“I Knew You Were Trouble (Screaming Goats’ Version)” — that’s what we’re calling the peak-2010s-comedy video that inspired a scene in the new Thor film. In a new interview with Insider, director Taika Waititi explained that a scene in Thor: Love and Thunder featuring two screaming goats was inspired by Taylor Swift. Well, sorta.
The screaming goats make their appearance early in the movie, part of a gift Chris Hemsworth’s Thor receives after one of his succesful adventures. As Waititi explained, the goats were always going to be in the film, though they “were never meant to be screaming.”
He continued: “The goats were always going to be in there because they are in the comics, but we didn’t know how they would sound. Then someone in post-production found this meme of a Taylor Swift song that has screaming goats in it. I didn’t even know that existed. So I hear the screaming goats and I just felt it was awesome. A lot of people think it’s me screaming. It’s not.”
The video Waititi is referring to is a 2013 YouTube clip that replaces Swift’s emphatic ad-libs on the chorus of her Red hit “I Knew You Were Trouble” with piercing scream of a goat.
“I think one of the vendors that was making the CG goats, they just added the Taylor Swift song ‘I Knew You Were Trouble,’ but the fan-made one with the goat sounds, and we just thought it was so funny,” Waititi said. “So it was just a shot of how the CG creatures were coming along, it wasn’t meant for the film or anything, it was just an update. And the screams were freakin’ awesome.”
Although Swift doesn’t make an appearance in the film’s soundtrack, Waititi spoke to Rolling Stone last week about how much Guns N’ Roses is featured in the film.
“I just wanted the whole thing to feel like an electric-guitar lead break. All the art and everything, it feels like an ’80s album cover,” Waititi said. “Even the title treatment — I wanted it all to feel like something I would draw on my school book in class, when I was perfecting the Metallica [logo].”
He added, “At one point, the music supervisors were like, you might have to have a chat with Axl. But I was just getting scared. He’s one of the greatest icons for me.”