HARSH REALITIES
WRITING AND DIRECTING DUO DANIEL KWAN AND DANIEL SCHEINERT TELL RACHAEL DAVIS ABOUT THEIR GENRE-HOPPING ROMP
MODERN life is overwhelming. In a world where anything is possible, where we can access all human knowledge at the tap of a screen, where we can do whatever we want, whenever we want... What is the point of anything at all?
This is the question writing and directing duo Daniels – Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – attempt to answer in Everything Everywhere All At Once.
The film sees Chinese American mother Evelyn Wang traverse multiple universes to save infinite versions of herself from being destroyed by an omnipresent villain. All while trying to file her taxes.
“We like to chase questions that we don’t know the answers to, and we use our films as therapy, as a way to process our ideas,” says Kwan of the film’s philosophical heart.
“It’s expensive therapy, but also lucrative therapy!” laughs Scheinert.
“Life has always been chaotic, confusing, but we’ve never been so close to it,” Kwan adds. “The internet is in our pockets and we’re touching infinity every day. Our pea-sized lizard brains weren’t built to process all of that.
“So this film was us saying: ‘Let’s try to use sci-fi and the multiverse to understand that’.”
Everything Everywhere All At Once opens with Evelyn, played by Tomorrow Never Dies and Crazy Rich Asians star Michelle Yeoh, frantically trying to prepare her family launderette’s tax documents ahead of an audit by the IRS.
She’s stressed: her elderly father Gong Gong (James Hong) is demanding her attention and her cooking, her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), seeking a divorce, is on the receiving end of her exasperated requests and her daughter Joy, played by Stephanie Hsu, is trying to get her to accept her girlfriend Becky.
As the couple and Gong Gong are in the elevator on their way to meet IRS agent Deirdre, played by double Golden Globe winner Jamie Lee Curtis, Waymond’s personality transforms. His body has been taken over by Alpha Waymond, a version of himself from parallel universe “the Alphaverse”, who explains to Evelyn the existence of multiverses, each with their own of herself and everyone she knows and loves.
Evelyn must use “verse-jumping” technology to move between the universes, accessing the skills, memories and bodies of her parallel counterparts to take on elusive villain Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu) who is at risk of destroying the entire multiverse – and herself.
It’s a wonderfully ridiculous concept, but Kwan and Scheinert are no strangers to absurdism. Their 2016 debut Swiss Army Man, starring Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe, is about a man who, marooned on an island, befriends a flatulent corpse and uses it as a sort of multitool to go on an adventure and discover a new perspective on life.
This time, however, there is a more philosophical agenda to their playful absurdity, as they contemplate the purpose of human existence, the modern family dynamic and the nihilism of youth.
could say a million things about it, but the most simple, honest thing is it’s about a mom learning to pay attention to her family in the chaos,” Kwan says. Chaos being, in this case, suddenly finding yourself with hot dogs for fingers.
“In a lot of ways, the movie is just a family drama,” Scheinert adds, “and then we came up with some of the most insane, enormous, overcomplicated hyperbolic metaphors for generational gaps, along with communication errors and ideological differences within a family.”
Casting that family was, therefore, an integral part of the film’s conception. The character of Evelyn, who Kwan says resembled his own mother – “the kind of flustered, overwhelmed mother who is doing a million things at once, and never really doing any of them with full focus” – paved the way for a lateversion
Daniel Scheinert on Stephanie Hsu, left career revelation for Michelle Yeoh.
“I’m always sort of cast into the more serious role,” Michelle says of her other film roles.
Ke Huy Quan, who plays Evelyn’s husband Waymond, had kept a low public profile since his iconic roles in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies, until Kwan reached out to him for a role in Everything Everywhere All At Once.
He smashed the audition, and the fact that he was bilingual and knew martial arts sealed the deal on his casting.
Daniels met Stephanie Hsu, who plays daughter Joy/Jobu Tupaki, on an episode they directed of TV comedy Awkwafina is Nora From Queens. She inspired them to mould the part for her, basing it “on her sense of humour and just how weird she is,” Scheinert says.
“She just has so much range,” he adds. “I think she’s going to be huge.”
Kwan believes that because the film and its script is so specific, it had “a gravity that pulled in the right people”.
“We were so lucky,” he says. “Each of them got to show off something that none of us knew they were capable of. We knew how talented they were, but we didn’t really know how much more they had to offer.”
“That’s become one of the most inspiring stories behind the story,” continues Scheinert. “We got to go to all of these Asian actors that we love, and give them multiple roles, multi“We ple versions of themselves, and each of them rose to the challenge.
“In a way, it kind of shames Hollywood for giving them such simple roles sometimes. Even iconic people like James Hong – it’s so fun to push him to new places.”
Everything Everywhere All At Once hops through multiple genres, from action to sci-fi to comedy to kung fu, and everything in between. Despite this genre-mashing, which Scheinert says is emblematic of the pandemonium of modern life, the writer-directors insist the overall message of the film is actually rather simple.
As she traverses the universes encountering increasingly absurd versions of reality, Evelyn discovers her own version of the true meaning of life – the power of empathy and kindness.
“We came to this very simple conclusion that kindness is one of our best weapons and shields against the chaos,” explains Kwan.
“In the chaos, no-one knows what’s happening, and if you try too hard to understand it, try too hard to strategise within it, you will fail and you will hurt each other.
“One of the best things we can do is understand that we are all going through the same thing and that kindness is going to be our greatest ally.”
THAT SEES A FRAZZLED MUM SKIP THROUGH MULTIPLE UNIVERSES TO FIGHT AN ANCIENT EVIL
She has so much range... I think she’s going to be huge...
Everything Everywhere All At Once is in UK cinemas now