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5 Questions with Alex Swift | "The Singer: In The Key Of Love (Natalie's Song)"

1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

My background: mostly Irish and a quarter Dutch. What first got me interested in filmmaking was likely just being obsessed with Wayne’s World and Mike Myers as a kid, because he was this goofy Canadian dude who made it out and was getting to write and star in these big movies. That and probably watching that Paul Giamatti/Frankie Muniz movie Big Fat Liar over and over when I was 8.

2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?

I’ve had the idea for a short about someone hijacking a private karaoke room for a while, initially it was going to be the hijacker in question doing like a perverse jukebox musical of existing songs with new lyrics for their friends and locking them in the room, because the musical that they’d pitched to the Toronto Fringe Festival got rejected. I kinda never got around to it, but then last summer when covid cases were really low in Ontario, Veronika Slowikowska, Sam Hancock, Emma Simpson and I wanted to write and shoot something simple and contained, so I pulled this idea back out and we retooled it to be a bit more simple and wrote some original songs.

3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?

Editing was kinda tricky but rewarding. When Veronika, Sam, Emma and I work together there's a lot of ad-libbing, so there's a lot of finessing when it comes to cutting that. There’s a whole song that we cut out that was kinda messing up the dramatic flow that felt bad dropping it in the moment because we’d worked hard on it, but ultimately the film’s better for it. 

On the first cut I put the Elliot Smith song Say Yes over the ending, and cut to a fake “In Loving Memory” slide of a bad picture of John Travolta, as a goof. But like a bunch of dummies, we fell in love with the joke temp track, so we ended up having to get Robert Laird to make a soundalike. 

The easiest part was the chemistry of the group. I’ve known the girls since we were teenagers and we know Hanif and Ben from the Toronto comedy scene, so we all felt comfortable acting totally unhinged around each other.

4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

Roadhouse baybeeeeeee. I hadn’t seen it till like a month ago, just sort of knowing it as this goofy 80’s artifact that was namechecked in like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but it's so much bigger and better than I expected. It’s like a western Golden Harvest action movie (albeit with slightly less tight choreography). Also Sam Elliot is in it. And he’s super hot! NO ONE TOLD ME!!

5) What’s next for you?

Ontario’s still fucked with covid at the time of this interview, so I’ll probably be working on another animation remotely with Alexander Laird (my co-director on NoBudge classic: Sad Kids), or hopefully shooting something goofy with Veronika, Emma and Sam again by the end summer. 

alexanderswift.com | IG: bugs_database