Taika Waititi has revealed that a scene in Thor: Love And Thunder involving screaming goats was partly inspired by a meme involving Taylor Swift‘s 2012 single ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’.

In an interview with Insider, the director said he had no plans for the goats beyond their mere presence in the scene. That changed when he was shown a video of a screaming goat interspersed with the chorus of ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’, replicating the song’s memorable hook. “The goats were always going to be in there because they are in the comics, but we didn’t know how they would sound,” he said.

“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. I hear[d] the screaming goats and I just felt it was awesome.”

Further work on the film’s post-production saw the team model the CGI goats’ sound on that of the one used in the meme, which Waititi and co. “thought… was so funny”. “It wasn’t meant for the film or anything, it was just an update,” he said. However, the goat screams ended up staying for the finished product because they “were freakin’ awesome”, Waititi added.

Thor: Love And Thunder, the fourth film in the Thor franchise, was released worldwide last week. Waititi has gone on record to say that there will not be a director’s cut of the film released, telling NME he believes “directors need to be controlled sometimes”.

“Director’s cuts are not good,” he said. “It’s not good, at four and a half hours. There’s a lot of cup-of-tea breaks in there, you don’t even have to pause it.”

‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ was released as the third single from Taylor Swift’s fourth studio album ‘Red’ in November of 2012. It was re-recorded, along with the rest of the album, for ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’, which was released in 2021.