The Weeknd’s Personal, Fictional Film Explained

“Hurry Up Tomorrow” is likely as bleak a film as you’ll see this year. In it, multi-platinum and Grammy-winning musician The Weeknd (Abel Tesfaye) stars as a fictional version of himself, spinning a dark tale of the loneliness and pain behind his new album (“Hurry Up Tomorrow”) as well as a couple of his early songs, including the hit “Blinding Lights.”

The story, centering on The Weeknd’s obsessive and disturbing relationship with a fictional paramour (Jenna Ortega), is the polar opposite of what we expect from a famous musician. At a time when most stars (or their estates) utilize their life and music rights to authorize highly sanitized movie versions of their biography, “Hurry Up Tomorrow” begs the question of why Tesfaye wanted to create such a dark fictional mythology behind his soon-to-be-retired persona of The Weeknd and his music.

“It was objectively risky for a pop star to do,” writer/director Trey Edward Shults told IndieWire, who admitted at first he too had the same question of why. “There’s no reason for him to make this movie.”

While Shults was on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, he discussed being very skeptical going into his first meeting with Tesfaye, half-expecting to be handed an album and asked to make a film to support it. But instead of Tesaye sharing new music (he hadn’t written any yet), he told Shults the story of losing his voice in the middle of a massive tour. The biggest blow, sending the pop star into a dark spiral, was when doctors told Tesfaye his vocal cord problems were mental rather than physical.

Shults, the son of two therapists, was intrigued.

“I did not expect to hit it off with The Weeknd,” said Shults with a laugh. He was wary of the unknownable mystery the musician had carefully crafted around his persona, only to discover, “he just wanted to explore this vulnerable thing and I was like, ‘Oh, if that’s a jumping off point, and if it all stems from something psychological, that’s very up my alley.’”

Shults has taken enough meetings in Hollywood to take praise of his films with the required grain of salt, but it quickly became clear to him that his 2019 film “Waves,” a gut-wrenching and unflinching look at a suburban family’s unexpected violent trauma, had profoundly registered with Tesfaye.

“I could tell he was sincere and he really dug my stuff and he actually told me, ‘I want you to make it a Trey movie,’” recalled Shults. “At first I laughed at that idea, ‘We’re gonna a movie with The Weeknd, that’s gonna be my movie? I don’t know.’”

Using the lowest point as a career jumping-off point, Shults and Tesaye spent hours on the phone. Shults began to realize that the movie’s narrative would drive Tesfaye’s album, his last as The Weeknd, and not vice versa.

“We just [had] a lot of phone calls, so I could find out a lot about Abel, about his past, stuff he struggled with,” said Shults. “[The idea was] for me to create a fictional narrative that stems from truth and things in his past.”

While the story was rooted in Tesfaye’s real pain as an artist, the fiction Shults spun was almost akin to creating a Weeknd metaverse: What if, at these lowest points, his circumstances had been different? What if the people surrounding him were different? What if he had made different choices? Through this lens, it wasn’t hard for Shults’ natural storytelling instincts to take him toward Tesaye’s character spinning out of control.

“I think we both naturally have drawn from pain in our art,” said Shults. “He likes exploring that painful stuff that’s happened in his past, and my first movie [‘Krisha’] was exploring the addicts in my family. My second movie [‘Waves’], I wrote after my dad died from cancer.”

Shults described the long phone calls as a form of therapy session. The therapy analogy is a Hollywood cliche, used by countless stars or directors to describe their collaboration with screenwriters in developing a personal project (see 50 percent of most Oscar campaigns, by way of example), but Shults’ creative fuel and process (which he attributes to growing up in the house of two therapists) have long been grounded in the theories of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

“I was always into this movie working in this other whole metaphorical Jungian dream analysis way, especially with what Jenna’s character represents,” said Shults. “So, literally, to me, the movie opens with the self.”

The opening shot is of Tesfaye’s face looking into a backstage mirror before a sold-out stadium show. The mirror squarely frames his face, “but then as he’s putting that [concert] attire on, as he is putting on the persona of The Weeknd, we’re opening up into 1.85 [aspect ratio], and going into the persona, basically into this fake world. The whole arc of the movie is, ‘OK, we’ve seen a taste of the self, now let’s put the persona on before we do a deep, surreal dive by the end of the movie into his subconscious and his self.’”

Shults and production designer Elliott Hostetter worked with Tesfaye’s lighting and stage design team to create an entirely new concert stage for the film. Tesfaye is the only child of Ethiopian immigrants, and both the tower at the center of the stage and his robe play into his cultural iconography.

“His character is yearning for his roots,” explained Shults of the film’s concert scenes. “The first concert is the persona of The Weeknd and the second concert is that persona disassembling and falling apart in front of everyone.”

The largely experimental film gains its loose narrative structure from Tesfaye’s relationship with Ortega’s Ani, short for the Jungian concept of the Anima. From the start, Shults saw Ortega’s character as the force for Tesaye and the film to build toward a reckoning.

“It was really two halves of the whole. If we were going to follow the journey of this guy who’s not in a healthy place and out of balance, the side that needs to come into the equation to hopefully find a balance and a new self was Jenna’s character,” said Shults. “Looking at Jungian dream analysis — I don’t want to spoil the film with my interpretation, everyone can have their own — but she’s his anima. His relationship with women is very out of whack, and I think he’s had a history with his music where people have inferred things. These two spirits, or one spirit, however you want look at it, have to come to a head and combat to have any chance at personal growth and self-reflection.”

Possibly the most surprising reckoning Ani forces — in a scene in which she has The Weeknd’s undivided attention (to say more would be a spoiler) — is for the musician to confront his own lyrics, putting one of The Weeknd’s biggest hits, “Blinding Lights,” as well as “Gasoline,” on the proverbial couch.

“I started digging into his music and listening to these lyrics,” said Shults of the surprising scene in which the songs’ lyrics are thematically linked to Tesfaye’s character’s psychological journey. “In hindsight, it’s kind of like an epic therapy session that she’s giving him, and literally me analyzing his music and pushing him and thinking about this as a probing, thematic thing, and [Abel] was down to go there and down to do it.”

A Lionsgate release, “Hurry Up Tomorrow” is now in theaters.

To hear Trey Edward Shults’ full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.