Filmmaker Joseph Kahn learned to be a better storyteller from Taylor Swift

Joseph Kahn has directed some of the most iconic pop music videos of all time, such as Britney Spears's Toxic, Say My Name by Destiny's Child and several Taylor Swift videos, including Blank Space and Look What You Made Me Do. 

But the Grammy Award-winning music video director has also slowly built up his feature film roster. He's mainly directed horror and sci-fi films, but ever since Bodied — his 2017 satirical rap battle film, produced by Eminem — he's begun folding in comic elements as well. 

Kahn premiered his latest sci-fi/horror/comedy hybrid, Ick, at TIFF this past Saturday. The film follows middle-aged science teacher Hank Wallace (Brandon Routh), who once reigned as his town's high school football star until an injury brought him down. He now works at his alma mater and spends his free time pining over his high school ex — a former cheerleader who's now a successful real estate agent — and listening to the early 2000s tunes of his youth on his MP3 player. 

Alongside Hank's journey, we watch "the Ick" slowly take over his town. It's an unknown substance that has been growing since Hank's football days. However, the hero suspects something about it has recently changed. The rest of the town remains apathetic to the strange goo, going about their lives right alongside the creeping entity. The only other person who believes the Ick is more sinister than it seems is Grace (Malina Weissman), one of Hank's science class students — who's possibly his daughter with his high school girlfriend. 

CBC Arts spoke with Kahn at TIFF about his 1980s inspirations, how his music connections helped him make this film and, yes, how Taylor Swift influenced Ick.

This interview is condensed and edited for clarity. 

Tell me why you wanted to make this movie.

I really missed that sense of undefined genre. 

When I was a kid, I watched movies like E.T. What the hell's E.T.? What genre is that? Or you watch Raiders of the Lost Ark — that was a weird genre. A guy in a hat running around and suddenly faces are exploding? These are weird, fantastic, left-field ideas, but that was the mainstream in the '80s. 

Even the descriptor of this movie: Hank might have a daughter, but he fights alien infestation. It sounds weird, but that's really the kind of thing that you would hear back in the '80s from a Gremlins movie. 

As a filmgoer and a movie fan, right now, it feels like an exchange. There's so many options and the consumer is so powerful right now and everyone's vying for your dollar for their big streaming services. And how do they get to you? Netflix goes: "movies you like that look like other movies." It trains the audience to go, "I want a horror film, and I want serial killers in it, and I want at least three deaths." And they literally craft a film after that. The audience now is ordering movies like hamburgers. 

So I wanted to make a movie that had that unique newness to it. I wanted to make a movie that made me feel like I was a kid again.

I wanted to make a movie about something that is unexplained. We don't explain the Ick, we don't know where it comes from. I wanted to make a movie about a threat that you don't have to explain, but that you would accept.

You could make parallels between the Ick and COVID. 

At the end of the day, as intellectual as we can talk about this stuff, it's really just a fun movie. If you're depressed, watch it and hopefully you feel better.

I believe that part of the fun is knowing that there's a metaphor out there. And the metaphor is obviously that of complacency. 

We live in a day and age where all these monsters have come. We've seen COVID come, we've seen 9/11, we've seen political situations that we can't control. And you know what we do at the end of it all? We just accept it. 

If the Ick really existed, we would do what they're doing. We would just walk around it. Maybe we'd kick it off the curb a little bit.

The Ick could be COVID, it could be anything. Ultimately, I want it to be more of a monster. You can bring your own monster into the Ick, but it's not specific. 

The soundtrack is a massive part of the movie, featuring hit songs from the 2000s, like Blink-182's All the Small Things and Hoobastank's The Reason. Did you have a huge music budget?

No, I did not.

How did you afford these?

I called in a lot of favours. One of those songs could be a million bucks, frankly. 

I think that some people may think that I'm just f--king with them and slapping in songs because I could. But I did it from an artistic point of view. Those songs are Hank's life. Hank's been stuck in a hole, right? In the 2000s, he was the top guy, he was the football player, he had the cheerleader, he had it all. Then he breaks his leg. And that MP3 player he gave her [his cheerleader girlfriend], now he listens to it. Why? Because he's pining for her and his old days.

So that's what he's been doing for the last 20 years, listening to those exact same songs. As the story changes and suddenly he thinks he may have a daughter, those songs mean something else. 

As a filmmaker, putting in the right music like Kubrick did for 2001, I feel I'm doing the same thing with pop music. They loved it in 2001. Just because it's the All-American Rejects — who is the Mozart of our time [laughs] — it's the same process. 

Because of all the high school stuff, I was like, "This is Taylor Swift-esque to think about high school and reconstruct it." I have to ask: did Taylor Swift influence any of this?

I had not thought of that, but I actually think you're connecting some dots in my head. I literally wrote it as I was doing four videos for her. 

There's been a mutual exchange between Taylor and me. She always says that she learned as a filmmaker from me.

But I then learned as a storyteller from her. She's an incredible storyteller. Just because she writes songs, people don't understand: Songs are not just things you listen to. Songs are things you experience; they're stories that are told in three acts. Every time I had to do one of her videos, I had to think really hard about her lyrics and how they were structured. So that may have had a big influence on Ick.