she wanted to be involved on the musical side as soon as she heard a film was in the works. “Where The Crawdads Sing is a book I got absolutely lost in when I read it years ago,” she’d written. “I wanted to create something haunting and ethereal to match this mesmerizing story.”
“We were working on a script, and we had not started production,” Newman continued. “So she wrote the song before we jumped into production. “It’s hard to know exactly what song will be the perfect fit for it, but obviously, when I heard the song for the first time, I had an initial response to it, which was the same feeling when I finished the book.”
“I knew that was the feeling I wanted to leave the movie on so immediately I thought ‘this is going to be a perfect fit for the end of the movie,'” she added.
Newman also revealed that “Carolina” — which Swift wrote alone and produced with Aaron Dessner — was stuck in her head the entire time they were filming the Daisy Edgar Jones-led movie. “I knew that that was sort of the emotional feeling that we were going end the movies with,” the director said of the song. “It was done in reverse order than it usually is but because her music was just so honest, it was just such a perfect fit.”
Listen to Taylor Swift’s “Carolina” below.
