At this year's Toronto Film Festival, Taylor Swift presented her new short film All Too Well and told the audience about her admiration for Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro.

In her speech at the festival, she began to talk about the films that inspired her short film, and revealed she felt enthralled by the Mexican director's works.

"In 2020, while we were locked up because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I saw two feature films by Guillermo, which made my whole world change," the artist said at the festival screening.

The singer mentioned that The Shape of Water is one of her all-time favorite films, despite having seen it a couple of years ago. She also said that she recently saw The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, Del Toro's first works. 

Although the mention of Del Toro was striking, it is not the first time Swift has talked about how del Toro's films have inspired her to make music and build a concept in mind, as was the case with her album Folklore.

Swift had previously mentioned her admiration for it, and told Entertainment Weekly in 2020 that she felt "consuming other people's art and storytelling" opened a portal in her imagination to rethink why she had not realized certain ideas she had kept in mind, referring to the aforementioned work. 

It was all the movies she saw at the time that allowed her to try out some concepts she didn't like at the time to create different plots in her videos and songs. It led her most recent album to develop a more cinematic point of view.