Netflix’s ‘Someone Great’ Inspired Taylor Swift to Write ‘Death By A Thousand Cuts’

In 2014, filmmaker Jenn Kaytin Robinson was heartbroken. She turned, as so many of us do after a breakup, to music—specifically to Taylor Swift‘s song “Clean,” from her 2014 album, 1989. Five years later, Swift was watching a movie on Netflix called Someone Great, a romantic comedy that hit Swift right in the feels and inspired her to write a song for her new album called “Death By A Thousand Cuts.” And guess who was the writer and director of that movie that inspired Swift? None other than Jenn Kaytin Robinson.

For those who hadn’t heard of the film before they started deep-diving into the meaning behind Swift’s newly-release album Lover (Swifties, I am looking at you), Someone Great is a Netflix original film starring Gina Rodriguez as Jenny, a twenty-something New York journalist going through a breakup with her boyfriend of nine years, Nate (LaKeith). Jenny copes by spending one crazy day with her best friends, played by Brittany Snow and DeWanda Wise, but as they run all over the city, she is tortured by flashbacks of her loving relationship with Nate. Spoiler alert: In the end, Nate and Jenny don’t get back together, because sometimes, that’s just the way life works. (And yes, the film was based on Robinson’s real-life breakup with her own Nate.)

Swift wasn’t emotionally prepared for that life lesson when she clicked on Robinson’s film in her Netflix queue. As she explained when she stopped by Elvis Duran’s radio show on Friday, “I read the synopsis of the movie and [..] I think the movie is going to be like, ‘Get over him girl! He’s a jerk! Let’s take shots. I was like, ‘I’m down. Let’s watch this movie.’ Then you turn it on, and it’s this gut punch because it actually isn’t that at all. It’s a movie about how she has to end this relationship that she didn’t want to end because she’s still in love with the person. But they just grew apart. He’s not a jerk. It’s just sad. It’s just realistic.”

Needless to say, Swift cried when she watched Someone Great. “For about a week, I start waking up from dreams that I’m living out that scenario, that that’s happening to me,” Swift said. “I just would wake up and was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m writing a breakup song.’ I’d have these lyrics in my head, based on the dynamics of these characters.”

Let’s a take a look at those lyrics, shall we? “Saying goodbye is death by a thousand cuts / Flashbacks waking me up” — that’s a pretty clear reference to the flashbacks in Someone Great that tell the story of Jenny and Nate’s relationship. “I see you everywhere / The only thing we share / Is this small town,” also speaks to those flashbacks, specifically the ones triggered by Jenny recognizing landmarks in New York City where she and Nate shared a moment.

Then there’s “I look through the windows of this love / Even though we boarded them up / Chandelier’s still flickering here,” which reminds me of the poem Jenny writes to Nate in Act 3, when she’s on the subway finally coming to terms with the breakup. “When you let the light in, shattered glass will glitter,” Jenny writes.

In a previous interview with Decider, Robinson expanded on the meaning of Jenny’s poem. “So often,” Robinson said, “we’re told if you break up with someone: ‘Throw that person away! Never think about them again. Move onto the next person!’ It’s like, no, those people make you who you are. Take all of that with you. That’s why I wrote the poem the way that I did: Shattered glass glitters. You can look at it like it’s shattered glass, or you can look at it as beautiful pieces of glass that are catching the light.”

Both Robinson and Swift are overjoyed that they were both able to inspire the other with their art.

“I just wrote a song based on something she made, which she made while listening to something I made,” Swift told Duran, “which is the most meta thing that’s ever happened to me!”

Robinson, meanwhile, shared her feelings about “Death By A Thousand Cuts” via an Instagram post. “In the most surreal, what the fuck is even happening, full circle situation,” Robinson wrote in the caption, “I find myself with a new song that will help me through heartbreak.”

Someone Great is streaming on Netflix now.

Watch Someone Great on Netflix