you for a while

A Sorta Fairytale

Lyrics, Music, and Commentary by Tori Amos

“A Sergio Rossi shoe…the whole wardrobe really. Um, picking the shoe was important…something I take very seriously. Finding shoes that can deal with all of the breakage. The girl who ended up wearing it was a dancer with a size 10 foot…which is not easy to find. Ten pairs of size 10 Sergio Rossi’s, in a very short amount of time.”

“Sanji, the director, knew what every frame needed to be…and this was his brain child. When I talked to him about the idea that a fairytale is not necessarily, um, like we see in the books, in the movies, in our fantasies…I said, you know, I wanna be the other sister, Cinderella’s other sister. You know, not the ugly ones and the nasty ones, but the one who has sort of a different journey to find her love.”

“Obviously there were leg people, and there were arm people, and there were head people. And I think the arm and the leg people did get along very well. I think they hooked up for a time. But I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that. But I do think they got on very well.”

“The thing is, um, to make sure you were where the digital people said you had to be so that in post production my head would hook up with her leg and Adrien’s head wood hook up with his arm. So we had to be exactly where they told us to be. Plus your body needed to be out of the way. They were only interested in our heads. So we were crawling around all time with our bodies out of the way so they could get good shots of our heads.”

“Up-do–very important here. But, um, I loved my up-do. Cim Mahoney, the hair guy, um, he designed that basket braid, the braid weave. Adrien Brody had just done The Pianist, and I think there was a strange sort of coincidence that he had just been playing a pianist and I’m a jobbing pianist. And that was the ground where we connected. This was where we were able to talk. We talked about music.”

“And let’s face it, certain shots were really hard for me…because I’m not an actress, that’s not what I do. But the songs have always sort of taken over my body and I had to trust this one would too. I had to take a lot of direction as far as where to stand, where to be. And um, basically I had to link up with my leg and that was really different for me. I’m usually more concentrated on my hands, being a piano player.”

“I think that instead of a happily ever after, Sanji was saying, don’t you think when you become whole again sometimes it is about being with another person, but being whole really has to be about finding a part of your soul [sole, he he he]…which always takes me back to shoes.”

~ Tori Amos on A Sorta Fairytale (from Fade to Red)