The Weeknd, Trey Edward Shults and Jenna Ortega on Finding the Voice of Hurry Up Tomorrow

Emotionally depleted following his 2019 drama Waves, writer-director Trey Edward Shults struggled to find the motivation to take on another arduous filmmaking venture.  

“I didn’t even want to watch a movie, let alone try to make one,” Shults says. ”I wanted to sit on the couch and watch reality TV.”

Thankfully, a new burst of creative inspiration engulfed him when he was asked to develop what would eventually become Hurry Up Tomorrow, an experiential, moody tale of a music superstar basking in outside adoration while his inner turmoil consumes him. 

Through mutual producers, Shults was introduced to Abel Tesfaye, better known by his stage name, The Weeknd, who admired the director’s Waves and 2017 film It Comes at Night. 

“I took the meeting because it’s The Weeknd, but I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t even know if I’d like the guy,” Shults recalls. “We all have preconceived notions of pop stars and then I was just shocked I jibed with him as a human.”

Tesfaye had an idea for a movie in which he would play a fictionalized version of himself, which would eventually relate to his then-upcoming album. Also called Hurry Up Tomorrow, it came out in January and debuted at the top of the Billboard 200.

But it hadn’t been completed when Shults agreed to work on a narrative outline for a potential film. 

To Shults’ initial surprise, Tesfaye didn’t have any details set for the project in stone, beyond wanting a meta approach. He was willing to allow the filmmaker the leeway to run with that premise and adapt it to his sensibilities.

“If he would’ve been like, ‘This is the album. Make this thing and do it like this,’ I wouldn’t have been interested,” Shults says. 

For his outline, Shults drew from The Weeknd’s mostly instrumental demos for the album, as well as long phone conversations in which the director tried to better understand Tesfaye and where he was in life.

Shults adds: “It was never about tying things into an album and songs. It was always just about making a good movie. And then he made the album after the movie, so they could coexist together in a beautiful way.”

Listening to The Weeknd's music also helped his Hurry Up Tomorrow co-star, Jenna Ortega. She plays his mysterious love interest, Anima.

"Abel was creating the album as we filmed, and it was my understanding that he first track that was completed was 'Hurry Up Tomorrow,'" Ortega told MovieMaker via email. "It was so unlike anything I had heard from him before, so personal and vulnerable. It definitely influenced how much I leaned into the Anima quality of Ani. Trey really emphasized that she’s less of a psychotic presence and more of a neglected, hurt, survivor type."

Also Read: The Waves Soundtrack Decoded, Song by Song

Shults embarked on making Hurry Up Tomorrow before the release of the 2023 HBO series The Idol, which lasted just five episodes on HBO. In the series, Tesfaye played a sleazy nightclub owner and cult leader named Tedros who is sometimes seductive, sometimes terrifying, and sometimes comic. 

Tesfaye’s role in Hurry Up Tomorrow is more introspective. Both the film and album take inspiration from his emotional breakdown after he lost his voice during a concert at L.A.’s SoFi stadium in September 2022 — and panicked that he might never get it back. 

“This film is of course deeply personal for me,” Tesfaye told MovieMaker via email. “I play a character based on myself and the narrative is a fictionalized version of an actual experience I had when I lost my voice. It was cathartic getting deep into the psyche of this character – he’s on a dark, cerebral and maybe even spiritual journey.”  

Shults was delighted that Tesfaye enthusiastically signed off on his script — even the less flattering, more confrontational moments. The director and Tesfaye are both credited as writers on Hurry Up Tomorrow, along with Reza Fahim, co-creator of The Idol and former nightlife entrepreneur.

“I don’t know another pop star or same-caliber celebrity who would be willing to go to the places this movie goes in terms of self-criticizing and analyzing themselves,” Shults says. He was excited by the chance to make something truly incisive, not simply a visual album or “vanity project puff piece thing for a pop star,” he says. 

Tesfaye was impressed by Shults as well.

“After giving Trey the initial concept for the film I was pleasantly surprised with where he took the script - my trust in him was cemented after that early draft,” Tesfaye added over email. “It was clear that he was emotionally connected to this project, and that freed up my mental focus so I could concentrate on my performance and get into character. Then I saw the footage and all of my confidence in Trey was validated — he translated this idea into a visually stimulating and beautiful sonic experience that blew me away.”

And Ortega was intrigued by the ever-shifting nature of the collaboration.

"My character was constantly changing as we shot, but her place in Abel’s brain was always consistent," she says. "I just watched a lot of footage of Abel/The Weeknd, referencing movement from old videos and things like that. I also just tried to speak to Abel as honestly as he’d allow, and him being the generous individual he is was incredibly helpful to me."

Hurry Up Tomorrow, the Music and the Movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg0oFI2egfo

Though Shults was relatively familiar with The Weeknd’s music and some of his visually sumptuous music videos, it wasn’t until his vision was a go that he took a deep dive into Tesfaye’s artistry. He also delved into the work of renowned electronic music composer and producer Daniel Lopatin, who has a long history collaborating with Tesfaye and is credited as co-composer on the film, alongside The Weeknd.

“I was just getting purely inspired musically for ebb and flow and the way I thought the movie was going to sound,” Shults says. 

Ortega was always confident that Shults and cinematographer Chayse Irvin — whose past work includes Beyonce's Lemonade — would make everything look beautiful.

"Some days were just committed to these more exploratory, intimate shots of eyes, hands, colors," she says. "One of the most amazing things about Trey is from top to bottom, no matter what your position is, Trey surrounds himself with people who he trusts, who therefore can take the all space they need to create and be imaginative. That understanding is so sacred, and means a lot to everyone on set."

There are three explicitly musical moments in the film, one of which involves The Weeknd performing at a sold-out concert for a sea of adoring fans. At first, the plan was to shoot the sequence while he was on his real summer tour. 

But the singer, who had lost his voice while juggling the demands of shooting The Idol and his musical commitments, feared that it could happen again if the stress of performing while also making a movie became too overwhelming. 

To avoid the chaos that shooting at a live concert would entail, Shults, his production designer Elliott Hostetter, and The Weeknd’s design and lighting team collaborated to create a stage that was practical for shooting and thematically relevant. Tesfaye was born in Toronto to parents who immigrated from Ethiopia, and the stage referenced Ethiopian iconography. 

“We wanted to play at the roots that are in him that he’s yearning for, even though he doesn’t realize it yet” in the film, Shults says. 

The production rented out the Honda Center in Anaheim, California, to re-create a Weeknd show. Tesfaye and Ortega shot scenes over two days, with about 2,000 extras in a venue that fits over 18,000 people. The crew shot plates in order to create the illusion of a full venue with VFX. 

“It’s actually all designed and made just for the movie,” Shults says. “But the goal was to just make people think that we shot it live at a Weeknd show.”

If he had filmed it like a typical concert movie, the camera would have been far from The Weeknd, to avoid being intrusive. But Shults didn’t want that distance from Tesfaye. 

“The camera had to be on stage with him, dancing with him, subjective to him and the way he experiences it,” he says. “ To me, that’s what was visually really exciting about this.”

The last time Tesfaye sings in the film occurs in a pivotal moment of distress for his character, which Shults describes as “a metaphorical therapy session.” Initially, Shults had written a monologue for the scene, because there was no song that could convey what the moment needed. But that changed. 

“I wrote this monologue in the script that to me was where he’s finally arrived emotionally, but then he wrote the song and I was like, ‘Oh, we don’t need the monologue. This is way better,’ Shults recalls. “It’s conveying everything thematically and emotionally that the monologue was, but now it’s through song.”

Since The Idol hadn’t come out yet when they started collaborating, Shults didn’t know if Tesfaye could act. But he had a good feeling, based on The Weeknd’s videos.

“I have this organic real bond with him that I just thought one way or another we were going to get it there,” Shults says. “You got to take a risk and just go for it.” 

Once on set, Shults was pleasantly surprised at how well Tesfaye responded to direction. “I didn’t need to trick him into stuff to get a performance out of him,” he adds. The singer-actor especially pushed himself during an intense scene of verbal sparring with co-star Barry Keoghan.

Shults doesn’t feel drained anymore.

“Sometimes you’ve got to make money and you’ll do a commercial. But my big thing with the films is I never want to make something that I don’t believe in with all my heart and my soul,” he says. “I would rather not work than do that.” 

To capitalize on his current momentum, Shults is already writing a new movie that he hopes will go into pre-production this year. “I just want to hopefully make special stuff the right way,” he says. 

Hurry Up Tomorrow is in theaters Wednesday, from Lionsgate.

Main image: Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye as Abel and writer-director Trey Edward Shults in Hurry Up Tomorrow. Photo Credit: Andrew Cooper. Lionsgate.